Confessions of Aleister Crowley

470 Everyone wanted "business as usual", while Europe was overrun by madmen, fired by commercial ambitions, as it had been a hundred years before, fired by the military ambition of a man greater than Bloody Bill. Napoleon, at least, stood for humanity and for civilization. He gave France a code of laws better than any since that which Manu gave to India. Wilhelm offered nothing but the Kultur of the pig-iron-brained Herr Professor, and the conception of woman as the Kuh of Küche, Kirche und Kinder. That was what we were fighting --- not for our golf and for our weekends. There has been no golf since the introduction of Haskell ball --- and if our weekends are to mean nothing but "adultry with home comforts" (in the great phrase of Frank Harris) I think Sunday a regrettable superstition. I grew tired of the heroic defence of Ličge. I looked at the map and I couldn't reconcile it with the folds of our ragged line of absent-minded beggars. I didn't like the way in which the journalists excused our "contemptible little army" for running away because of the treachery of French generals who were always being shot at sunrise, and always subsequently writing to the papers to say how much they liked the war. My phlebitis affected merely my left leg and the fact that I was a sharp-shooter and an {743} old artilleryman didn't interest the War Office. I couldn't use my leg --- could I use my brains? I was at dinner with an old friend, the Honourable A. B., the brother of the Earl of C. He mentioned that he was in the censor's office. I said, "What about me? I have some little reputation as a man of letters --- as a critic --- I am an expert in cipher --- I read and write French as well as I write English (and the world knows how well that is) --- I have a fair acquaintance with a dozen other languages, including Hindustani --- my leg will keep me out of war as effectively as Mr Woodrow Wilson will keep America --- is there nothing I can do to serve my country as it appears that you are serving her?" He said, "I'm afraid you can't do anything --- you see I started in the Navy --- I had a year or two on a training ship before I became a barrister --- I have a locus standi. You didn't even take honours at Cambridge, as the Patriot Bottomley will one day suppose you to have done --- you did not even take the ordinary degree. You wear a short blue gown and and extremely battered mortarboard. You have an extraordinary personality --- a reputation for having committed every crime from murder, barratry and arson to quaternio terminorum. You have the subtlest mind,the deepest knowledge of psychology and the most unusual way of brushing your hair in England. I cannot hold out any hopes that any way can be found whereby you might serve your country." He drank eight cups of coffee; he swallowed fifteen glasses of 1911 brandy. But he could not make me a naval lieutenant who had forgotten the difference between a powder monkey and a taffrail. "You cannot serve your country." I said, "Lord Kitchener has asked for a hundred thousand volunteers. Damn this leg, but couldn't I write or talk? He said, "Lord Kitchener is only bluffing. We don't want men; LiŠge is holding out." (This was about a month after it fell.) "A million and a half Russians of the steam-roller brand passed through England last night in a first-class carriage on their way to Flanders. They travelled from St Petersburg to Archangel by a railway which has a single line and whose rolling stock consists of three engines, one tied up with really serviceable iron wire, and the others with pieces of excellent efficient string --- and four trucks which aren't so bad, I honestly believe. And why they disembarked all those men in Scotland and sent them through England in a first-class carriage with the blinds drawn, instead of sending them direct to Dunkirk, I don't know." My leg and my Sunday School record alike conspiring to keep me out of the trenches, and my deplorable lack of stupidity disqualifying me for the Intelligence Department, I accepted an