A young officer in the flying service was describing to me the other day some of his recent experiences in France. They were both amusing and sensational, though told with that happy freedom from vanity and self-consciousness which is so pleasant a feature of the British soldier of all ranks. The more he has done and seen the less disposed he seems to regard himself as a hero. It is a common enough phenomenon. Bragging is a sham currency. It is the base coin with which the fraudulent pay their way. F. C. Selous was the greatest big game hunter of modern times, but when he talked about his adventures he gave the impression of a man who had only been out in the back garden killing slugs. And Peary, who found the North Pole, writes as modestly as if he had only found a new walk in Epping Forest. It is Dr Cook, who didn't find the North Pole and didn't climb Mount M'Kinley, who does the boasting. And the man who talks most about patriotism is usually the man who has least of that commodity, just as the man who talks most about his honesty is rarely to be trusted with your silver spoons. A man who really loves his country would no more brag about it than he would brag about loving his mother.

But it was not the modesty of the young officer that leads me to write of him. It was his facility in swearing. He was extraordinarily good-humoured, but he swore all the time with a fluency and variety that seemed inexhaustible. There was no anger in it and no venom in it. It was just a weed that had overgrown his talk as that pestilent clinging convolvulus overgrows my garden. “Hell” was his favourite expletive, and he garnished every sentence with it in an absent-minded way as you might scatter pepper unthinkingly over your pudding. He used it as a verb, and he used it as an adjective, and he used it as an adverb, and he used it as a noun. He stuck it in anyhow and everywhere, and it was quite clear that he didn't know that he was sticking it in at all.

And in this reckless profusion he had robbed swearing of the only secular quality it possesses—the quality of emphasis. It is speech breaking bounds. It is emotion earned beyond the restraints of the dictionary and the proprieties of the normal habit. It is like a discord in music that in shattering the harmony intensifies the effect. Music which is all discord is noise, and speech which is all emphasis is deadly dull.

It is like the underlining of a letter. The more it is underlined the emptier it seems, and the less you think of the writer. It is merely a habit, and emphasis should be a departure from habit. “When I have said 'Malaga,'” says Plancus, in the “Vicomte de Bragelonne,” “I am no longer a man.” He had the true genius for swearing. He reserved his imprecations for the grand occasions of passion. I can see his nostrils swell and his eyes flash fire as he cries, “Malaga.” It is a good swear word. It has the advantage of meaning nothing, and that is precisely what a swear word should mean. It should be sound and fury, signifying nothing. It should be incoherent, irrational, a little crazy like the passion that evokes it.

If “Malaga” has one defect it is that it is not monosyllabic. It was that defect which ruined Bob Acres' new fashion in swearing. “'Damns' have had their day,” he said, and when he swore he used the “oath referential.” “Odds hilts and blades,” he said, or “Odds slanders and lies,” or “Odds bottles and glasses.” But when he sat down to write his challenge to Ensign Beverley he found the old fashion too much for him. “Do, Sir Lucius, let me begin with a damme,” he said. He had to give up artificial swearing when he was really in a passion, and take to something which had a wicked sound in it. For I fear that, after all, it is the idea of being a little wicked that is one of the attractions of swearing. It is a symptom of the perversity of men that it should be so. For in its origin always swearing is a form of sacrament. When Socrates spoke “By the Gods,” he spoke, not blasphemously, but with the deepest reverence he could command. But the oaths of to-day are not the expression of piety, but of violent passion, and the people who indulge in a certain familiar expletive would not find half so much satisfaction in it if they felt that, so far from being wicked, it was a declaration of faith—“By our Lady.” That is the way our ancestors used to swear, and we have corrupted it into something which is bankrupt of both faith and meaning.

The revival of swearing is a natural product of the war. Violence of life breeds violence of speech, and according to Shakespeare it is the prerogative of the soldier to be “full of strange oaths.” In this respect Wellington was true to his vocation. Not that he used “strange oaths.” He stuck to the beaten path of imprecation, but he was most industrious in it. There are few of the flowers of his conversation that have come down to us which are not garnished with “damns” or “By Gods.” Hear him on the morrow of Waterloo when he is describing the battle to gossip Creevey—“It has been a damned serious business. BlÜcher and I have lost 30,000 men. It has been a damned nice thing—the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life.” Or when some foolish Court flunkey appeals to him to support his claim to ride in the carriage with the young Queen on some public occasion—“Her Majesty can make you ride on the box or inside the carriage or run behind like a damned tinker's dog.” But in this he followed not only the practice of soldiers in all times, but the fashionable habit of his own time. Indeed, he seems to have regarded himself as above reproach, and could even be shocked at the language of the Prince Regent.

“By God! you never saw such a figure in your life as he is,” he remarks, speaking of that foul-mouthed wastrel. “Then he speaks and swears so like old Falstaff, that damn me if I was not ashamed to walk into the room with him.” This is a little unfair to Falstaff, who had many vices, but whose recorded speech is singularly free from bad language. It suggests also that Wellington, like my young aviator, was unconscious of his own comminatory speech. He had caught the infection of the camps and swore as naturally and thoughtlessly as he breathed. It was so with that other famous soldier Sherman, whose sayings were a blaze of blasphemy, as when, speaking of Grant, he said, “I'll tell you where he beats me, and where he beats the world. He don't care a damn for what the enemy does out of his sight, but it scares me like Hell.” Two centuries ago, according to Uncle Toby, our men “swore terribly in Flanders,” and they are swearing terribly there again, to-day. Perhaps this is the last time that the Flanders mud, which has been watered for centuries by English blood, will ensanguine the speech of English lips. I fancy that pleasant young airman will talk a good deal less about “Hell” when he escapes from it to a cleaner world.

Original

Original