Review by Helen Parry
Suppose Germany and Britain went to war and Britain lost and was absorbed into the German empire? What would British people do? What would you do? This is the basis of Saki’s 1913 novel, written at a time when Europe was engaged in an arms race and tensions were rising. It’s an odd but intriguing little book, part warning of what might happen to an unwary Britain, part acid social comedy which delights in exposing vanity and hypocrisy.
Murrey Yeovil arrives back in London some months after the fait accompli, as some call it (it’s also called ‘the catastrophe’ and ‘it’, no character wishes to name it ‘the defeat’) to an occupied land. He has been desperately ill in Siberia and missed the invasion and its aftermath, and so he experiences as shocking change what his wife Cicely and many other Britons have already learnt to tolerate. London is full of Germans and noticeably different to before the war. Now open-air cafés, the imperial flag and petty rules are ubiquitous.
Cicely tries to comfort him: ‘time is always something of a narcotic, you know. Things seem absolutely unbearable, and then bit by bit we find out that we are bearing them.’ Unlike some of their friends, who have left London in protest, Cicely wants to rebuild her metropolitan life and its pleasures. She is pragmatic and dedicated to getting what she wants out of life. In counterpoint, Yeovil, sentimental and patriotic, is appalled, but ultimately more self-deceiving. His initial condemnation of those he deems collaborators soon comes under pressure. What can he actually do to resist?
Saki has chosen to focus his novel not on the drama of the invasion, nor on the excitement of a future uprising, but on the moment of greatest moral difficulty: when the British are deciding how to live under occupation. It’s a moment that plays to Saki’s satirical strengths, as the upper classes struggle to reconcile their own needs and ambitions with their patriotic duty – and even to define what that duty might be in these circumstances. The drawing-room scenes in which these struggles are played out are as witty and revealing as you would wish and Saki just cannot help himself writing characters as entertaining as Joan Mardle:
She cultivated a jovial, almost joyous manner, with a top-dressing of hearty good will and good nature which disarmed strangers and recent acquaintances; on getting to know her better they hastily re-armed themselves. […] She was not without a certain popularity, the sort of popularity that a dashing highwayman sometimes achieved among those who were not in the habit of travelling on his particular highway.
But Saki has also chosen this moment of moral difficulty because this is a novel with a message, and that message is that the British have become soft and need to take Germany more seriously as a threat. Bring back national conscription before it’s too late! Unfortunately, this message is responsible for some weaker moments in the novel in which characters become mouthpieces for Saki’s views, which are the more obtrusive because of the subtleties of other elements of the novel.
One such subtlety is the use of fox-hunting, with which Saki hints at a possible future uprising against the Germans. Lady Shalem, a social climber, quotes ‘Take us the little foxes, the little foxes that spoil the vines’. It’s a quotation from the Song of Solomon: small things can cause immense amounts of damage. Later, this forms the epigraph to the final chapter, ‘The Little Foxes’, in which we see the first glimpse of the little foxes’ teeth.
Earlier, Cicely argues that country life, including fox-hunting, unites Englishmen and ‘That is why so many men who hate German occupation are trying to keep field sports alive, and in the right hands.’ Yeovil accepts this because actually he doesn’t want to do the work of resistance, he wants to live in the country and have fun. However, he does wonder if this makes him any better than those in London whom he condemned: effete men who obsess over interior decoration, handsome boys who are the playthings of older women. The novel suggests that it is: the English countryside is portrayed as a significant contributor to the national character. And it’s the home of the little foxes. Perhaps it is enough that Yeovil shares that home. Perhaps by fox-hunting, though, he is not adapting the best tactic for overthrowing the Germans. Perhaps, like the Scouts, he needs to become the fox itself.
In a novel that is very much concerned with masculinity, field sports are definitely masculine. Yeovil, pondering what it is to be a man, feels keenly the insult of the scornful way that the Germans impose a higher rate of taxation on their British subjects. The British, we are reminded, chose not to impose military conscription on their young men. Therefore:
Their new Overlord did not propose to do violence to their feelings and customs by requiring from them the personal military sacrifices and services which were rendered by his subjects German-born. The British subjects of the Crown were to remain a people consecrated to peaceful pursuits […]
Instead, the Germans will ‘protect’ Britain with their Imperial military, and the British will pay handsomely for the privilege. Emasculated, they are to be shielded from harm like women.
If masculinity is something that troubles the novel, so too is race. The conquest of one imperium by another throws up interesting ironies, not least because the war was triggered by some sort of colonial dispute between Germany and Britain. Slightly implausibly, the deposed King of England reigns in Delhi as Emperor of the East, ‘with most of his overseas dominions still subject to his sway’, and many upper-class Britons have fled to the colonies to escape the Germans. England has been reduced to the same status as the lands which form its own empire and every English character regards this as intolerable – but only for them. As Yeovil tells Cicely, ‘I’ve been bred and reared as a unit of a ruling race; I don’t want to find myself settling down resignedly as a member of an enslaved one.’ Self-reflection on these matters may still be in short supply for Yeovil and his fellows, but beyond the confines of this novel, the twentieth century is about to start gnawing at their certainties.
Helen blogs at A Gallimaufry
Saki (H.H. Munro), When William Came (Michael Walmer, 2025). 978-0645751987, 246pp., pbk.
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