VII: SIEBENHAAR
He was not glad of it for long, because he soon became very cold and was nipped to numbness. He assumed that it was the end, and felt a remote regret for Arabella. Other thought he had none.
When he came to himself he was, or seemed to be, once more in the room from which he had been so violently propelled, but there were two men standing near him and talking in a strange tongue. Presently there came a third man who spoke to him in Fattish.
“Hullo! Thought you were done in,” said the man.
George stared.
“Done in. Dead.”
“Yes, I was.”
The man laughed.
“Funny fellow you are. Eyes just like a baby.”
“Where is Arabella?” asked George. “Where am I?”
“Give you three guesses,” said the man.
“On a ship?”
“Right.”
“The Emperor-King’s ship?”
“No. The King-Emperor’s. You have the honour to be the first prisoner in the great Fattero-Fattish war.”
“War? What is that?”
“War? You don’t know what war is? Have you never read a newspaper?”
“I have only read Tittiker. It tells about a War Office, but I never knew what it was for.”
“My name’s Siebenhaar, engineer and philosophical student, and I fancy you are the man I have been looking for all my life. You should be capable of a pure idea....”
“What,” asked George, “is an idea?”
Siebenhaar flung his arms around him and embraced him and recited a long poem in his own language.
“You shall be presented at the Universities!” he said. “You shall be a living reproach to all writers, thinkers, artists, and I, Siebenhaar, will be your humble attendant.”
“Did I say anything unusual?”
“Unusual? Unique! Colossal! The ultimate question! ‘What is war? What is an idea?’ Ach?”
George insisted on an explanation of the meaning of war, and then he asked why the Fattish and the Fatters should be intent upon mutual destruction, and also what the difference between them might be.
“Difference?” said Siebenhaar. “The Fattish drink beer that you can hold; the Fatters drink beer that runs through you. That is all there is to it.”
With that he sent for some Fatter beer and drank a large quantity himself and made George taste it. He spat it out.
“Is that why they are making war?”
Siebenhaar smacked his lips.
“Man,” he said, “is the creature of his internal organs, almost, I might say, their slave. The lungs, the heart, the kidneys, the stomach, the bladder, these control a man, and every day refashion him. If they do their work well, so does he. If they do it ill, then so does he. Each of the organs has secretions which periodically choke their interaction, and bring about a state of ill-humour and discomfort in which the difference between man and man is accentuated, and their good relations degenerate into hatred and envy and distrust. At such times murders are committed and horrible assaults, but frequently discretion prevails over those desires, suppresses them but does not destroy them. They accumulate and find expression in war, which has been led up to by a series of actions on the part of men suffering from some internal congestion. Modern war, they say, is made by money, and the lust for it. That is no explanation. No man becomes a victim of the lust for money except something interferes with his more natural lusts: no man, I go so far as to say, could so desire money as to become a millionaire except he were const——”
“But what has this to do with beer?” interrupted George.
“I’m coming to that,” continued Siebenhaar.
“Beer taken in excess is a great getter of secretions, and man is so vain an animal as to despise those whose secretions differ from his own. What is more obvious than that the implacable enemies of the Eastern hemisphere should be those whose drink is so much the same but so profoundly different in its effects? Internal congestion may bring about war, but in this war the material is undoubtedly supplied by beer. And I may add, in support of my theory, that once war is embarked upon, those engaged in it suffer so terribly from internal disorganisation as to become unanswerable for their actions, and so mad as to rejoice in the near prospect of a violent death. Moltke was notoriously decayed inside and the state of Napoleon’s internal organs will not bear thinking on.”
George protested that he had never heard of Napoleon or Moltke, and Siebenhaar was on the point of embracing him, when, muttering something about Fatter beer, he rose abruptly and left the room.