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The World Decision by Robert Herrick

R >> Robert Herrick >> The World Decision




Often as you crawled along in a train you could follow the battle by
the bare spots left in the fields around the graves. They will never
be ploughed under and sown, not even the graves of Germans, not in
the richest land. Generally they were carefully fenced off, almost
always with a simple cross on the point of which hung the soldier's
_kepi_ whenever it was found with the body. It is remarkable, considering
the scarcity of hands, the desolation of the country, the difficulty of
existence, what tender care has been given these graves of the unknown
dead. Many of them were decorated with fresh flowers or those metal
wreaths that the Europeans use, and where a company lay together a
little monument had been erected with a simple inscription. It would
seem that these Champenoise peasants still retain some of that pagan
reverence for the dead which their Latin ancestors had cultivated,
mingled with passionate love for those who gave themselves in defense
of _la patrie._

So for years to come the beautiful fields of France will be strewn
with these little spots of sanctuary where Frenchmen died fighting
the invader. The fields are already green again: Nature is doing her
best to remove the scars of battle from this land where so often in
the past ages she has been called upon to heal the wounds inflicted
by men. Nature will have completed her task long before the ruined
villages can be restored, long, long before the scars in men's hearts
made by this ruthless invasion can be healed. Another generation,
that of the little children playing in the ruins of their fathers'
homes, must grow up with hate in their hearts and die before the
wounds can be forgotten.

* * * * *

The Germans were shelling Rheims the day I was there. From the
little Mountain of Rheims, five miles away on the Epernay road, I
could see the gray and black clouds from bursting shells rise in the
mist around the massive cathedral. An observation balloon was floating
calmly over the hill beyond, directing the fire on the desolated city.
It was necessary to wait outside the town until a lull came in the
bombardment, and when our motor at last entered, it was like speeding
through a city of the dead, with crushed walls, weed-grown streets,
and empty silence everywhere save for the low whine of the big shells.
With the five or six hundred large shells hurled into Rheims that one
day, the Germans killed three civilians, wounded eighteen more, and
knocked over some hollow houses already gutted in previous bombardments.
They did not damage the cathedral that day, though several explosions
occurred within a few feet of the building.

There were no soldiers, no artillery in Rheims--there have not been
any for many months. Of its one hundred and thirty thousand people,
only twenty thousand were left hiding in cellars, skulking along the
walls, clinging to their homes in the immense desolation of the city
with that tenacity which is peculiarly French. In the afternoon when
the fire ceased the boys were playing in the streets and women sat in
front of their cellar homes sewing. They have adapted themselves to
sudden death. They move about from hole to hole in the wilderness of
shattered buildings. For the city had been gutted by the acre: street
after street was nothing but an empty shell of walls that crumpled up
from time to time and tottered over. Within lay an indescribable mass
of household articles, merchandise, all that once had been homes and
stores and factories. Around the cathedral there was a peculiar silence,
for this quarter of the city which received most of the shells is
absolutely deserted. The grass grew high between the stones in the
pavement all about. The sun was throwing golden cross-lights over the
battered walls as I came into the deserted square and stood beside the
little figure of Jeanne d'Arc before the great portal. As seen from
afar, now in the full nearer view, the amazing thing was the majesty
of the windowless, roofless, defaced cathedral. Acres of other buildings
have crumbled utterly, but not even the German guns have succeeded in
smashing the dignity out of this ancient altar of French royalty. It
still stands firm and mighty, dominating its ruined city, as if too old,
too deeply rooted in the soil of France to be crushed by her enemies.
After a year of bombardment it still raised its mutilated face in dumb
protest above the crumbling dwellings of its people, whom it could no
longer protect from the barbarian.

Not that the Germans have spared the cathedral in their senseless
bombardment of Rheims! From that first day, when their own wounded
lay within its walls and were carried out of the burning building
by the French, until the morning I was there, when a shell tore at
the ground beneath the buttresses hitherto untouched, the Germans
seem to have taken a special malignant delight in shelling the
cathedral. They have already damaged it beyond the possibility of
complete repair, even should their hearts at this late day be
miraculously touched by shame for what they have done and their guns
should cease from further desecration. The glorious glass has already
been broken into a million fragments; many of the finely executed
mouldings and figures--irreplaceable specimens of a forgotten art--have
been crushed; great wall spaces pounded and marred. It is as if a huge,
fat German hand had ground itself across a delicately moulded face,
smearing and smudging with vindictive energy its glorious beauty.
Rheims Cathedral must bear these brutal German scars forever, even
should the vandal hand be stayed now. It can never again be what it
was--the full, marvelous flowering of Gothic art, precious heritage
from dim centuries long past. Like a woman at the full flower of her
life who has been raped and defiled, all the perfection of her ripened
being defaced in a moment of lust, she will live on afterward with a
certain grandeur of horror in her eyes, of tragic dignity that can
never utterly be erased from her outraged person....

A French officer, speculating on the German intentions with that
admirably dispassionate intelligence with which the French consider
these brutal manifestations of the German mind, remarked, "At present
they seem engaged in ringing the cathedral with their fire, as if to
see how close they can come without hitting the building itself, but
of course from that distance they must sometimes miss." One theory
why the enemy pursues this unmilitary monument with such peculiarly
relentless ferocity is that they enjoy the outcry which their vandalism
creates. Moreover, it is a way of boasting to the world that they have
not yet been expelled from their positions behind Rheims, are not being
driven back. If any special explanation were needed, I should find it
rather in the fact that Rheims is peculiarly associated with French
history,--minster of her kings,--and its destruction would be especially
bruising to French pride. William the Second probably swells with
magnitude at the thought of destroying with his big guns this sanctuary
of French kings. Some of the graven kings still cling to their niches
in the lofty facade. Two have been taken to the ground for safety and
look out with horror in their blind eyes at the ruin all about them.
The little figure of Jeanne d'Arc, rescuer of a French king, still
stands untouched before the great portal, astride her prancing horse,
bravely waving her bronze flag. Around her were heaped garlands of
fresh flowers, touching evidence that the city of Rheims still holds
stout souls with faith in the ultimate salvation of their great church,
who lay their tribute at the feet of the virgin warrior. Once she
protected their ancestors from a less barbarous enemy.

What use to enumerate the wounds and outrages in minute detail? For
by to-day more of this unique beauty has gone to that everlasting
grave from which no German skill can resurrect it.... Within, the
cathedral has been less spoiled, but is even sadder. One walked over
the stone pavement crunching fragments of the purple glass that had
fallen from the gorgeous windows, now sightless. Once at this hour
it was all aglow with color, radiating a mysterious splendor into
the vaults of transept and nave. A shell had blasted its way into
one corner, another had rent the roof vaulting near the crossing of
transept and nave. The columns and arches were blackened by the smoke
of that fire which caught in the straw on which the German wounded
lay. There was something peculiarly forlorn, ghostly within the dim
ruins of what was once so great, and I was glad to escape to the old
hospital in the close, now turned into a hospital for the cathedral
itself. Here on benches and in piles about the floor of the low-vaulted
room had been gathered those fragments of statue and moulding that a
pious search could rescue from the debris around the cathedral. In this
room, while the German guns were still raining shells upon Rheims, an
old man in workman's apron was already moulding casts of the faces and
lines of the shattered stones so that in some happier day an effort to
reproduce them might be made. I saw between his trembling old fingers
the fine features of a stone angel which he was covering with clay. I
know of nothing more beautifully eloquent of the French spirit than
this labor of preservation. Within range of shell fire this old man
was calmly working to save what he might of the beauty that had been
so prodigally murdered. If spiritual laws are still operative in this
mad world of ours, the Latin must endure and conquer because of his
unshakable faith....

At the hill on the Epernay road I looked back for a last view of the
cathedral. The evening mist was already creeping over its scarred
walls. With the two towers lifting the great portal to the sky, it
dominated the valley, the ruined city at its feet, a monument of men's
aspirations raising its head high into the sky in spite of the unseen
missiles that even then were beginning once more their attack. I would
that these words might go to swell that cry which has gone up from all
civilized peoples at the sacrilege to Rheims! Even now something of its
majesty and its glory might be saved if the German guns were silenced--if
within the German nation there were left any respect for the ancient
decencies and traditions of man. But I know too well with what contempt
the Germans view such pleas for beauty, for old memories and loves. They
are but "sentimental weakness," in the words of the "War Book," along
with respect for defenseless women and children. The people who gloried
in the sinking of the Lusitania will hardly be moved to refrain from the
destruction of a cathedral. Rheims--unless saved by a miracle--is doomed.
And it is because neither beauty nor humanity, neither ancient tradition
nor common pity can touch the modern German, that this war must be fought
to a real finish. There is not room in this world for the German ideal
and the Latin ideal: one must die.

* * * * *

The tragedy of Rheims has been repeated again and again--at Soissons,
at Arras, at Ypres, in every town and village throughout that blackened
band of invaded France from the Vosges to the sea. Also the tragedy of
exiled and imprisoned country folk, of ruined farms and houses, of mere
destruction.

The wounds of France are so many, the outward physical bleeding of
the land is so vast, that volumes have been written already as the
record. Very little can be said or written about another wound,--the
lives of those in the invaded provinces behind the German lines,--for
almost nothing is known as to what has happened there, what is going
on now. A word now and then comes from that dead, no man's land; a
rare fugitive escapes from the conqueror's hand. The military rule
forbids any correspondence through neutrals, as is permitted prisoners
of war, to those held "behind the lines." The inhabitants are kept as
prisoners. Worse, they have been used at certain places along the front
as bucklers against the fire of their countrymen--in a quarry near
Soissons, at Saint-Mihiel. It is known that heavy imposts are laid upon
them, as at Lille, and that the invader is exploiting this richest part
of France's industrial territory. This last wound is, perhaps, the most
serious of all for France, in this modern, machine war. Latterly rumor
has it that the treatment of the inhabitants imprisoned behind the
German lines has become less rigorous, because, as a French general
explained,--"They hope to make peace with us--_quelle sale race!_"

These wounds are still bleeding. They cannot be ignored. They, as
well as the death, suffering, and agony of the long trench combat,
make the faces of the French tense, silent. "To think that they are
still here after a whole year since this happened!" a young Frenchman
exclaimed in bitterness of soul as we looked out over the thickly
scattered graves in the fields around Bercy. To him it was as if a
crazed and drunken marauder had taken possession of his house, burned
a part of it, and still caroused in another wing. The unforgettable,
unforgivable wounds of France!

The French, so clear-seeing, so reasonable even about their own
tragedies, are bitter to the soul when they think of the brutality
done to their _"douce France."_ To the French, quite as much as to
the Bryanited American, war is a senseless, inhuman thing; but it
becomes direfully necessary when the home has been burned and laid
waste. The Gallic spirit cannot understand that spirit of malevolent
destruction which vengefully wreaks its spite against defenseless and
inanimate works of age to be reverenced, of art to be loved. There are
certain scrupulosities of soul in the Latin that divide him from his
enemy, more effectually than a thousand years of life and an entire
world of space.




III


_The Barbarian_

The barbarian, as the Greeks used the word, was not necessarily a
person or a people without civilization. Indeed, certain ancient
peoples known as barbarians had a high degree of luxury, civilization.
The Persians under the barbarian Xerxes were probably quite the equals
in the mechanics of civilization of the Greeks, and the Egyptians could
lay claim to a large amount of what even the Greeks considered culture.
The barbarian was a person or a nation without a spiritual sense in his
values. The barbarian was often strong, able, intelligent, "organized"
as we say, but he was incapable of self-government: the barbarian nations
were ruled despotically. Their position in the world depended upon the
force and the ability of the particular despot who got control of their
destinies. The barbarian peoples were often crude in what is called
fine art. They neither believed in nor practiced those amenities of daily
life which express themselves superficially in manners, more deeply in
sensitive inhibitions, nor those amenities of the soul which are known
as honor, justice, mercy. The barbarian despised as soft and degenerate
such persons as permitted themselves to be trammeled in their conduct by
non-utilitarian considerations. In his primitive state the barbarian's
instinct was to destroy what he could not understand; as he became more
sophisticated, his instinct was to imitate what he could not create.

What, above all, the barbarian cannot appreciate is the suave mean
of life, the ideal of individual human excellence, of a tempered
social control, the liberty of the individual within the fewest
possible restrictions to work out his own scheme of existence, his
own civilization. For the barbarian mind recognizes only two sorts
of beings--the master and the slave. One is a tyrant and the other
is a docile imitation of manhood. The barbarian never totally dies
from the world. In every race, in every nation, in every community
fine examples of the barbarian instinct, the barbarian philosophy
of existence can be found. I have known personally a great many
barbarians,--American life is full of them,--and my knowledge of
them, of their strengths and their limitations, has given me my
understanding of the modern German as manifested in this world war.

* * * * *

Real truth often underlies popular nomenclature. It is neither accident
nor a desire to abuse that has given the German the name of barbarian
in the Latin nations. Just as the Latin peoples are the inheritors of
Greek ideals, so the German peoples seem to be the active modern
protagonists of all that the Greeks meant by their term "barbarian."
The French before the war regarded the Germans as not wholly well-bred
persons, lacking in some of those niceties of feeling and conduct which
seemed to them important--"_parvenus_" as a French officer characterized
his feeling about the race, and added the descriptive adjective
"_sale_"--dirty. Since the war there has been ground into the French the
more awful inhumanities of which these _parvenus_ are capable. Therefore,
when they think of the German, there comes instinctively to their lips
the ancient term of complete distinction,--_les barbares_,--by which is
meant a person and a nation who are not governed by ideals of taste,
honor, humanity, what to the non-barbarian are summed up in the one
word "decency." The adjective that the officer used--"_sale_"--does
not imply necessarily literal physical dirt, but a moral callousness
and unrefinement of soul which in the spiritual realm corresponds with
the term "dirty" in the physical. He sees the soul of the German as a
dirty soul, unclean, unsqueamish. And this conception of the enemy has
given to the French soldier something of that crusader spirit which has
sustained him through his terrible conflict. As M. Emile Hovelaque has
expressed it,--"France is fighting the battle of humanity, of the world,
of America, of every nation, man, and child who are resolved to live
their own life in their own way, under the dictates of their conscience,
within the limits of the laws they have accepted." The battle of the
world to push back once more the pest of barbarism! It is that which
has roused French chivalry, French heroism, not merely the love of
the _patrie_. Indeed, for the higher spirits the _patrie_ is closely
identified with the non-barbaric ideals of humanity.

* * * * *

The whole conscious world has had the manifestations of the new
barbarism before its eyes for an entire year and more. It has recoiled
in disgust from the invasion of Belgium, the sinking of the Lusitania,
the shooting of Edith Cavell, from the wanton destruction of monuments.
All these barbarities are indisputable facts, which may be explained
and extenuated, but cannot be denied. There is another class of
barbarities,--the so-called "atrocities,"--which are more easily denied,
but which most people who have taken the trouble to examine the charges
know to be equally true. The record of these multiplied atrocities is
so enormous and so well authenticated that it would seem to me useless
to add any words to the theme were it not for an amazing attitude of
indifference to the subject on the part of many Americans. "We don't
want to hear any more atrocity stories," they say. "Perhaps the
atrocities have been exaggerated, probably there's truth on both sides.
Anyway, war is brutal as every one knows." Some newspapers will not
publish the atrocity charges, whether because of our popular prejudice
against anything "unpleasant" unless freshly sensational or because of
more sinister reasons, the reader may judge.

This attitude is both evasive and cowardly. It is essential to
understand the atrocity for a proper realization of the war and of
the German menace. It is false to say that all war is barbarous, and
that in every war similar atrocities have occurred. As Mr. Hilaire
Belloc has well said,--"Men have often talked during this war ... as
though the crime accompanying Prussian activities in the field were
normal to warfare.... It is of the very first importance to appreciate
the truth that Prussia in this campaign has postulated in one point
after another new doctrines which repudiate everything her neighbors
have held sacred from the time when a common Christianity first began
to influence the states of Europe. The violation of the Belgian
territory is on a par with the murder of civilians in cold blood, and
after admission of their innocence, with the massacre of priests and
the sinking without warning of unarmed ships with their passengers and
crews. To regard these things as something normal to warfare in the past
is as monstrous an historical error as it would be to regard the Reign
of Terror during the French Revolution as normal to civil disputes
within the states."

It is the business of every person who is concerned about anything
more than his own selfish fate to examine into the atrocity charges
and to convince himself, not only of the truth, but of the more serious
implications in their premeditated and persistent character. The record
has been well made, fortunately, often in judicial form. It is already
voluminous and being added to constantly. Best of all the evidence,
perhaps, are the German diaries of soldiers and officers, extracts of
which have been edited by Professor Bedier, of the College de France,
with facsimile photographs of the texts. Next I should place in evidence
the so-called German "War Book" ("Kriegsbrauch im Landkriege"), where
under the convenient title of "Indispensable Severities" may be found
the text for many of the worst atrocities committed in Belgium and
France.

If the atrocity charge against the Germans is false or exaggerated,
it is surely time to know it, but no mere denial or general argument
can be accepted in rebuttal. The world must convince itself of the
truth. The German crimes have been too many and too public, too well
authenticated by witnesses to be disproved by mere denial. The best
public opinion of the world has condemned military Germany as a
barbarous outlaw. The crimes committed with the connivance of the
supreme military authorities, authorized by their instructions to
their officers, have fouled the name German for eternity: it will
be coupled with Vandal, Tartar, Barbarian.

* * * * *

I believe the atrocity charges to be substantially true in a vast
majority of cases. Moreover, I do not believe that half the truth of
them has been told or ever will be. My reasons for this belief in the
atrocity charge are the following: First, undisputed crimes, such as
the Lusitania and Cavell cases. A government that would sanction these
murders would sanction all other atrocities. Second, the witness of
persons in whose credibility I have confidence, such as French officers
and civilians, nurses and doctors, whose occupations have thrown
first-hand evidence in their way, who have personal knowledge of
specific outrages. Third, from what I myself gathered while I was in
France from the lips of abused persons. Although I did not look for
atrocities, I could not avoid getting reports from such people as I
met in the devastated territory of the Marne, weighing their stories,
and estimating the validity of them.

I believe in the truthfulness of that abbe of Esternay, who was one
of the unfortunates that the Germans used as a screen before the
operations of a body of troops. I believe in the truthfulness of the
keen old peasant woman at Chatillon, whose home had been riddled by
German bullets and who had been fired at when she took refuge in the
cellar of her house, and of many others with whom I talked of their
experiences during the early days of September, 1914. Unfortunately,
there was no photographer at work those days along the Marne valley,
though no doubt the German denying office would instantly impugn the
evidence of a photograph of the act. Each one of us, however, has his
own inner instinctive tests of truth to which he puts the credibility
of a story, and I believe the abbe, the old woman, and many others
who suffered abominably at the hands of German soldiers.

One fact only too evident to anybody who has followed in German
footsteps through the valley of the Marne is the part that mere
drunkenness had in this affair. The flower of the German army was
incredibly drunken throughout the advance into France. Pillage, rape,
incendiarism followed inevitably. They are common crimes to be expected
where an exhausted soldiery is inflamed with drink. But the cowardly
slaughter of non-combatants, the wanton destruction of monuments, the
brutal tyrannies toward conquered peoples--these are the blacker crimes
against the German name.

* * * * *

Self-control is not a Teutonic ideal. Of all the psychological surprises
that the war has revealed, the exhibition of the German temperament has
not been one of the least. Not its frank philosophic materialism, which
any one who had followed the drift of German thought and literature might
have expected, but its extraordinary lack of self-control. English and
Americans are taught that an individual who cannot master his own temper
is unfit to master others. Yet here is a people pretending to world rule
whose tempers individually are so little under control that they explode
in senseless passion on the least provocation. The German nation froths
with hate first against the English because they were neither as cowardly
nor selfish as had been expected, then against the Italians because they
would not listen to Prince von Buelow's song, latterly against Americans
because the United States dared to question the divine right of Germany
to do with neutrals what she pleased. Judging from the German press and
from the Germans whom I have met, the German nation is living in a
ferment of rage, all the more extraordinary as the fighting seems to
have gone their way thus far. What would happen to this uncontrolled
people should the war take an unfavorable turn and not supply them with
daily victories? Self-control is not included in that famous German
discipline. Uncontrolled tempers, drink, the ordinary fund of brutality
in the pit of human beings with the extraordinary conditions of war
will explain much of all this barbarism--but not all.

Documentary to lay bare 'Narnia Code'

He wrote it in just three weeks, furiously and loudly tap-tap-tapping away on his typewriter on 12ft long reels of paper so that he did not have to stop, just writing writing writing fuelled only, he said, by coffee…

It became one of the most important American novels of the last century and yesterday the original manuscript - a scroll taped together with eight reels of paper - of Jack Kerouac's On The Road was unfurled in the UK for the first time.
Fifty years after the novel which more or less defined the Beat generation, was published in Britain, the Barber Institute in Birmingham is showing what is now one of the most valuable literary manuscripts in existence as part of its exhibition Jack Kerouac: Back On the Road.

The exhibition's curator Professor Dick Ellis said there had been a lot of competition to get the scroll which is itself spending a lot of time on the move, having toured a string of US cities and hitting the road to Rome once this show is over. "We're very excited indeed," he said. "This is an iconic manuscript. It is a record of the huge effort Kerouac put into composing it. It was 20 days of typing 6,500 words a day, flat out, in spontaneous composition. He wanted to record things with the most possible accuracy using the spontaneous technique. His typewriter became a compositional instrument.

"Truman Capote once accused Kerouac of typing rather than writing, I would say he was learning the ability of using the typewriter like a jazz instrument, like a saxophone. He also had an incredible memory. And he had great speed at typing, he became a lightning typist. He came to be able to use a typewriter in a way that has not been seen before or since. Kerouac said he wrote fast because the road was fast."

About 22 of the scroll's 120ft will be on display in a specially built cabinet and while visitors will have to slightly tilt their heads, Ellis believes they will get a much deeper knowledge of what Kerouac was all about. It comes to Birmingham courtesy of Jim Irsay, owner of the Indianapolis Colts, who bought it for $2.4m (£1.6m) in 2001 before agreeing to a tour. Of course, in the published novel, there are paragraph breaks but in the scroll, there are none. Kerouac did not have the time. The exhibition runs until January 28.

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Doctors assure us that wherever you find an elderly, pompous old writer long past his prime you will find a bottle of scotch nearby. If only that were the case. Hilly hid mine after I fell up the stairs when I came home from the Garrick yesterday, and I've had to make do with a bottle of Blue Nun I found in the maid's parlour. Not that I am an alcoholic. Dipsomaniacs are a breed of the lower orders you meet on street corners: people like myself are bon viveurs who happen to like a drink. Or 12.

My primary observation is that drinking makes the daily grind of dealing with people so much easier. You drink a pint of whisky and become the life and soul of the party. You then start insulting people, before sweating heavily and wetting yourself involuntarily. You will usually find that everyone quickly avoids you, thereby relieving you of the need to make conversation. This is why I prefer to do much of my drinking at home. It saves so much time.

There are a great many drinks on the market - spirits, wines and beers - and I've probably drunk them all. Usually in some kind of combination with one another. Mixing cocktails is one of my favourite hobbies. Here's one I invented last week for my great sycophant, Christopher Hitchens.

The Hitch

One bottle of Babycham

One bottle of absinthe

Five shots of Angostura very bitters

Two tablespoons of bile

Two or three glasses of this tincture can give you a lifetime of self-satisfaction.

At some time you will probably be forced to invite people to your home and they may expect a drink. My advice is to offer them the cheapest tipple you can find; my local off-licence does a ghastly Mosel at 70p a bottle. I've never cared for even the best wines, and this should guarantee those poncing off you neither ask for top-ups nor stay long, thereby leaving you more money and time for the pub.

It is well known that only the very dullest of petit-bourgeois minds fail to over-imbibe on a daily basis, so I regard hangovers as a price worth paying for my brilliance. That said, I have found ways of coping with this metaphysical malaise. The first is to fuck someone; preferably somebody else's wife, but if your own is the only one around then she will do. The second is to read a book by that little shit Mart; it will either remind you you're not that bad a writer or give you some sleep.

The one downside to drinking is that it can make you fat. This is remedied by cutting out food entirely and drinking all spirits without mixers. My weight has gone down to 19st with this diet. There isn't much more to say, but as I'm being paid by the column I'd better repeat myself. And now that I'm dead, there's no harm in Bloomsbury repackaging the same material several times in the same collection.

I don't really like wine. Gin is for pansies, though a snifter with water doesn't go amiss. Liqueurs are best left to patent-shoed Wops. Or Americans. Champagne is an overrated girl's drink, though it can be drunk with any food; as such, it's a perfect breakfast drink because a scotch before 10am is very non-U.

I loathe pubs with loud music, but my utmost detestation is reserved for sanctimonious ex-topers. There's nothing worse than a man who doesn't drink. I once tried not drinking for several hours and my wives and mistresses said how dull it was that I was conscious and they were spared removing my soiled trousers from my bloated legs.

Whisky is my favourite tipple, though I recommend never giving it to a Welshman as it's wasted on someone with an IQ of less than 80. Have I mentioned that I'm partial to a Macallan? Gosh is that the time? Hilly's coming to change my IV drip before I fall unconscious again. The publisher can bloody well pad out the rest of the book with a pointless quiz without me.

Q: Who will buy this?

A: No one.

The digested read digested: The old pub bore.

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