III.—Rhapsody on Rats
What first strikes one in a trench is, contrary to report, not the Rat but the Slat. A trench-board is a sort of ladder, laid horizontally along a ditch of ill repute, and the rungs of this ladder are the slats. It is true that if this ladder were set upright it would be impossible to climb it, for the slats are too close together. Nevertheless, it has the form and aspirations of a ladder, and yearns towards the vertical. To follow the windings of the trench, this board is of necessity made in short sections. Now, one often enters a trench in the dark. Certain short boards have been displaced by the outgoing unit. An incautious foot, with, say, fifteen stone avoirdupois behind it, is set on one end, and the perpendicular ambition of the trench-board manifests itself in a jarring wallop of the other end on one’s tin hat. The slat decidedly strikes you.
It is unpleasant to walk on, as anybody who has ever laboriously evaded coal-cellar gratings will realise. It exists in numbers that have never been counted. You can walk from the North Sea to the foot-hills of the Alps with the soles of your boots continuously beslatted, save where there is an odd broken board which there has not been time to repair. At the end of the war there will probably be slat-excursions organised by American tourist companies—they are said to have already purchased the ground—with the privilege to each pilgrim of removing one slat as a souvenir. What is to be said for them is that they stand between you and a flounder along the bottom mud. In winter, when the drainage improvisations prove false, and the fighting ditches run hip-high, the foothold is to be valued. And now as to the rats.
Ratavia, as one may designate it, resembles China in that there has never been a census of its population, but that it approximates to the mathematical infinite. They are everywhere—large rats, small rats, bushy rats, shy rats and impudent, with their malign whiskers, their obscene eyes, loathsome all the way from overlapping teeth to kangaroo tail. You see them on the parades and the shelter-roofs at night, slinking along on their pestiferous errands. You lie in your dug-out, famished, not for food (that goes without saying), but for sleep, and hear them scurrying up and down their shafts, nibbling at what they find, dragging scraps of old newspapers along, with intolerable cracklings, to bed themselves. They scurry across your blankets and your very face. Nothing suppresses their numbers. Not dogs smuggled in in breach of regulations. Not poison, which most certainly ought not to be used. Not the revolver-practice in which irritated subalterns have been known to indulge. Men die and rats increase.
I see just one defence that they can make: it was not they who invaded our kingdom, but we who invaded theirs. We descended, we even dug ourselves down to their level. It is true that in our heroic moments we may style the trenches the New Catacombs to which freedom descended for a while to return in triumph. But it is also true that they are rat-holes, rat-avenues, rat-areas. The dramatic translation of an old period was called “The Birds”; the dramatisation of this must be called “The Rats.” Strangely enough, it has been left for me to tell the decisive chapter of the inner history of the war. Kaiser Wilhelm, whose resemblance to a rat has been too little noticed—you have but to take the wax out of his moustache and allow it to droop—was seated in his ugly palace at Potsdam, considering his ultimatum to Serbia, when there suddenly appeared before him, down the chimney or out of some diplomatic orifice in the panelling, a Rat, the master and pattern of all rats. “Majesty!” said he, “I am come to offer you my aid in this war which you are planning. As you are the Emperor of all the Germans, so am I the Emperor of all the Rats. Our interests coincide.”
They conferred together very shrewdly, and struck an alliance. “Good!” said his Majesty, slapping his thigh. “It is decided. We are with-one-another-firmly-united. The war will begin forthwith.”
So the great quintessential Super-Rat, the Rattish Ding an sich, left to mobilise his forces, and the Kaiser drew over a sheet of paper and wrote the magical and black word that unlocks Hell. And the great rat called in his Austria, which is the louse, and his Turkey, which is the sand-flea, and his Bulgaria, which is that porter of poison, the fly. So the battle was joined between the clean and the obscene.
It must be said for the Kaiser that with this one ally he kept faith. Ratavia has increased enormously in population and prosperity. It has suffered from no menace of famine, for Wilhelm, the faith-keeper, has even sacrificed his own subjects generously in order to avert that calamity.
But the end is not yet. The Emperor of the Rats will come once again to Potsdam.
“Majesty!” he will say. “I am a student of Treitschke, who teaches that an alliance is to be kept by the stronger of two associates only as long as his profit lies that way.” And as Majesty, shrivelled, decaying with the pallor of death on him, trembles in his chair the Great Rat will add—
“I propose to annex you.”