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| Several Miles Longer than the Statue of Liberty / artist unknown |
The most interesting thing to me about this row that is going on on the other side of the river," said Michael Angelo, as he sculpted the Kaiser's head out of his camembert and tossed it to Dick Whitington's cat, "is the business of camouflage, and proud as I am of my own achievement along lines of art I take off my hat to these French and American artists who can kalsomine a fleet of 46 battleships so that it looks like a strawberry shortcake floating on the surface of the ocean a mile away, and so titivate a battle front with colored chalk and gew-gaws that to the eye of a German spy it appears to be nothing more than a row of peace-loving Charlotte roosters greeting the dawn with a song."
"O, I don't know, Mike," said Savonarola, who happened to be lunching at the club that day, having wearied of his third consecutive eatless week. "] wouldn't wear out the brim of my hat taking it off to those chaps if I were you. They didn't invent camouflage. It is as old as the everlasting hills, and I don't know that your modern camouflagers had anything on some of our first families of Italy when it came to flagging an enemy in the good old days of long ago. You were no piker in the camouflage line yourself, Mickey, dear."
"What, I?" said Michael Angelo, apparently very much surprised.
"Si, Signor—sure pop," said Savanarola. "I have known you to take a piece of plain, common garden, kiln-dried brick that was so poor in quality that it couldn't even be used on a government contract in Russia, and as raucously red as a New Jersey mudbank, and with a few deft strokes of your brush turn It into a baby-blue masterpiece that an American squillionaire would pay $945,429.2s for it at an auction sale. You know that as well as I do, and then look at Lucrezia Borgia—"
"Lucrezia Borgia?" echoed Michael Angelo. "O, come now, Savvy, what in all cimmeria had Lucrezia Borgia to do with camouflage?"
"She was a pippin at it, that's what," returned Savonarola. "Camouflage was that lady's long suit."
"Well, I never knew that before," laughed Michael Angelo. "As I recall Lucrezia's record she ran a sort of deluxe delicatessen shop for people who were tired of life."
"Ask Leonardo da Vinci if I am not right," persisted Savonarola. "How about it, Len?"
"You can search me, Savvy," smiled da Vinci. "Now you've got it you'd better keep the floor yourself."
"O, "tutt!" retorted Savonarola. "I thought you chaps had some brains. Why my dearly beloved Bambini, if Lucrezia Borgia wasn't queen of the May in the line of pure camouflage, I'm blest if I know what else you'd call her. Did you ever see one of her Welsh rabbits?"
"I've heard of them," said da Vinci. *but I never ate one. Fact is, I made it a rule never to eat anything at any of the Borgia chafing dish parties, just as I always wore hole-proof BVDs when I attended a reception at the Medicis. Safety first is my motto."
"Sure," said Savonarola, *and that's just my point. Those Welsh rabbits of Lucrezia's were pure camouflage.
Michael Angelo laughed.
"O, I see." said he, "you're thinking of camambert. Savvy. We were talking of camouflage. Camouflage Isn't cheese, you know."
"I know what camouflage is just as well as you do," retorted Savonarola, reddening angrily. "And when I say that Lucrezia's Welsh rabbits were pure camouflage, I mean it. They appeared to be one thing when in reality they were another. On the surface they were the most innocent looking little bits of golden sunshine that ever gloried a piece of toast. To look at 'em you'd say that as symbols of peaceful innocence they had the dove lashed to the everlasting mast—but underneath! Lago di Garda, Mike, they were seething maelstroms of destruction, and the man or woman Lucrezia wanted permanently removed from the social register after they had eaten a half-portion of a Borgia-made golden buck had about as much chance of getting home alive as they'd have if they'd swallowed a drugstore. Socrates' Hemlock cocktail was as buttermilk alongside of one of the fair Lucrezia's Loganberry flips."
"I hadn't thought of it in that light but I see your point," said Michael Angelo, "and while I deprecate Lucrezia's fondness for getting her guests fed up on cyanide of potassium, and other indelicacies, I am glad if Italy may lay claim to the paternity of the wonderful art we are discussing."
"Italy, nothing!" interjected Shakespeare. *I guess you never read my play of Macbeth, Mike?"
"Ah?" laughed Michael Angelo. "Another bit of dramatic camouflage I suspect, my beloved Bard—ostensibly Shakespeare, but underneath a mere side of bacon. That it, Billious?"
"O," said Shakespeare amiably, "I'm perfectly satisfied to let that matter rest just where it stands. I'm beginning to believe from the way my works are being attributed to everybody but me that even at that I was the most distinguished person of my time, since I seem to be the only guy then living who didn't write 'em. But the point I wanted to make was that whoever it was that wrote my play of Macbeth, he foresaw this whole business of camouflage when he disguised Macbeth's enemies as a picnic grove, so that when Macbeth saw what he thought was Birnam Wood marching on towards him with a real Sousa swing, it gave him an attack of the Willies that left him as full of pep in the hands of MacDuff as a Bolshevik in the presence of a German peace soliloquy. Don't you remember the line—'As I did stand my watch upon the hill I looked toward Birnam, and anon methought the wood began to move!'"
"Never heard 'em before, Bill, but it I say they're there I'll take your word for it," replied Michael Angelo. "It only goes to prove my point that after all art is the original knockout. Whether it was invented by you with your peripatetic picnic park or Lucrezia Borgia with her cunning little rabbits so disengaging in their habits that started it, camouflage was some discovery."
"It went further back than you imagine," put in Priam sadly, spreading a thick layer of horse radish on his toast. "It may have done a lot for MacDuff, but I want to tell you right now, boys, it ruined me. I had the nicest little kingdom in the world up around Troy. It had Seattle and Oklahoma City and all the rest of your marvels of modern growth backed off the map. We were all happy and prosperous until that fool son of mine, Paris, awarded the blue ribbon for beauty to Venus, and thereby knocked us all galley-west. That decision made certain other leading ladies of the Olympian Sorosis so immortally mad that they sicked the Greeks on me at a time when preparedness was my short suit. But even at that they had to use camouflage to put me on the mat. We had 'em beaten to a frazzle, when some wizard on the Greek side got the big idea. He induced Agamemnon to holler for peace, and as a token of Greek sincerity instead of handing me a loving cup they made me a present of a horse several miles longer than the Statue of Liberty. You know the rest. That old cob looked like a midway stunt at a World's Fair, and while I didn't want the darn thing any more than London wants Barnard's statue of Lincoln. thought it would please the children and took it."
"And then what?" roared Wat Tyler.
"Then what?" roared Priam. "Do you mean to tell me you never heard of the Trojan horse?"
"No." said Tyler. "I never studied mathematics."
"Well. it was a horse on me, all right!" said Priam moodily: "It was built of wood and stucco, and was about the size of Billy Sunday's tabernacles. It was mounted on wheels and rolled into our Central Park by the Greek peace delegation and formally accepted by my Royal Highness as a token of Agamemnon's love. We made a great festival of the occasion. All the schools were closed for the day and the leading Nestors and Chauncey Depewsters of the time delivered addresses on the 'Era of Good Feeling' and 'The End of the War and The Overthrow of Mars,' and so on, from every angle of that old nag, and then when, as a grand climacteric, I climbed up the old hack's neck and planted a Trojan flag in one ear and a Greek flag in the other, while the band played 'There Are No Pals Like the Old pals,' the populace yelled themselves to exhaustion with joy. Like a Bolshevik boob on a Potsdam payroll, I ordered the army demobilized and went to bed happy. And then—"
Priam wept bitter tears.
"And then the camouflage got in its fine work," he resumed, nerving himself up with a long, deep draft of Worcestershire sauce. *That old horse wasn't a horse at all. It was a cantonment! Instead of being a mere bit of equine pleasantry it turned out to be a division of Rough Riders, only they rode inside the horse instead of on his back. The horrible beast held the whole Greek general staff, 15 brigades of discus throwers, seven regiments of natural gasoliers armed to the teeth with the fiercest kind of Greek propaganda, and a highly efficient fire department that for making things burn to an ash beat anything in that line in all history. They started the home fires burning and kept 'em going to the last flicker of the ultimate ember. In short, Wat, while I slept, dreaming sweet dreams of peace, those Greeks inside shinned down that old jade's hind legs and when I waked up in the morning Troy was a flickering reminiscence."
"It was a great piece of strategy," said Achilles proudly.
"It was a low-down Dutch trick!" retorted Priam angrily. "But much as I have always regretted it, two good things came out of it. It inspired Virgil to write a great poem and it showed you up for what you were—jealous, sulky when you couldn't have your own way and brave only because you thought you had an armor-plated hide that not even criticism could puncture, and shot in the heel at the last! Shot in the heel, sir—just keep your mind on that."
"What's that got to do with it?" growled Achilles.
"Well, to me," returned Priam, "it proves your great reputation as a warrior to have been mere press agent stuff. In other words, Achilles, no man ever gets shot in the heel running towards the enemy."
Achilles sprang to his feet and would doubtless have made short work of the aged Priam had it not been for the prompt action of William Penn, who, like a true Quaker, desiring only peace, grabbed the belligerent warriors by the neck, and, throwing Priam into one corner and Achilles Into another, smilingly remarked:
"Come, come, gentlemen! Thee must not introduce rough stuff into hades!"
"Well, I don't like his reflections on my courage," said Achilles. "He will take them back. will thee not, brother?" said Penn, with so menacing a glance at Priam that the Trojan immediately acquiesced.
"Sure!" he said. "Indeed I'll go further," he added tremulously. "Achilles was one of the bravest men that ever honked his way to fame. The fact is, you know, that whenever I think of that game his people put on me I see red, and say a lot of things I don't really mean. You were a brave old lad, Achilles, so brave that you forgot to protect your rear, and besides there are times when running away is the highest type of courage."
"Well," said Homer, who had been a yawning listener to the discussion, "you're all off in thinking the Trojan horse was the beginning of camouflage, for as a matter of fact for centuries before the Trojan trick was pulled off camouflage had been a favorite pastime on high Olympus. Those old gods up there took to camouflage like a pacifist to grape juice. Even Jupiter himself went into it to an extent that kept his domestic entourage in a constant state of turmoil. Indeed the only constant thing about Jupiter was the state of turmoil in which his camouflage behavior kept him. He was the prize camouflage of the ages. There was a good deal of the Brigham Young about Jupiter, but Juno was so jealous, Brigham Young's tactics wouldn't work. Jupiter couldn't marry every woman in sight after the Brigham method of wedding every girl's boarding school that happened to look like the only woman he had ever loved, and get away with it. Juno was strong on woman's rights, and so Jupiter had to resort to camouflage. Whenever he met a lady that he thought he could support in the style to which she was accustomed, he called his secretary of the exterior and had himself camouflaged so his own mother wouldn't know him. One day he'd rig himself up as a swan, and paddle gracefully along the skyline of the lady whose eye he wished to catch, knowing full well the feminine weakness for the cold bird. Another day he'd make himself up to resemble ready-money, and sprinkle himself over the fair one's horizon like a gold reserve on a spree. Another time he would stroll by looking for all the world like a quiet little woolly lamb, and some pretty little sheperdess he'd taken a fancy to would scratch his nose for him, and feed him nice fresh cauliflower with her Dresden China fingers, and so on. I guess Jupiter had the Kaiser beaten 70 ways for Sunday with his camouflage clothes, and the calm, nonchalant way in which he fooled the ladies of the Hoi Poloi was a caution to militant suffragettes. Savonarola was right when he said camouflage was old as the hills. Noah probably, thought Ararat was a sea-beach, until he found his old scow stranded on top of a mountain. Eve doubtless thought the serpent was a gentleman, and discovered later that he was a snake. Life is full of it. That things are seldom what they seem, the sages have told us for myriads of years. Art is eternal, and eternity works both ways, fore and aft. We have always had camouflage and we'll continue to have it to the end."
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| Eve Doubtless Thought the Serpent was a Gentleman |
"Ubetcha!" said Socrates. "And what I am glad about is that over in France they are fighting fire with fire today. If there is anything that can beat camouflage it is camouflage itself."
"The point of which wise remark is just what?" queried Solomon. "Just this," replied Socrates. "They are using camouflage to down kultur, which is the most insidious bit of camouflage yet developed by Satan to befool the human race. Pretending to make men free, its real intent is to forever enslave them. Pretending to elevate a people to the heights of spiritual greatness it has debased them to the level of brutish savagery. Claiming to be a blessing it has turned out to be the blackest curse that has ever afflicted the human race. Promising Its followers heaven it has loosed hell Itself upon them.
"Solomon leapt to his feet, his face flaming with enthusiasm.
"Sock, old man," he cried, holding out his hand, "put it there! By every George and Jove in history, my boy, you've said something at last!"
And the members of the Associate Shades rose and cheered until the very reel of the House Boat on the Styx shook with the reverberance, for even in the realm of the shadows kultur knows no brother.
