|A young officer in the flying service was describing to me the other
day some of his recent experiences in France. They were both amusing
and sensational, though told with that happy freedom from vanity and
self-consciousness which is so pleasant a feature of the British soldier
of all ranks. The more he has done and seen the less disposed he seems
to regard himself as a hero. It is a common enough phenomenon. Bragging
is a sham currency. It is the base coin with which the fraudulent pay
their way. F. C. Selous was the greatest big game hunter of modern
times, but when he talked about his adventures he gave the impression of
a man who had only been out in the back garden killing slugs. And Peary,
who found the North Pole, writes as modestly as if he had only found a
new walk in Epping Forest. It is Dr Cook, who didn't find the North Pole
and didn't climb Mount M'Kinley, who does the boasting. And the man who
talks most about patriotism is usually the man who has least of that
commodity, just as the man who talks most about his honesty is rarely to
be trusted with your silver spoons. A man who really loves his country
would no more brag about it than he would brag about loving his mother.
But it was not the modesty of the young officer that leads me to
write of him. It was his facility in swearing. He was extraordinarily
good-humoured, but he swore all the time with a fluency and variety that
seemed inexhaustible. There was no anger in it and no venom in it. It
was just a weed that had overgrown his talk as that pestilent clinging
convolvulus overgrows my garden. “Hell” was his favourite expletive, and
he garnished every sentence with it in an absent-minded way as you might
scatter pepper unthinkingly over your pudding. He used it as a verb, and
he used it as an adjective, and he used it as an adverb, and he used it
as a noun. He stuck it in anyhow and everywhere, and it was quite clear
that he didn't know that he was sticking it in at all.
And in this reckless profusion he had robbed swearing of the only
secular quality it possesses--the quality of emphasis. It is speech
breaking bounds. It is emotion earned beyond the restraints of the
dictionary and the proprieties of the normal habit. It is like a discord
in music that in shattering the harmony intensifies the effect. Music
which is all discord is noise, and speech which is all emphasis is
deadly dull.
It is like the underlining of a letter. The more it is underlined the
emptier it seems, and the less you think of the writer. It is merely a
habit, and emphasis should be a departure from habit. “When I have said
'Malaga,'” says Plancus, in the “Vicomte de Bragelonne,” “I am no
longer a man.” He had the true genius for swearing. He reserved his
imprecations for the grand occasions of passion. I can see his nostrils
swell and his eyes flash fire as he cries, “Malaga.” It is a good swear
word. It has the advantage of meaning nothing, and that is precisely
what a swear word should mean. It should be sound and fury, signifying
nothing. It should be incoherent, irrational, a little crazy like the
passion that evokes it.
If “Malaga” has one defect it is that it is not monosyllabic. It was
that defect which ruined Bob Acres' new fashion in swearing. “'Damns'
have had their day,” he said, and when he swore he used the “oath
referential.” “Odds hilts and blades,” he said, or “Odds slanders and
lies,” or “Odds bottles and glasses.” But when he sat down to write his
challenge to Ensign Beverley he found the old fashion too much for him.
“Do, Sir Lucius, let me begin with a damme,” he said. He had to give
up artificial swearing when he was really in a passion, and take to
something which had a wicked sound in it. For I fear that, after all, it
is the idea of being a little wicked that is one of the attractions of
swearing. It is a symptom of the perversity of men that it should be so.
For in its origin always swearing is a form of sacrament. When Socrates
spoke “By the Gods,” he spoke, not blasphemously, but with the deepest
reverence he could command. But the oaths of to-day are not the
expression of piety, but of violent passion, and the people who indulge
in a certain familiar expletive would not find half so much satisfaction
in it if they felt that, so far from being wicked, it was a declaration
of faith--“By our Lady.” That is the way our ancestors used to swear,
and we have corrupted it into something which is bankrupt of both faith
and meaning.
The revival of swearing is a natural product of the war. Violence of
life breeds violence of speech, and according to Shakespeare it is
the prerogative of the soldier to be “full of strange oaths.” In this
respect Wellington was true to his vocation. Not that he used “strange
oaths.” He stuck to the beaten path of imprecation, but he was most
industrious in it. There are few of the flowers of his conversation that
have come down to us which are not garnished with “damns” or “By Gods.”
Hear him on the morrow of Waterloo when he is describing the battle to
gossip Creevey--“It has been a damned serious business. Blücher and I
have lost 30,000 men. It has been a damned nice thing--the nearest run
thing you ever saw in your life.” Or when some foolish Court flunkey
appeals to him to support his claim to ride in the carriage with the
young Queen on some public occasion--“Her Majesty can make you ride
on the box or inside the carriage or run behind like a damned tinker's
dog.” But in this he followed not only the practice of soldiers in all
times, but the fashionable habit of his own time. Indeed, he seems to
have regarded himself as above reproach, and could even be shocked at
the language of the Prince Regent.
“By God! you never saw such a figure in your life as he is,” he remarks,
speaking of that foul-mouthed wastrel. “Then he speaks and swears so
like old Falstaff, that damn me if I was not ashamed to walk into the
room with him.” This is a little unfair to Falstaff, who had many vices,
but whose recorded speech is singularly free from bad language. It
suggests also that Wellington, like my young aviator, was unconscious of
his own comminatory speech. He had caught the infection of the camps and
swore as naturally and thoughtlessly as he breathed. It was so with that
other famous soldier Sherman, whose sayings were a blaze of blasphemy,
as when, speaking of Grant, he said, “I'll tell you where he beats me,
and where he beats the world. He don't care a damn for what the enemy
does out of his sight, but it scares me like Hell.” Two centuries ago,
according to Uncle Toby, our men “swore terribly in Flanders,” and they
are swearing terribly there again, to-day. Perhaps this is the last time
that the Flanders mud, which has been watered for centuries by English
blood, will ensanguine the speech of English lips. I fancy that pleasant
young airman will talk a good deal less about “Hell” when he escapes
from it to a cleaner world.
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