War With the Newts
At first it was thought that some mines had blown up in the Channel. But when the coasts on both sides of the Straits were cordoned off by troops, and when the British Prime Minister (for only the fourth time in world history) cut short his weekend on Saturday evening to hurry back to London people began to suspect that this was an affair of extremely serious international import. The newspapers carried the most sensational stories, but strangely enough for once they fell far short of the facts: no one even suspected that for a few critical days Europe, and with her the whole world, was hovering on the brink of a warlike conflagration. It was only some years later, when Sir Thomas Mulberry, a member of the British Cabinet at the time, lost his parliamentary seat at the general election and thereupon published his political memoirs that the public was able to find out what had actually happened. Except that by then no one was interested any more.
In essence this was what happened. Both France and England had begun, each from her own side, to build submarine Newt fortifications in the English Channel; these would make it possible, in the event of war, to close the Channel altogether. Subsequently, of course, each power accused the other of having started the business; the truth, however, seems to be that both of them commenced work at the same time, for fear that their neighbour and ally across the water might get there first. In short, two colossal concrete fortresses grew up under the waters of the Straits of Dover, facing each other, equipped with heavy guns, torpedo launchers, extensive minefields and in general all the latest achievements of human progress in the martial arts. On the British side this terrible submarine fortress was manned by two divisions of heavy Newts and some 30,000 worker Newts; on the French side there were three divisions of first-rate combat Newts.
It appears that on that critical day a working party of British Newts encountered some French salamanders on the sea-bed and that some disagreement arose between them. The French version was that their peacefully working Newts had been attacked by the British Newts who had tried to drive them off; the armed British Newts (it was claimed) had tried to drag some French Newts away with them, and these of course offered resistance. Thereupon the British military salamanders opened up at the French worker Newts with hand-grenades and trench-mortars, forcing the French Newts to resort to the same weapons. The French government felt obliged to demand full satisfaction from His Britannic Majesty’s Government as well as the evacuation of the contentious sector of sea-bed; it also required assurances that similar incidents would not be repeated.
The British government, on the other hand, in a special Note to the government of the French Republic, stated that French militarised Newts had invaded the British half of the Channel and begun to lay mines there. The British Newts had drawn their attention to the fact that they were on British working territory; thereupon the French salamanders, armed as they were to the teeth, had responded by throwing hand-grenades, killing a number of British worker Newts. His Majesty’s Government much to its regret felt compelled to demand from the government of the French Republic full satisfaction and a guarantee that French military Newts would not in future encroach on the British half of the English Channel.
The French government thereupon declared that it could not tolerate a neighbouring country constructing submarine fortifications in the immediate vicinity of the French coasts. As far as the misunderstanding on the Channel floor was concerned, the government of the Republic proposed that the dispute be submitted, in the spirit of the London Convention, to the adjudication of the International Court at the Hague.
The British government replied that it could not and did not intend to subject the security of the British shores to any external adjudication. As the attacked country it once more emphatically demanded an apology, compensation for the damage caused, and guarantees for the future. Simultaneously the British Mediterranean Fleet, stationed at Malta, set sail at full steam for the west; the Atlantic Fleet received orders to concentrate at Portsmouth and Yarmouth.
The French government ordered the mobilisation of five age classes of its navy.
It seemed that neither country was any longer able to withdraw; after all, it was clear that what was at stake was no more and no less than control of the entire Channel. At that critical moment Sir Thomas Mulberry made a surprising discovery: no worker or combat Newts actually existed (at least de jure) on the British side, as a law passed (some time before) under Sir Samuel Mandeville, prohibiting the employment of even a single salamander on the coasts or in the territorial waters of the British Isles, was still in force. Consequently the British government could not officially maintain that French Newts had attacked British Newts; the whole affair therefore shrank to the issue of whether French salamanders, either deliberately or unwittingly, had encroached on the seabed of British territorial waters. The authorities of the French Republic promised to Investigate the matter; the British government did not even suggest submission of the dispute to the International Court at the Hague. The British and French Admiralties subsequently agreed that the submarine fortifications of the two sides should be separated by a neutral strip five kilometres wide - an arrangement which quite extraordinarily strengthened the friendship between the two states.
4
Der Nordmolch
A few years after the establishment of the first Newt colonies in the North Sea and the Baltic the German researcher, Dr Hans Thüring, ascertained that the Baltic Newt -undoubtedly in response to its environment - exhibited a number of divergent physical characteristics. It was said to be somewhat paler, to walk more erect, and to have a cranial index suggesting a longer and narrower skull than that of other Newts. This variety was named der Nordmolch or der Edelmolch (Andrias Scheuchzeri var. nobilis erecta Thüring).
After that the German press began to show an intense interest in the Baltic Newt. Special importance was attached to the fact that it was just in response to the German environment that this Newt developed into a different and higher racial type, indisputably superior to all other salamanders. With contempt the papers referred to the degenerate Mediterranean Newts, stunted both physically and morally, and to the savage Newts of the tropics, and the altogether low, barbarian and bestial salamanders of other nations. From the Giant Newt to the German Super-Newt was the slogan of the day. After all, was not the prime origin of all modern Newts on German territory? Did their cradle not stand at Oeningen, where the German scientist Dr Johannes Jakob Scheuchzer had discovered their glorious imprint dating back to the Miocene? There cannot therefore be the slightest doubt that the original Andrias Scheuchzeri was born geological ages ago on Germanic soil; subsequently it migrated to other seas and zones and dearly paid for it by its evolutionary descent and degeneration. As soon, however, as it settled once more in its primeval homeland it became what it had originally been: Scheuchzer’s noble Nordic Newt, fair, erect and dolichocephalic. Only on German soil, therefore, could the Newts revert to their pure and highest form, as had been found in the Oeningen quarry imprint by the great Johannes Jakob Scheuchzer. Germany therefore needed new and longer coastlines, she needed colonies, she needed oceans, so that new generations of racially pure original German salamanders could develop in German waters everywhere. We need new space for our Newts, the German papers clamoured; and to ensure that this fact was permanendy before the German nation’s eyes a splendid monument was erected in Berlin to Johannes Jakob Scheuchzer. It showed the great doctor with a fat book in his hand; by his feet, sitting erect, was a noble Nordic Newt, gazing into the distance, towards the infinite coasts of the world ocean.
Needless to say, festive speeches were made at the unveiling of this national monument, and these aroused exceptional interest in the international press. New German Threat was the reaction especially in England. Accustomed as we are to this kind of tone, if an official occasion is used for statements to the effect that Germany needs 5,000 kilometres of new sea coasts within the next three years, then we are bound to reply very clearly: All right, try and get them! You’ll sma
sh your teeth on the British shores. We are prepared now, and we shall be even better prepared in three years’ time. Britain will and must have as many naval units as the two greatest Continental powers together; this ratio is inviolable for all time. If you wish to unleash a mad naval armaments race, so be it; no Briton will permit us to remain behind by as much as a single step.
‘We accept the German challenge,’ Sir Francis Drake, First Lord of the Admiralty, declared in the Commons on behalf of the government. ‘Whosoever lays his hands on any sea will encounter the armour of our ships. Great Britain is strong enough to repel any attack on her headlands or on the coasts of her dominions or colonies. We shall view as such an attack also the construction of new continents, islands, fortifications or air bases in any ocean whose waves wash even the smallest stretch of a British coast. Let this be a final warning to anyone who would try to shift a sea coast by as much as a yard.’ Parliament thereupon approved the building of new warships at a preliminary cost of half a billion pounds sterling. It was a truly impressive reply to the construction of the provocative Johannes Jakob Scheuchzer monument. That monument, admittedly, cost only 12,000 Reichmarks.
A reply to these statements came from the brilliant French journalist, the Marquis de Sade, a man usually extremely well informed. Britain’s First Lord of the Admiralty (he said) had declared Great Britain to be prepared for all eventualities. Very good. But is the noble lord aware that Germany has in her Baltic Newts a permanent and very well-equipped army already numbering 5 million regular combat Newts who can be employed at a moment’s notice in the sea or on shore? Add to them some 17 million Newts in the technical and supply services, ready to operate at any time as a reserve or an army of occupation. Today the Baltic Newt is the best soldier in the world; psychologically perfectly brain-washed, he sees his true and supreme mission in war; he will go into any battle with the enthusiasm of the fanatic, with the cool reasoning of the technician and with the terrifying discipline of a true Prussian Newt.
Is Britain’s First Lord of the Admiralty further aware that Germany is feverishly building transport vessels capable of carrying a whole brigade of combat salamanders at a time? Is he aware that she is building hundreds and hundreds of small submarines with an operational range of 3,000 to 5,000 kilometres, crewed solely by Baltic Newts? Is he aware that she is setting up huge underwater fuel tanks in various parts of the ocean? Well, let us ask again: is the British citizen sure that his country is really well prepared for all eventualities?
It is not difficult, the Marquis de Sade continued, to visualise the importance of the Newts in any future war: equipped with underwater Big Berthas, mortars and torpedoes for blockading any coasts. God knows, for the first time in world history no one need envy Britain her splendid island situation. But while we are on the subject, is the British Admiralty aware that the Baltic Newts are equipped with a normally very peaceful instrument known as the pneumatic drill? And that this drill can cut ten metres deep into the best Swedish granite in an hour, or to a depth of fifty to sixty metres in English chalk? (This was proved by trial borings secretly conducted by a German technical expedition during the nights of the 11th, 12th and 13th of last month on the English coast between Hythe and Folkestone, right under the nose of the fortifications at Dover.) We would advise our friends across the Channel to work out for themselves how many weeks it would take for Kent or Essex to become riddled with holes below sea level like a chunk of cheese. Hitherto the British islander has been anxiously watching the skies, the only direction from where he thought disaster might come to his flourishing cities, to his Bank of England or to his peaceful cottages, snug under their perpetual green cover of ivy. Let him now press his ear to the ground instead, the ground on which his children are playing: will he not hear, if not today then tomorrow, the grinding sound, the crunching progress, inch by inch, of the tireless and terrible cutting head of the Newts’ drills, boring holes for as yet unheard-of explosive charges? No longer the war in the air but a war under water and underground is the latest marvel of our age. We heard some self-assured words from the captain’s bridge of proud Albion: yes, she still is a mighty ship riding the waves and ruling them; yet one day these waves might close over a ship blown to smithereens and sinking to the depths of the sea. Would it not be wiser to oppose this danger in time? Three years from now it will be too late!
This warning by the brilliant French commentator caused tremendous excitement in England. In spite of all denials people in the most diverse parts of England heard the crunch of the Newts’ drills underground. German official quarters, of course, emphatically repudiated and refuted the article quoted, describing it as sheer incitement and enemy propaganda from start to finish; simultaneously, however, major combined exercises were taking place in the Baltic between the German Navy, land forces and combat salamanders. As part of these exercises a Newt sapper platoon, before the eyes of foreign military attaches, blew up a strip of undermined sand dunes near Riigenwalde, an area of six square kilometres. It was said to have been a magnificent spectacle when, with a dreadful rumbling, the earth rose up ‘like a cracked ice-floe’, to break up a moment later into a gigantic wall of smoke, sand and boulders. The sky grew dark, almost as though it were night, and the raised sand fell over a radius of nearly a hundred kilometres, indeed after a few days it fell as a sandy rain as far away as Warsaw. After that magnificent explosion so much freely suspended fine sand and dust remained in the earth’s atmosphere that throughout Europe the sunsets were exceptionally beautiful right to the end of the year - blood-red and fiery as never before.
The sea which flooded the shattered stretch of coast was later named the Scheuchzer-See and became the goal of countless school outings and excursions of German children who sang the popular Newt anthem: Solche Erfolche erreichen nur deutsche Molche.
5
Wolf Meynert Writes His Great Work
Perhaps it was those magnificent and tragic sunsets that inspired the Koenigsberg recluse philosopher Wolf Meynert to write his monumental Untergang der Menschheit (Decline of Mankind). We can vividly picture him pacing the seashore, bare-headed in a flowing cloak, staring with fascinated eyes at that flood of fire and blood filling more than half the sky. ‘Yes,’ he whispers in ecstasy, ‘yes, the time has come to write the epilogue to the history of mankind!’ And so he sat down and wrote it.
The tragedy of the human race is being played out, Wolf Meynert began. Let us not be blinded by feverish enterprise or technological prosperity; these are but the fever patches on the cheeks of an organism already marked by death. Never has mankind experienced a greater upsurge to its life than today; yet find me one person who is happy, show me one class that is content, or one nation that does not feel threatened in its existence. Amidst all the gifts of civilisation, in Croesuslike wealth of spiritual and material values, we are all increasingly gripped by an irresistible sense of uncertainty, anxiety and malaise. And Wolf Meynert relentlessly analysed the spiritual condition of the world today, that mixture of fear and hate, of mistrust and megalomania, of cynicism and despondency: in one word, despair, Wolf Meynert concluded briefly. Typical terminal symptoms. Moral agony.
The question is: is or was man ever capable of happiness? Man certainly, as indeed every living creature - but not mankind. Man’s whole tragedy lies in the fact that he was forced to become mankind, or that he became mankind too late when he had already been irreparably differentiated into nations, races, faiths, estates and classes, into rich and poor, educated and uneducated, into rulers and oppressed. Herd together horses, wolves, sheep and cats, foxes and deer, bears and goats; shut them into one enclosure and compel them to live together in that nonsensical crowd which you call the social order, and to observe common rules of life; it will be an unhappy, dissatisfied, fatally divided herd, in which not one of God’s creatures will feel at home. This is a more or less accurate picture of the great and hopelessly heterogeneous herd that is called mankind. Nations, estates, or classes cannot in th
e long run coexist without crowding in on each other and getting in each other’s way to the point when it becomes unbearable. They can either live forever separated from each other - this was possible while the world was still big enough for them - or against each other, locked in a life-and-death struggle. For biological human entities, such as race, nation or class, the only natural road to homogeneity and undisturbed happiness is: to establish room for themselves and exterminate all others. And this is precisely what the human race failed to do in time. Today it is too late. We have made ourselves too many doctrines and obligations to protect ‘the others’ instead of getting rid of them; we have thought up a moral code, human rights, treaties, laws, equality, humanity and heaven knows what else; we have created the fiction of mankind which embraces both us and ‘the others’ in a notional higher entity. What a fatal error! We have placed the moral law above the biological law. We have violated the great natural prerequisite of all community existence: that only a homogeneous society can be a happy society. That attainable happiness we have sacrificed to a great but impossible dream: to create one mankind and one order out of all people, nations, classes and strata. It was a piece of magnanimous stupidity. It was, in its way, man’s only respectable attempt to rise above himself. But for that extreme idealism the human race is now paying by its inevitable disintegration.