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Page 1 of 11930 · PDF PAGE 6
…s was underfed and not properly drilled. I have also been told that the battle was won by the Belgians. Now, all these things are merely matters of opinion. There may be a little truth in some of them. But we have practically no means of finding out exactly how much, even if our documentary support is valid to establish any of these theories. It is, also, almost impossible to estimate the causes of any given event, if only because those causes are infinite, and each one of them is to a certain extent an efficient determining cause. Take a quite…
1930 · PDF PAGE 9
… precise and most atrocious charge that is made against him ? That he sacrificed, in the course of Alchemical and magical experiments, a matter of 800 children ? I submit that, a priori, this sounds a little improbable. Gilles de Rais was the lord of a district whose population could not have been very extensive, and even in that age of slavery, dirt, disease, debauchery, poverty and ignorance, which seems to Mr. G. K. Chesterton the one ideal state of society, it must have been a little difficult to carry out abductions and murders on such who…
1930 · PDF PAGE 7
…on by incidents which we have no reason to suppose other than authentic, but seem incongruous. So far as we can get any truth out of the matter at all, it is that the character of Napoleon, like that of everybody who ever lived, was extremely complex. And the writers are more or less in the position of the Six Wise Men of Hindustan who were born blind and had to describe an elephant. Spiritually fortified by these simple meditations, we may apply their fruits to the problem of Gilles
1930 · PDF PAGE 16
… some dimly-visaged operation might be satisfactorily accomplished. And even if they sacrificed a child every day, it would have taken a matter of two and a half years to dispose of 800 children. Besides, it must have taken more than a few minutes to kidnap a child with the secrecy obviously required. Did the disappearance of the first four hundred, say, put no parents on their guard ? I think, at the best, it is a case of little Tommy who told his mother that there were millions of cats on the wall of the back garden, but under cross- examinat…
1930 · PDF PAGE 14
…ple. A nice young gentle- man the other day wanted (very properly) to earn his living, and not being peculiarly endowed by Nature in the matter of original invention, he thought he might make a story out of the idea of a Suicide Club. In this he was evidently correct. Robert Louis Stevenson had in fact proved the point. So he took Stevensons story and transferred it to Germany, and drivelled on about the ace of spades, and quoted statistics of suicides, and said that I was the president of the Club and that the Berlin police were after me. Now…