Windmills: A book of fables

Windmills
Gilbert Cannan
A BOOK OF FABLES
BY GILBERT CANNAN
NEW YORK B. W. HUEBSCH, INC. MCMXX
COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY B. W. HUEBSCH, INC. PRINTED IN U. S. A.
TO D. H. LAWRENCE
... a huge terrible monster, called Moulinavent, who, with four strong arms, waged eternal battle with all their divinities, dexterously turning to avoid their blows, and repay them with interest.
A Tale of a Tub
Prophecy of an event is unlikely to be interesting after it and this may be the reason why my prophetic utterances regarding the Great War took the form of Satire. The first of these fables has a history. It was published originally in London as a little orange-covered booklet, called Old Mole’s Novel and it was issued simultaneously with Old Mole, a character to whom I was so attached that it gave me great pleasure to attribute authorship to him. Only a small edition was printed and it soon ran out of print. A copy of it reached Germany and fell into the hands of a group of young men who were incensed by the nonsense the high-born Generals and Admirals were talking in the Reichstag and I received enthusiastic letters asking for more so that these caustic prophecies might circulate in Germany and serve as an antidote. That was more encouragement than I had received in England and so, for my German friends, who had the advantage of living under a frank and not a veiled Junkerdom, I composed the remaining fables and finished them a few months before the outbreak of war. The translation was proceeded with but so far as I know the book was never issued in Germany. It appeared in England early in 1915 and this intensely patriotic effort of mine was condemned as unpatriotic because we had already caught the German trick of talking of war as holy. It sold not at all in its first expensive edition because it was not a novel, nor an essay, nor a play and the British public had no training in Satire, but I have since had letters from both soldiers and conscientious objectors saying that the book was their constant companion and solace, and I have recently learned that in a certain division of the British Army it was declared to be a court-martial offense for any officer to have the book in his possession, presumably on the principle that the soldier must not read anything which his superiors cannot understand. That of course was good for the sale of the book and the cheap edition also ran out of print just about the time when the shortage of paper produced a crisis in the affairs of authors and publishers.