By now it is probably too late to do anything about it, but the unsettling fact remains that the so-called sale of Manhattan Island to the Dutch in 1626 was a totally illegal deal; a group of Brooklyn Indians perpetrated the swindle, and they had no more right to sell Manhattan Island than the present mayor of White Plains would have to declare war on France. When the Manhattan Indians found out about it they were understandably furious, but by that time the Dutch had too strong a foothold to be dislodged—by the Indians, at any rate—and the eventual arrival of one-way avenues and the Hamburg Heaven Crystal Room was only a matter of time.
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January 2011
“This will, some time hence, be a vast empire, the seat of power and learning. … Nature has refused them nothing, and there will grow a people out of our little spot, England, that will fill this vast space, and divide this great portion of the globe with the Spaniards, who are possessed of the other half.”
That prophecy, two hundred and one years ago, about the future of Britain’s colonies in America, was written by the man who had scornfully said in another letter four days earlier: “The Americans are in general the dirtiest most contemptible dogs that you can conceive.” This hasty and violent generalization from a particular episode—the capture of Louisbourg—was as characteristic of the man as was the far-ranging vision shown in his next letter.
Sir:
The attentions which you have so long and so assiduously shown to me have not escaped my notice; indeed how could they, since they were directed exclusively to met … I admit the truth, that pleased and flattered by such attentions, I fondly endeavored to persuade myself that attachment toward me had formed itself in your breast.
Judge then, what must have been my feelings on reading the contents of your letter, in which you propose to pay your addresses, in a manner, the object of which cannot be mistaken—that I may regard you as my acknowledged suitor, and that you have chosen me as the most likely to contribute to your happiness in the married state.
On consulting my parents, I find that they do not object to your proposal; therefore, I have only this to add—may we still entertain the same regard which we have hitherto cherished for each other, until it shall ripen into that affection which wedlock shall sanction, and which lapse of time will not allow to fade. Believe me to be,
Yours, sincerely attached.
If the study of military history teaches anything worth knowing, its principal lesson is that modern war never means what the people who are fighting it thought that it was going to mean. This is not merely because it involves infinite physical destruction, but because it turns loose social forces that get completely out of hand. It brings results that were neither foreseen nor desired. It means profound change.
For war disrupts the ground on which people were standing when they took up arms. It erases the status quo —which one side or the other, if not both, believes itself to be fighting to preserve. The very process of fighting creates the certainty that nothing is ever going to be the same again.
Yet this is where the shoe really pinches. The professional soldier, probably of necessity, spends his life learning how to beat an enemy to his knees, and he does his best to learn this by studying the ways in which the last enemies were beaten. Then the world moves out from under him, and his body of knowledge becomes a hindrance rather than a help—and, once again, history turns a corner.
A French military historian, Colonel A. Goutard, examines this problem in The Battle of France, 1940 , and the book makes a good companion piece to the study written by Mr. Falls. Colonel Goutard says bluntly that the soldiers of France—a nation whose army had a military tradition as good as any in Europe —had learned from World War I nothing except a few outmoded lessons in tactics, and that France lost its part of the Second World War as a direct result.