tuba had to be helped.
And we started home and I was still hearing ‘Tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys are
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marching’ and that tragic first line, In my prison cell I sit…’ Somebody told me
later that the man who wrote that knew nothing about it, because wartime prison
camps don’t have anything as luxurious as cells. He cited Andersonville.
As may be, it was enough to make my eyes blur up and I couldn’t see. But that didn’t
matter; Beau Brummel and Daisy needed no help from me. Just leave the reins slack
and they would take us home. And they did.
I helped Frank unharness both rigs, then went in and upstairs. Mother came to my
room just as I closed the door, and tapped on it. I opened it.
‘Yes, Mother?’
‘Maureen, your Golden Treasury – May I borrow it?’
‘Certainly. ‘I went and got it; it was under my pillow. I handed it to her. ‘It’s
number eighty-three, Mother, on page sixty.’
She looked surprised, then thumbed the pages. ‘So it is,’ she agreed, then looked
up. ‘We must be brave, dear.’
‘Yes, Mother. We must.’
Speaking of prison cells, Pixel has just arrived in mine, with a present for me. A
mouse. A dead mouse. Still warm. He is so pleased with himself and clearly he
expects me to eat it. He is waiting for me to eat it.
How am I going to get out of this?
Chapter 6 – ‘When Johnny Comes Marching Home…’
The rest of 1898 was one long bad dream. Our men had gone to war but it was
difficult to find out what was happening. I remember a time, sixty-odd years later,
when the malevolent eye of television turned war into a spectator sport, even to the
extent (I hope that this is not true!) that attacks were timed so that the action
could be shown live on the evening news. Can you imagine a more ironically horrible
way to die than to have one’s death timed to allow an anchor man to comment on it
just before turning the screen over to the beer ads?
In 1898 the fighting was not brought live into our livingrooms; we had trouble
finding out what had happened even long after the fact. Was our Navy guarding the
east coast (as eastern politicians were demanding), or was it somewhere in the
Caribbean? Had the Oregon rounded the Horn and would it reach the Fleet in time? Why
was there a second battle at Manila? Hadn’t we won the battle of Manila Bay weeks
ago?
In 1898 I knew so little about military matters that I did not realise that
civilians should not know the location of a fleet or the planned movements of an
army. I did not know that anything known to an outsider will be known by enemy
agents just minutes later. I had never heard of the public’s ‘right to know’, a
right that cannot be found in the Constitution but was sacrosanct in the second half
of the twentieth century. This so-called ‘right’ meant that tr was satisfactory
(regrettable perhaps but necessary) for soldiers and sailors and airmen to die in
order to preserve unblemished that sacred `right to know’.
I had still to learn that neither Congressmen nor newsmen could be trusted with the
lives of our men.
Let me try to be fair. Let us assume that over ninety per cent of Congressmen and
newsmen are honest and honourable men. In that case, less than ten per cent need be
murderous fools indifferent to the deaths of heroes for that minority to destroy
lives, lose battles, turn the course of a war.
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I did not have these grim thoughts in 1898; it would take the War of 1898 and two
world wars and two undeclared wars (‘police actions’ for God’s sake!) to make me
realise that neither our government nor our press could be trusted with human lives.
`A democracy works well only when the common man is an aristocrat. But God must hate
the common man; He has made him so dadblamed common! Does your common man understand