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First Fable

Farfetched Fables ~ Second Fable written by George Bernard Shaw

Third Fable

A Room in the War Office in London. The Commander-in-Chief at work reading letters. A secretary opening them. The telephone rings. The secretary answers it.

SEC. Yes? [To the C.-in-C.] Lord Oldhand from the Foreign Office.

C.-IN-C. Shew him up; and get out.

SEC. He is shewing himself up. He must have heard—

Lord 0. bursts in. The secretary hurries out.

OLDHAND. Ulsterbridge: have you heard the news?

C.-IN-C. Of course Ive heard the news. Here in the War Office we have to get the news in six minutes. At the Foreign Office six years is soon enough for you. Sit down.

OLDHAND [seating himself] Is this a time for your Irish jokes? What the devil are we to do? How much do you know?

C.-IN-C. Only that there is not one of God's creatures left alive in the Isle of Wight. I shall have to send every soldier in England to cremate the dead or throw them into the sea. The Home Office will have to find 88,454 civilians to dust the houses with vacuum cleaners and keep the banks and the telephone services and the wireless and water supplies and the lighting and the markets and all the rest of it going.

OLDHAND. Precisely. And all this is your fault.

C.-IN-C. Oldhand: you lie, categorically. How my fault?

OLDHAND. Do you forget that when that fellow who found out how to make volatile poison gas offered us his discovery it was you who turned him down?

C.-IN-C. That cockney blighter? He wanted a hundred thousand pounds for it. And the scientific authorities assured me that every penny spent on anything but atomic research would be wasted.

OLDHAND. Well, he sold it to the South African negro Hitler, Ketchewayo the Second, for a hundred and fifty thousand. Ketch could afford it: his backyard is chock full of diamonds. The fellow made a Declaration of Independence for Zululand with himself as emperor. Capetown, Natal, and Rhodesia went to war with him and involved us in it. That made it your job, didnt it?

C.-IN-C. Not a bit of it. Ketch is far too cunning to go to war with us. He did not go to war with anybody. He dropped his bombs on the Isle of Wight just to shew Capetown and the rest that the world was at his mercy. He selected the Isle of Wight because it's a safe distance from his own people, just as we selected Hiroshima in 1945. He thinks islands are out-of-the-way little places that dont matter to us. But he maintains that his relations with the Commonwealth are friendly; and as you have not declared war on him we are still technically at peace. That makes it your job, not mine, though as usual when there is anything to be done except what was done last time, I shall have to do it.

OLDHAND. You have a very important diplomatic point there, I admit; but it must stand over. Meanwhile let us put our heads together and get to work. The first practical step is to hang this traitor who has sold his accursed invention to the enemy.

C.-IN-C. What! Dont you know that he went to live in the Isle of Wight as the safest civilized place in the world, and is now lying dead there, killed by his own poison gas?

OLDHAND. Serve the scoundrel right! there is the hand of God in this. But your mistake in turning the fellow down was none the less a mistake because he is dead and you are alive—so far. You may be dead tomorrow.

C.-IN-C. So may you.

OLDHAND. Yes; and it will be your doing.

C.-IN-C. How was I to know that the gas was any good? I get dozens of such inventions every week, all guaranteed to make an end of war and establish heaven on earth. I'm a soldier, not a chemist. I have to go by what the scientific authorities tell me. Youre a diplomatist, not a laboratory bloke. Do you know what an isotope is? Do you know what a meson is? I dont: neither do you. What could you have done except what I did? kick the fellow out.

OLDHAND. Listen to me. I am, as you say, a diplomatist; and I think youll admit that I know my job after my fifteen years in the Foreign Office. You know your job too as a soldier: I dont question it. That gives us one great principle in common.

C.-IN-C. And what is that, may I ask?

OLDHAND. It is to regard all our allies as Powers that may at any moment become our enemies. The public thinks it is the other way about; but we know better. We must be prepared for war before everything.

C.-IN-C. We never are, thanks to the damned taxpayers who wont vote us the money. But of course I agree in principle. What then?

OLDHAND. I'll tell you what then. What sort of fellow was this volatile gas man? You interviewed him. What did you make of him?

C.-IN-C. Oh, a middleclass cad through and through. Out for money and nothing else. Big money.

OLDHAND. Just so. Well, what security have we that after selling his invention to Ketchewayo in Africa he did not sell it over again in Europe? All he had to do was to hand over half a sheet of notepaper with a prescription on it and pocket another hundred and fifty thousand. Every State in Europe and America except ourselves may have it up its sleeve for all we know. The gas may come in at that window while we are talking.

C.-IN-C. That is true: it may. Let us hope it wont.

OLDHAND. Hope wont help us if it does. Our first duty is at all cost to get hold of that receipt, and make the gas our- selves. When the other States know that we have plenty of it none of them will dare to start using it. Meanwhile—

C.-IN-C. Meanwhile I have to provide gas masks for everybody in the country, and make wearing of them compulsory. I have to bury the dead; and I cant spare enough soldiers to do it. Youll have to buy a million vultures from Bombay to pick the bones of the dead before they stink us out. We must make every house in the country gas-proof, and rigidly enforce the closing of all windows. We must— [He is interrupted by a siren alarm, followed by an artillery salvo.] What the devil is that?

OLDHAND. Nothing. We have ordered a salute of five guns to celebrate the hundred and first birthday of the President or the Board of Trade.

The siren screams again.

C.-IN-C. [singing drowsily]

"Oh we dont want to lose you

But we think you ought to go."

He collapses, apparently into a deep sleep.

SHOUTS WITHOUT. Shut the windows! Shut the windows! Gas! Gas! [Another salvo]

Oldhand rises and rushes toward the open window to shut it He staggers, and can only clutch at the sill to steady himself.]

OLDHAND [with a vacant grin which develops into a smile of radiant happiness, sings] "It's a long way to Tipperary—

He falls dead.