I watched him beating his bunch of grass
against his knees, with that preoccupied grandmotherly air that elephants have.
against his knees, with that preoccupied grandmotherly air that elephants have.
Orwell
Wodehouse’s attitude towards the English social system is the same as his attitude
towards the public-school moral code — a mild facetiousness covering an unthinking
acceptance. The Earl of Emsworth is funny because an earl ought to have more dignity,
and Bertie Wooster’s helpless dependence on Jeeves is funny partly because the servant
ought not to be superior to the master. An American reader can mistake these two, and
others like them, for hostile caricatures, because he is inclined to be Anglophobe already
and they correspond to his preconceived ideas about a decadent aristocracy. Bertie
Wooster, with his spats and his cane, is the traditional stage Englishman. But, as any
English reader would see, Wodehouse intends him as a sympathetic figure, and
Wodehouse’s real sin has been to present the English upper classes as much nicer people
than they are. All through his books certain problems are constantly avoided. Almost
without exception his moneyed young men are unassuming, good mixers, not avaricious:
their tone is set for them by Psmith, who retains his own upper-class exterior but bridges
the social gap by addressing everyone as “Comrade”.
But there is another important point about Bertie Wooster: his out-of-dateness. Conceived
in 1917 or thereabouts, Bertie really belongs to an epoch earlier than that. He is the
“knut” of the pre-1914 period, celebrated in such songs as “Gilbert the Filbert” or
“Reckless Reggie of the Regent’s Palace”. The kind of life that Wodehouse writes about
by preference, the life of the “clubman” or “man about town”, the elegant young man
who lounges all the morning in Piccadilly with a cane under his arm and a carnation in
his buttonhole, barely survived into the nineteen- twenties. It is significant that
Wodehouse could publish in 1936 a book entitled YOUNG MEN IN SPATS. For who
was wearing spats at that date? They had gone out of fashion quite ten years earlier. But
the traditional “knut”, the “Piccadilly Johnny”, OUGHT to wear spats, just as the
pantomime Chinese ought to wear a pigtail. A humorous writer is not obliged to keep up
to date, and having struck one or two good veins, Wodehouse continued to exploit them
with a regularity that was no doubt all the easier because he did not set foot in England
during the sixteen years that preceded his intermnent. His picture of English society had
been formed before 1914, and it was a naive, traditional and, at bottom, admiring picture.
Nor did he ever become genuinely americanised. As I have pointed out, spontaneous
Americanisms do occur in the books of the middle period, but Wodehouse remained
English enough to find American slang an amusing and slightly shocking novelty. He
loves to thrust a slang phrase or a crude fact in among Wardour Street English (“With a
hollow groan Ukridge borrowed five shillings from me and went out into the night”), and
expressions like “a piece of cheese” or “bust him on the noggin” lend themselves to this
purpose. But the trick had been developed before he made any American contacts, and
his use of garbled quotations is a common device of English writers running back to
Fielding. As Mr John Hayward has pointed out, * Wodehouse owes a good deal to his
knowledge of English literature and especially of Shakespeare. His books are aimed, not,
obviously, at a highbrow audience, but at an audience educated along traditional lines.
When, for instance, he describes somebody as heaving “the kind of sigh that Prometheus
might have heaved when the vulture dropped in for its lunch”, he is assuming that his
readers will know something of Greek mythology. In his early days the writers he
admired were probably Barry Pain, Jerome K. Jerome, W. W. Jacobs, Kipling and F.
Anstey, and he has remained closer to them than to the quickmoving American comic
writers such as Ring Lardner or Damon Runyon. In his radio interview with Flannery,
Wodehouse wondered whether “the kind of people and the kind of England I write about
will live after the war”, not realising that they were ghosts already. “He was still living in
the period about which he wrote,” says Flannery, meaning, probably, the nineteen-
twenties. But the period was really the Edwardian age, and Bertie Wooster, if he ever
existed, was killed round about 1915.
* “P. G. Wodehouse” by John Hayward. (The Saturday Book, 1942. ) I believe this is the
only full-length critical essay on Wodehouse. (Author’s footnote. )
If my analysis of Wodehouse’s mentality is accepted, the idea that in 1941 he consciously
aided the Nazi propaganda machine becomes untenable and even ridiculous. He MAY
have been induced to broadcast by the promise of an earlier release (he was due for
release a few months later, on reaching his sixtieth birthday), but he cannot have realised
that what he did would be damaging to British interests. As I have tried to show, his
moral outlook has remained that of a public-school boy, and according to the public-
school code, treachery in time of war is the most unforgivable of all the sins. But how
could he fail to grasp that what he did would be a big propaganda score for the Germans
and would bring down a torrent of disapproval on his own head? To answer this one must
take two things into consideration. First, Wodehouse’s complete lack — so far as one can
judge from his printed works — of political awareness. It is nonsense to talk of “Fascist
tendencies” in his books. There are no post-1918 tendencies at all. Throughout his work
there is a certain uneasy awareness of the problem of class distinctions, and scattered
through it at various dates there are ignorant though not unfriendly references to
Socialism. In THE HEART OF A GOOF (1926) there is a rather silly story about a
Russian novelist, which seems to have been inspired by the factional struggle then raging
in the U. S. S. R. But the references in it to the Soviet system are entirely frivolous and,
considering the date, not markedly hostile. That is about the extent of Wodehouse’s
political consciousness, so far as it is discoverable from his writings. Nowhere, so far as I
know, does he so much as use the word “Fascism” or “Nazism. ” In left-wing circles,
indeed in “enlightened” circles of any kind, to broadcast on the Nazi radio, to have any
truck with the Nazis whatever, would have seemed just as shocking an action before the
war as during it. But that is a habit of mind that had been developed during nearly a
decade of ideological struggle against Fascism. The bulk of the British people, one ought
to remember, remained anjsthetic to that struggle until late into 1940. Abyssinia, Spain,
China, Austria, Czechoslovakia — the long series of crimes and aggressions had simply
slid past their consciousness or were dimly noted as quarrels occurring among foreigners
and “not our business. ” One can gauge the general ignorance from the fact that the
ordinary Englishman thought of “Fascism” as an exclusively Italian thing and was
bewildered when the same word was applied to Germany. And there is nothing in
Wodehouse’s writings to suggest that he was better infonned, or more interested in
politics, than the general run of his readers.
The other thing one must remember is that Wodehouse happened to be taken prisoner at
just the moment when the war reached its desperate phase. We forget these things now,
but until that time feelings about the war had been noticeably tepid. There was hardly any
fighting, the Chamberlain Government was unpopular, eminent publicists were hinting
that we should make a compromise peace as quickly as possible, trade union and Labour
Party branches all over the country were passing anti-war resolutions. Afterwards, of
course, things changed. The Army was with difficulty extricated from Dunkirk, France
collapsed, Britain was alone, the bombs rained on London, Goebbels announced that
Britain was to be “reduced to degradation and poverty”. By the middle of 1941 the
British people knew what they were up against and feelings against the enemy were far
fiercer than before. But Wodehouse had spent the intervening year in internment, and his
captors seem to have treated him reasonably well. He had missed the turning-point of the
war, and in 1941 he was still reacting in terms of 1939. He was not alone in this. On
several occasions about this time the Germans brought captured British soldiers to the
microphone, and some of them made remarks at least as tactless as Wodehouse’s. They
attracted no attention, however. And even an outright Quisling like John Amery was
afterwards to arouse much less indignation than Wodehouse had done.
But why? Why should a few rather silly but harmless remarks by an elderly novelist have
provoked such an outcry? One has to look for the probable answer amid the dirty
requirements of propaganda warfare.
There is one point about the Wodehouse broadcasts that is almost certainly significant —
the date. Wodehouse was released two or three days before the invasion of the U. S. S. R. ,
and at a time when the higher ranks of the Nazi party must have known that the invasion
was imminent. It was vitally necessary to keep America out of the war as long as
possible, and in fact, about this time, the Gennan attitude towards the U. S. A. did become
more conciliatory than it had been before. The Germans could hardly hope to defeat
Russia, Britain and the U. S. A. in combination, but if they could polish off Russia quickly
— and presumably they expected to do so — the Americans might never intervene. The
release of Wodehouse was only a minor move, but it was not a bad sop to throw to the
American isolationists. He was well known in the United States, and he was — or so the
Gennans calculated — popular with the Anglophobe public as a caricaturist who made
fun of the silly-ass Englishman with his spats and his monocle. At the microphone he
could be trusted to damage British prestige in one way or another, while his release
would demonstrate that the Germans were good fellows and knew how to treat their
enemies chivalrously. That presumably was the calculation, though the fact that
Wodehouse was only broadcasting for about a week suggests that he did not come up to
expectations.
But on the British side similar though opposite calculations were at work. For the two
years following Dunkirk, British morale depended largely upon the feeling that this was
not only a war for democracy but a war which the common people had to win by their
own efforts. The upper classes were discredited by their appeasement policy and by the
disasters of 1940, and a social levelling process appeared to be taking place. Patriotism
and left-wing sentiments were associated in the popular mind, and numerous able
journalists were at work to tie the association tighter. Priestley’s 1940 broadcasts, and
“Cassandra’s” articles in the DAILY MIRROR, were good examples of the demagogic
propaganda flourishing at that time. In this atmosphere, Wodehouse made an ideal
whipping-boy. For it was generally felt that the rich were treacherous, and Wodehouse —
as “Cassandra” vigorously pointed out in his broadcast — was a rich man. But he was the
kind of rich man who could be attacked with impunity and without risking any damage to
the structure of society. To denounce Wodehouse was not like denouncing, say,
Beaverbrook. A mere novelist, however large his earnings may happen to be, is not OF
the possessing class. Even if his income touches £50,000 a year he has only the outward
semblance of a millionaire. He is a lucky outsider who
SHOOTING AN ELEPHANT
BY: GEORGE ORWELL
CATEGORY: LITERATURE - SHORT STORIES
SHOOTING AN ELEPHANT
BY
GEORGE ORWELL
IN MOULMEIN, IN LOWER BURMA, I was hated by large numbers of people--the only
time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me. I was
sub-divisional police officer of the town, and in an aimless, petty kind of way anti-
European feeling was very bitter. No one had the guts to raise a riot, but if a
European woman went through the bazaars alone somebody would probably spit
betel juice over her dress. As a police officer I was an obvious target and was baited
whenever it seemed safe to do so. When a nimble Burman tripped me up on the
football field and the referee (another Burman) looked the other way, the crowd
yelled with hideous laughter. This happened more than once. In the end the sneering
yellow faces of young men that met me everywhere, the insults hooted after me
when I was at a safe distance, got badly on my nerves. The young Buddhist priests
were the worst of all. There were several thousands of them in the town and none of
them seemed to have anything to do except stand on street corners and jeer at
Europeans.
All this was perplexing and upsetting. For at that time I had already made up my
mind that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I chucked up my job and got
out of it the better. Theoretically--and secretly, of course--I was all for the Burmese
and all against their oppressors, the British. As for the job I was doing, I hated it
more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear. In a job like that you see the dirty work
of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of
the lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks
of the men who had been Bogged with bamboos--all these oppressed me with an
intolerable sense of guilt. But I could get nothing into perspective. I was young and
ill-educated and I had had to think out my problems in the utter silence that is
imposed on every Englishman in the East. I did not even know that the British
Empire is dying, still less did I know that it is a great deal better than the younger
empires that are going to supplant it. All I knew was that I was stuck between my
hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who
tried to make my job impossible. With one part of my mind I thought of the British
Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in saecula saecutorum,
upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy
in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest's guts. Feelings like
these are the normal by-products of imperialism; ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you
can catch him off duty.
One day something happened which in a roundabout way was enlightening. It was a
tiny incident in itself, but it gave me a better glimpse than I had had before of the
real nature of imperialism--the real motives for which despotic governments act.
Early one morning the sub-inspector at a police station the other end of the town
rang me up on the phone and said that an elephant was ravaging the bazaar. Would
I please come and do something about it? I did not know what I could do, but I
wanted to see what was happening and I got on to a pony and started out. I took my
rifle, an old . 44 Winchester and much too small to kill an elephant, but I thought the
noise might be useful in terrorem. Various Burmans stopped me on the way and told
me about the elephant's doings. It was not, of course, a wild elephant, but a tame
one which had gone "must. " It had been chained up, as tame elephants always are
when their attack of "must" is due, but on the previous night it had broken its chain
and escaped. Its mahout, the only person who could manage it when it was in that
state, had set out in pursuit, but had taken the wrong direction and was now twelve
hours' journey away, and in the morning the elephant had suddenly reappeared in
the town. The Burmese population had no weapons and were quite helpless against
it. It had already destroyed somebody's bamboo hut, killed a cow and raided some
fruit-stalls and devoured the stock; also it had met the municipal rubbish van and,
when the driver jumped out and took to his heels, had turned the van over and
inflicted violences upon it.
The Burmese sub-inspector and some Indian constables were waiting for me in the
quarter where the elephant had been seen. It was a very poor quarter, a labyrinth of
squalid bamboo huts, thatched with palmleaf, winding all over a steep hillside. I
remember that it was a cloudy, stuffy morning at the beginning of the rains. We
began questioning the people as to where the elephant had gone and, as usual,
failed to get any definite information. That is invariably the case in the East; a story
always sounds clear enough at a distance, but the nearer you get to the scene of
events the vaguer it becomes. Some of the people said that the elephant had gone in
one direction, some said that he had gone in another, some professed not even to
have heard of any elephant. I had almost made up my mind that the whole story
was a pack of lies, when we heard yells a little distance away. There was a loud,
scandalized cry of "Go away, child! Go away this instant! " and an old woman with a
switch in her hand came round the corner of a hut, violently shooing away a crowd of
naked children. Some more women followed, clicking their tongues and exclaiming;
evidently there was something that the children ought not to have seen. I rounded
the hut and saw a man's dead body sprawling in the mud. He was an Indian, a black
Dravidian coolie, almost naked, and he could not have been dead many minutes. The
people said that the elephant had come suddenly upon him round the corner of the
hut, caught him with its trunk, put its foot on his back and ground him into the
earth. This was the rainy season and the ground was soft, and his face had scored a
trench a foot deep and a couple of yards long. He was lying on his belly with arms
crucified and head sharply twisted to one side. His face was coated with mud, the
eyes wide open, the teeth bared and grinning with an expression of unendurable
agony. (Never tell me, by the way, that the dead look peaceful. Most of the corpses I
have seen looked devilish. ) The friction of the great beast's foot had stripped the
skin from his back as neatly as one skins a rabbit. As soon as I saw the dead man I
sent an orderly to a friend's house nearby to borrow an elephant rifle. I had already
sent back the pony, not wanting it to go mad with fright and throw me if it smelt the
elephant.
The orderly came back in a few minutes with a rifle and five cartridges, and
meanwhile some Burmans had arrived and told us that the elephant was in the
paddy fields below, only a few hundred yards away. As I started forward practically
the whole population of the quarter flocked out of the houses and followed me. They
had seen the rifle and were all shouting excitedly that I was going to shoot the
elephant. They had not shown much interest in the elephant when he was merely
ravaging their homes, but it was different now that he was going to be shot. It was a
bit of fun to them, as it would be to an English crowd; besides they wanted the
meat. It made me vaguely uneasy. I had no intention of shooting the elephant--I
had merely sent for the rifle to defend myself if necessary--and it is always
unnerving to have a crowd following you. I marched down the hill, looking and
feeling a fool, with the rifle over my shoulder and an ever-growing army of people
jostling at my heels. At the bottom, when you got away from the huts, there was a
metalled road and beyond that a miry waste of paddy fields a thousand yards across,
not yet ploughed but soggy from the first rains and dotted with coarse grass. The
elephant was standing eight yards from the road, his left side towards us. He took
not the slightest notice of the crowd's approach. He was tearing up bunches of grass,
beating them against his knees to clean them and stuffing them into his mouth.
I had halted on the road. As soon as I saw the elephant I knew with perfect certainty
that I ought not to shoot him. It is a serious matter to shoot a working elephant--it is
comparable to destroying a huge and costly piece of machinery--and obviously one
ought not to do it if it can possibly be avoided. And at that distance, peacefully
eating, the elephant looked no more dangerous than a cow. I thought then and I
think now that his attack of "must" was already passing off; in which case he would
merely wander harmlessly about until the mahout came back and caught him.
Moreover, I did not in the least want to shoot him. I decided that I would watch him
for a little while to make sure that he did not turn savage again, and then go home.
But at that moment I glanced round at the crowd that had followed me. It was an
immense crowd, two thousand at the least and growing every minute. It blocked the
road for a long distance on either side. I looked at the sea of yellow faces above the
garish clothes-faces all happy and excited over this bit of fun, all certain that the
elephant was going to be shot. They were watching me as they would watch a
conjurer about to perform a trick. They did not like me, but with the magical rifle in
my hands I was momentarily worth watching. And suddenly I realized that I should
have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to
do it; I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly. And it
was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped
the hollowness, the futility of the white man's dominion in the East. Here was I, the
white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd--seemingly
the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to
and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that
when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes
a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the
condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the "natives," and
so in every crisis he has got to do what the "natives" expect of him. He wears a
mask, and his face grows to fit it. I had got to shoot the elephant. I had committed
myself to doing it when I sent for the rifle. A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has
got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things. To come all that
way, rifle in hand, with two thousand people marching at my heels, and then to trail
feebly away, having done nothing--no, that was impossible. The crowd would laugh
at me. And my whole life, every white man's life in the East, was one long struggle
not to be laughed at.
But I did not want to shoot the elephant.
I watched him beating his bunch of grass
against his knees, with that preoccupied grandmotherly air that elephants have. It
seemed to me that it would be murder to shoot him. At that age I was not
squeamish about killing animals, but I had never shot an elephant and never wanted
to. (Somehow it always seems worse to kill a large animal. ) Besides, there was the
beast's owner to be considered. Alive, the elephant was worth at least a hundred
pounds; dead, he would only be worth the value of his tusks, five pounds, possibly.
But I had got to act quickly. I turned to some experienced-looking Burmans who had
been there when we arrived, and asked them how the elephant had been behaving.
They all said the same thing: he took no notice of you if you left him alone, but he
might charge if you went too close to him.
It was perfectly clear to me what I ought to do. I ought to walk up to within, say,
twenty-five yards of the elephant and test his behavior. If he charged, I could shoot;
if he took no notice of me, it would be safe to leave him until the mahout came back.
But also I knew that I was going to do no such thing. I was a poor shot with a rifle
and the ground was soft mud into which one would sink at every step. If the
elephant charged and I missed him, I should have about as much chance as a toad
under a steam-roller. But even then I was not thinking particularly of my own skin,
only of the watchful yellow faces behind. For at that moment, with the crowd
watching me, I was not afraid in the ordinary sense, as I would have been if I had
been alone. A white man mustn't be frightened in front of "natives"; and so, in
general, he isn't frightened. The sole thought in my mind was that if anything went
wrong those two thousand Burmans would see me pursued, caught, trampled on and
reduced to a grinning corpse like that Indian up the hill. And if that happened it was
quite probable that some of them would laugh. That would never do.
There was only one alternative. I shoved the cartridges into the magazine and lay
down on the road to get a better aim. The crowd grew very still, and a deep, low,
happy sigh, as of people who see the theatre curtain go up at last, breathed from
innumerable throats. They were going to have their bit of fun after all. The rifle was
a beautiful German thing with cross-hair sights. I did not then know that in shooting
an elephant one would shoot to cut an imaginary bar running from ear-hole to ear-
hole. I ought, therefore, as the elephant was sideways on, to have aimed straight at
his ear-hole, actually I aimed several inches in front of this, thinking the brain would
be further forward.
When I pulled the trigger I did not hear the bang or feel the kick--one never does
when a shot goes home--but I heard the devilish roar of glee that went up from the
crowd. In that instant, in too short a time, one would have thought, even for the
bullet to get there, a mysterious, terrible change had come over the elephant. He
neither stirred nor fell, but every line of his body had altered. He looked suddenly
stricken, shrunken, immensely old, as though the frightful impact of the bullet had
paralysed him without knocking him down. At last, after what seemed a long time--it
might have been five seconds, I dare say--he sagged flabbily to his knees. His mouth
slobbered. An enormous senility seemed to have settled upon him. One could have
imagined him thousands of years old. I fired again into the same spot. At the second
shot he did not collapse but climbed with desperate slowness to his feet and stood
weakly upright, with legs sagging and head drooping. I fired a third time. That was
the shot that did for him. You could see the agony of it jolt his whole body and knock
the last remnant of strength from his legs. But in falling he seemed for a moment to
rise, for as his hind legs collapsed beneath him he seemed to tower upward like a
huge rock toppling, his trunk reaching skyward like a tree. He trumpeted, for the
first and only time. And then down he came, his belly towards me, with a crash that
seemed to shake the ground even where I lay.
I got up. The Burmans were already racing past me across the mud. It was obvious
that the elephant would never rise again, but he was not dead. He was breathing
very rhythmically with long rattling gasps, his great mound of a side painfully rising
and falling. His mouth was wide open--I could see far down into caverns of pale pink
throat. I waited a long time for him to die, but his breathing did not weaken. Finally I
fired my two remaining shots into the spot where I thought his heart must be. The
thick blood welled out of him like red velvet, but still he did not die. His body did not
even jerk when the shots hit him, the tortured breathing continued without a pause.
He was dying, very slowly and in great agony, but in some world remote from me
where not even a bullet could damage him further. I felt that I had got to put an end
to that dreadful noise. It seemed dreadful to see the great beast Lying there,
powerless to move and yet powerless to die, and not even to be able to finish him. I
sent back for my small rifle and poured shot after shot into his heart and down his
throat. They seemed to make no impression. The tortured gasps continued as
steadily as the ticking of a clock.
In the end I could not stand it any longer and went away. I heard later that it took
him half an hour to die. Burmans were bringing dahs and baskets even before I left,
and I was told they had stripped his body almost to the bones by the afternoon.
Afterwards, of course, there were endless discussions about the shooting of the
elephant. The owner was furious, but he was only an Indian and could do nothing.
Besides, legally I had done the right thing, for a mad elephant has to be killed, like a
mad dog, if its owner fails to control it. Among the Europeans opinion was divided.
The older men said I was right, the younger men said it was a damn shame to shoot
an elephant for killing a coolie, because an elephant was worth more than any damn
Coringhee coolie. And afterwards I was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it
put me legally in the right and it gave me a sufficient pretext for shooting the
elephant. I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it
solely to avoid looking a fool.
You and the Atomic Bomb
by George Orwell, October 19, 1945
Considering how likely we all are to be blown to pieces by it within the next five years,
the atomic bomb has not roused so much discussion as might have been expected. The
newspapers have published numerous diagrams, not very helpful to the average man, of
protons and neutrons doing their stuff, and there has been much reiteration of the useless
statement that the bomb "ought to be put under international control. " But curiously little
has been said, at any rate in print, about the question that is of most urgent interest to all
of us, namely: "How difficult are these things to manufacture? "
Such information as we— that is, the big public— possess on this subject has come to us in
a rather indirect way, apropos of President Truman's decision not to hand over certain
secrets to the USSR. Some months ago, when the bomb was still only a rumour, there
was a widespread belief that splitting the atom was merely a problem for the physicists,
and that when they had solved it a new and devastating weapon would be within reach of
almost everybody. (At any moment, so the rumour went, some lonely lunatic in a
laboratory might blow civilisation to smithereens, as easily as touching off a firework. )
Had that been true, the whole trend of history would have been abruptly altered. The
distinction between great states and small states would have been wiped out, and the
power of the State over the individual would have been greatly weakened. However, it
appears from President Truman's remarks, and various comments that have been made on
them, that the bomb is fantastically expensive and that its manufacture demands an
enormous industrial effort, such as only three or four countries in the world are capable of
making. This point is of cardinal importance, because it may mean that the discovery of
the atomic bomb, so far from reversing history, will simply intensify the trends which
have been apparent for a dozen years past.
It is a commonplace that the history of civilisation is largely the history of weapons. In
particular, the connection between the discovery of gunpowder and the overthrow of
feudalism by the bourgeoisie has been pointed out over and over again. And though I
have no doubt exceptions can be brought forward, I think the following rule would be
found generally true: that ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to
make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and
simple, the common people have a chance. Thus, for example, tanks, battleships and
bombing planes are inherently tyrannical weapons, while rifles, muskets, long-bows and
hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong
stronger, while a simple weapon— so long as there is no answer to it— gives claws to the
weak.
The great age of democracy and of national self-determination was the age of the musket
and the rifle. After the invention of the flintlock, and before the invention of the
percussion cap, the musket was a fairly efficient weapon, and at the same time so simple
that it could be produced almost anywhere. Its combination of qualities made possible the
success of the American and French revolutions, and made a popular insurrection a more
serious business than it could be in our own day. After the musket came the breech-
loading rifle. This was a comparatively complex thing, but it could still be produced in
scores of countries, and it was cheap, easily smuggled and economical of ammunition.
Even the most backward nation could always get hold of rifles from one source or
another, so that Boers, Bulgars, Abyssinians, Moroccans— even Tibetans— could put up a
fight for their independence, sometimes with success. But thereafter every development
in military technique has favoured the State as against the individual, and the
industrialised country as against the backward one. There are fewer and fewer foci of
power. Already, in 1939, there were only five states capable of waging war on the grand
scale, and now there are only three— ultimately, perhaps, only two. This trend has been
obvious for years, and was pointed out by a few observers even before 1914. The one
thing that might reverse it is the discovery of a weapon— or, to put it more broadly, of a
method of fighting— not dependent on huge concentrations of industrial plant.
From various symptoms one can infer that the Russians do not yet possess the secret of
making the atomic bomb; on the other hand, the consensus of opinion seems to be that
they will possess it within a few years. So we have before us the prospect of two or three
monstrous super-states, each possessed of a weapon by which millions of people can be
wiped out in a few seconds, dividing the world between them. It has been rather hastily
assumed that this means bigger and bloodier wars, and perhaps an actual end to the
machine civilisation. But suppose— and really this the likeliest development— that the
surviving great nations make a tacit agreement never to use the atomic bomb against one
another? Suppose they only use it, or the threat of it, against people who are unable to
retaliate? In that case we are back where we were before, the only difference being that
power is concentrated in still fewer hands and that the outlook for subject peoples and
oppressed classes is still more hopeless.
When James Burnham wrote The Managerial Revolution it seemed probable to many
Americans that the Germans would win the European end of the war, and it was therefore
natural to assume that Germany and not Russia would dominate the Eurasian land mass,
while Japan would remain master of East Asia. This was a miscalculation, but it does not
affect the main argument. For Burnham's geographical picture of the new world has
turned out to be correct. More and more obviously the surface of the earth is being
parceled off into three great empires, each self-contained and cut off from contact with
the outer world, and each ruled, under one disguise or another, by a self-elected oligarchy.
The haggling as to where the frontiers are to be drawn is still going on, and will continue
for some years, and the third of the three super-states— East Asia, dominated by China— is
still potential rather than actual. But the general drift is unmistakable, and every scientific
discovery of recent years has accelerated it.
We were once told that the aeroplane had "abolished frontiers"; actually it is only since
the aeroplane became a serious weapon that frontiers have become definitely impassable.
The radio was once expected to promote international understanding and co-operation; it
has turned out to be a means of insulating one nation from another. The atomic bomb may
complete the process by robbing the exploited classes and peoples of all power to revolt,
and at the same time putting the possessors of the bomb on a basis of military equality.
Unable to conquer one another, they are likely to continue ruling the world between
them, and it is difficult to see how the balance can be upset except by slow and
unpredictable demographic changes.
For forty or fifty years past, Mr. H. G. Wells and others have been warning us that man is
in danger of destroying himself with his own weapons, leaving the ants or some other
gregarious species to take over. Anyone who has seen the ruined cities of Germany will
find this notion at least thinkable. Nevertheless, looking at the world as a whole, the drift
for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery.
We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the
slave empires of antiquity. James Burnham's theory has been much discussed, but few
people have yet considered its ideological implications— that is, the kind of world-view,
the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a state which
was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of "cold war" with its neighbors.
Had the atomic bomb turned out to be something as cheap and easily manufactured as a
bicycle or an alarm clock, it might well have plunged us back into barbarism, but it
might, on the other hand, have meant the end of national sovereignty and of the highly-
centralised police state. If, as seems to be the case, it is a rare and costly object as difficult
to produce as a battleship, it is likelier to put an end to large-scale wars at the cost of
prolonging indefinitely a "peace that is no peace. "
Review of Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
I t is a sign of the speed at which events are
moving that Hurst and Blackett’s unexpur-
gated edition of Mein Kampf , published only a year
ago, is edited from a pro-Hitler angle. The obvious
intention of the translator’s preface and notes is to tone
down the book’s ferocity and present Hitler in as
kindly a light as possible. For at that date Hitler was
still respectable. He had crushed the German labour
movement, and for that the property-owning classes
were willing to forgive him almost anything. Both Left
and Right concurred in the very shallow notion that
National Socialism was merely a version of Conser-
vatism.
Then suddenly it turned out that Hitler was not
respectable after all. As one result of this, Hurst and
Blackett’s edition was reissued in a new jacket explain-
ing that all profits would be devoted to the Red Cross.
Nevertheless, simply on the internal evidence of Mein
Kampf, it is difficult to believe that any real change
has taken place in Hitler’s aims and opinions. When
one compares his utterances of a year or so ago with
those made fifteen years earlier, a thing that strikes
one is the rigidity of his mind, the way in which his
world-view doesn’t develop. It is the fixed vision of a
monomaniac and not likely to be much affected by the
temporary manoeuvres of power politics. Probably, in
Hitler’s own mind, the Russo-German Pact represents
no more than an alteration of time-table. The plan laid
down in Mein Kampf was to smash Russia first, with
the implied intention of smashing England afterwards.
Now,' as it has turned out, England has got to be dealt
with first, because Russia was the more easily bribed
of the two. But Russia’s turn will come when England
is out of the picture — that, no doubt, is how Hitler sees
it. Whether it will turn out that way is of course a
different question.
Suppose that Hitler’s programme could be put into
effect. What he envisages, a hundred years hence, is a
continuous state of 250 million Germans with plenty of
“living room” (i. e. stretching to Afghanistan or there-
abouts), a horrible brainless empire in which, essen-
tially, nothing ever happens except the training of
young men for war and the endless breeding of fresh
cannon-fodder. How was it that he was able to put this
monstrous vision across? It is easy to say that at one
stage of his career he was financed by the heavy indus-
trialists, who saw in him the man who would smash
the Socialists and Communists. They would not have
backed him, however, if he had not talked a great
movement into existence already. Again, the situation
in Germany, with its seven million unemployed, was
obviously favourable for demagogues. But Hitler could
not have succeeded against his many rivals if it had not
From The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of
George Orwell, Volume 2, edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian
Angus, copyright © 1968 by Sonia Brownell Orwell. Re-
printed by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.
been for the attraction of his own personality, which
one can feel even in the clumsy writing of Mein
Kampf, and which is no doubt overwhelming when one
hears his speeches. . . . The fact is that there is some-
thing deeply appealing about him. One feels it again
when one sees his photographs — and I recommend
especially the photograph at the beginning of Hurst
and Blackett’s edition, which shows Hitler in his early
Brownshirt days. It is a pathetic, dog-like face, the
face of a man suffering under intolerable wrongs. In a
rather more manly way it reproduces the expression of
innumerable pictures of Christ crucified, and there is
little doubt that that is how Hitler sees himself. The
initial, personal cause of his grievance against the
universe can only be guessed at; but at any rate the
grievance is here. He is the martyr, the victim, Pro-
metheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero
who fights single-handed against impossible odds. If
he were killing a mouse he would know how to make it
seem like a dragon. One feels, as with Napoleon, that
he is fighting against destiny, that he can’t win, and
yet that he somehow deserves to. The attraction of
such a pose is of course enormous; half the films that
one sees turn upon some such theme.
Also he has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic
attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the
last war, certainly all “progressive” thought, has as-
sumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond
ease, security and avoidance of pain. In such a view of
life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and
the military virtues. The Socialist who finds his chil-
dren playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is
never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers;
tin pacifists somehow won’t do. Hitler, because in his
own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength,
knows that human beings don't only want comfort,
safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control
and, in general, common sense; they also, at least
intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to
mention drums, flags and loyalty -parades. However
they may be as economic theories, Fascism and
Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any
hedonistic conception of life. The same is probably
true of Stalin’s militarised version of Socialism. All
three of the great dictators have enhanced their power
by imposing intolerable burdens on their peoples.
Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more
grudging way, have said to people “I offer you a good
time,” Hitler has said to them “I offer you struggle,
danger and death,” and as a result a whole nation
flings itself at his feet. Perhaps later on they will get
sick of it and change their minds, as at the end of the
last war. After a few years of slaughter and starvation
“Greatest happiness of the greatest number” is a good
slogan, but at this moment “Better an end with honor
than a horror without end” is a winner. Now that we
are fighting against the man who coined it, we ought
not to underrate its emotional appeal.
towards the public-school moral code — a mild facetiousness covering an unthinking
acceptance. The Earl of Emsworth is funny because an earl ought to have more dignity,
and Bertie Wooster’s helpless dependence on Jeeves is funny partly because the servant
ought not to be superior to the master. An American reader can mistake these two, and
others like them, for hostile caricatures, because he is inclined to be Anglophobe already
and they correspond to his preconceived ideas about a decadent aristocracy. Bertie
Wooster, with his spats and his cane, is the traditional stage Englishman. But, as any
English reader would see, Wodehouse intends him as a sympathetic figure, and
Wodehouse’s real sin has been to present the English upper classes as much nicer people
than they are. All through his books certain problems are constantly avoided. Almost
without exception his moneyed young men are unassuming, good mixers, not avaricious:
their tone is set for them by Psmith, who retains his own upper-class exterior but bridges
the social gap by addressing everyone as “Comrade”.
But there is another important point about Bertie Wooster: his out-of-dateness. Conceived
in 1917 or thereabouts, Bertie really belongs to an epoch earlier than that. He is the
“knut” of the pre-1914 period, celebrated in such songs as “Gilbert the Filbert” or
“Reckless Reggie of the Regent’s Palace”. The kind of life that Wodehouse writes about
by preference, the life of the “clubman” or “man about town”, the elegant young man
who lounges all the morning in Piccadilly with a cane under his arm and a carnation in
his buttonhole, barely survived into the nineteen- twenties. It is significant that
Wodehouse could publish in 1936 a book entitled YOUNG MEN IN SPATS. For who
was wearing spats at that date? They had gone out of fashion quite ten years earlier. But
the traditional “knut”, the “Piccadilly Johnny”, OUGHT to wear spats, just as the
pantomime Chinese ought to wear a pigtail. A humorous writer is not obliged to keep up
to date, and having struck one or two good veins, Wodehouse continued to exploit them
with a regularity that was no doubt all the easier because he did not set foot in England
during the sixteen years that preceded his intermnent. His picture of English society had
been formed before 1914, and it was a naive, traditional and, at bottom, admiring picture.
Nor did he ever become genuinely americanised. As I have pointed out, spontaneous
Americanisms do occur in the books of the middle period, but Wodehouse remained
English enough to find American slang an amusing and slightly shocking novelty. He
loves to thrust a slang phrase or a crude fact in among Wardour Street English (“With a
hollow groan Ukridge borrowed five shillings from me and went out into the night”), and
expressions like “a piece of cheese” or “bust him on the noggin” lend themselves to this
purpose. But the trick had been developed before he made any American contacts, and
his use of garbled quotations is a common device of English writers running back to
Fielding. As Mr John Hayward has pointed out, * Wodehouse owes a good deal to his
knowledge of English literature and especially of Shakespeare. His books are aimed, not,
obviously, at a highbrow audience, but at an audience educated along traditional lines.
When, for instance, he describes somebody as heaving “the kind of sigh that Prometheus
might have heaved when the vulture dropped in for its lunch”, he is assuming that his
readers will know something of Greek mythology. In his early days the writers he
admired were probably Barry Pain, Jerome K. Jerome, W. W. Jacobs, Kipling and F.
Anstey, and he has remained closer to them than to the quickmoving American comic
writers such as Ring Lardner or Damon Runyon. In his radio interview with Flannery,
Wodehouse wondered whether “the kind of people and the kind of England I write about
will live after the war”, not realising that they were ghosts already. “He was still living in
the period about which he wrote,” says Flannery, meaning, probably, the nineteen-
twenties. But the period was really the Edwardian age, and Bertie Wooster, if he ever
existed, was killed round about 1915.
* “P. G. Wodehouse” by John Hayward. (The Saturday Book, 1942. ) I believe this is the
only full-length critical essay on Wodehouse. (Author’s footnote. )
If my analysis of Wodehouse’s mentality is accepted, the idea that in 1941 he consciously
aided the Nazi propaganda machine becomes untenable and even ridiculous. He MAY
have been induced to broadcast by the promise of an earlier release (he was due for
release a few months later, on reaching his sixtieth birthday), but he cannot have realised
that what he did would be damaging to British interests. As I have tried to show, his
moral outlook has remained that of a public-school boy, and according to the public-
school code, treachery in time of war is the most unforgivable of all the sins. But how
could he fail to grasp that what he did would be a big propaganda score for the Germans
and would bring down a torrent of disapproval on his own head? To answer this one must
take two things into consideration. First, Wodehouse’s complete lack — so far as one can
judge from his printed works — of political awareness. It is nonsense to talk of “Fascist
tendencies” in his books. There are no post-1918 tendencies at all. Throughout his work
there is a certain uneasy awareness of the problem of class distinctions, and scattered
through it at various dates there are ignorant though not unfriendly references to
Socialism. In THE HEART OF A GOOF (1926) there is a rather silly story about a
Russian novelist, which seems to have been inspired by the factional struggle then raging
in the U. S. S. R. But the references in it to the Soviet system are entirely frivolous and,
considering the date, not markedly hostile. That is about the extent of Wodehouse’s
political consciousness, so far as it is discoverable from his writings. Nowhere, so far as I
know, does he so much as use the word “Fascism” or “Nazism. ” In left-wing circles,
indeed in “enlightened” circles of any kind, to broadcast on the Nazi radio, to have any
truck with the Nazis whatever, would have seemed just as shocking an action before the
war as during it. But that is a habit of mind that had been developed during nearly a
decade of ideological struggle against Fascism. The bulk of the British people, one ought
to remember, remained anjsthetic to that struggle until late into 1940. Abyssinia, Spain,
China, Austria, Czechoslovakia — the long series of crimes and aggressions had simply
slid past their consciousness or were dimly noted as quarrels occurring among foreigners
and “not our business. ” One can gauge the general ignorance from the fact that the
ordinary Englishman thought of “Fascism” as an exclusively Italian thing and was
bewildered when the same word was applied to Germany. And there is nothing in
Wodehouse’s writings to suggest that he was better infonned, or more interested in
politics, than the general run of his readers.
The other thing one must remember is that Wodehouse happened to be taken prisoner at
just the moment when the war reached its desperate phase. We forget these things now,
but until that time feelings about the war had been noticeably tepid. There was hardly any
fighting, the Chamberlain Government was unpopular, eminent publicists were hinting
that we should make a compromise peace as quickly as possible, trade union and Labour
Party branches all over the country were passing anti-war resolutions. Afterwards, of
course, things changed. The Army was with difficulty extricated from Dunkirk, France
collapsed, Britain was alone, the bombs rained on London, Goebbels announced that
Britain was to be “reduced to degradation and poverty”. By the middle of 1941 the
British people knew what they were up against and feelings against the enemy were far
fiercer than before. But Wodehouse had spent the intervening year in internment, and his
captors seem to have treated him reasonably well. He had missed the turning-point of the
war, and in 1941 he was still reacting in terms of 1939. He was not alone in this. On
several occasions about this time the Germans brought captured British soldiers to the
microphone, and some of them made remarks at least as tactless as Wodehouse’s. They
attracted no attention, however. And even an outright Quisling like John Amery was
afterwards to arouse much less indignation than Wodehouse had done.
But why? Why should a few rather silly but harmless remarks by an elderly novelist have
provoked such an outcry? One has to look for the probable answer amid the dirty
requirements of propaganda warfare.
There is one point about the Wodehouse broadcasts that is almost certainly significant —
the date. Wodehouse was released two or three days before the invasion of the U. S. S. R. ,
and at a time when the higher ranks of the Nazi party must have known that the invasion
was imminent. It was vitally necessary to keep America out of the war as long as
possible, and in fact, about this time, the Gennan attitude towards the U. S. A. did become
more conciliatory than it had been before. The Germans could hardly hope to defeat
Russia, Britain and the U. S. A. in combination, but if they could polish off Russia quickly
— and presumably they expected to do so — the Americans might never intervene. The
release of Wodehouse was only a minor move, but it was not a bad sop to throw to the
American isolationists. He was well known in the United States, and he was — or so the
Gennans calculated — popular with the Anglophobe public as a caricaturist who made
fun of the silly-ass Englishman with his spats and his monocle. At the microphone he
could be trusted to damage British prestige in one way or another, while his release
would demonstrate that the Germans were good fellows and knew how to treat their
enemies chivalrously. That presumably was the calculation, though the fact that
Wodehouse was only broadcasting for about a week suggests that he did not come up to
expectations.
But on the British side similar though opposite calculations were at work. For the two
years following Dunkirk, British morale depended largely upon the feeling that this was
not only a war for democracy but a war which the common people had to win by their
own efforts. The upper classes were discredited by their appeasement policy and by the
disasters of 1940, and a social levelling process appeared to be taking place. Patriotism
and left-wing sentiments were associated in the popular mind, and numerous able
journalists were at work to tie the association tighter. Priestley’s 1940 broadcasts, and
“Cassandra’s” articles in the DAILY MIRROR, were good examples of the demagogic
propaganda flourishing at that time. In this atmosphere, Wodehouse made an ideal
whipping-boy. For it was generally felt that the rich were treacherous, and Wodehouse —
as “Cassandra” vigorously pointed out in his broadcast — was a rich man. But he was the
kind of rich man who could be attacked with impunity and without risking any damage to
the structure of society. To denounce Wodehouse was not like denouncing, say,
Beaverbrook. A mere novelist, however large his earnings may happen to be, is not OF
the possessing class. Even if his income touches £50,000 a year he has only the outward
semblance of a millionaire. He is a lucky outsider who
SHOOTING AN ELEPHANT
BY: GEORGE ORWELL
CATEGORY: LITERATURE - SHORT STORIES
SHOOTING AN ELEPHANT
BY
GEORGE ORWELL
IN MOULMEIN, IN LOWER BURMA, I was hated by large numbers of people--the only
time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me. I was
sub-divisional police officer of the town, and in an aimless, petty kind of way anti-
European feeling was very bitter. No one had the guts to raise a riot, but if a
European woman went through the bazaars alone somebody would probably spit
betel juice over her dress. As a police officer I was an obvious target and was baited
whenever it seemed safe to do so. When a nimble Burman tripped me up on the
football field and the referee (another Burman) looked the other way, the crowd
yelled with hideous laughter. This happened more than once. In the end the sneering
yellow faces of young men that met me everywhere, the insults hooted after me
when I was at a safe distance, got badly on my nerves. The young Buddhist priests
were the worst of all. There were several thousands of them in the town and none of
them seemed to have anything to do except stand on street corners and jeer at
Europeans.
All this was perplexing and upsetting. For at that time I had already made up my
mind that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I chucked up my job and got
out of it the better. Theoretically--and secretly, of course--I was all for the Burmese
and all against their oppressors, the British. As for the job I was doing, I hated it
more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear. In a job like that you see the dirty work
of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of
the lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks
of the men who had been Bogged with bamboos--all these oppressed me with an
intolerable sense of guilt. But I could get nothing into perspective. I was young and
ill-educated and I had had to think out my problems in the utter silence that is
imposed on every Englishman in the East. I did not even know that the British
Empire is dying, still less did I know that it is a great deal better than the younger
empires that are going to supplant it. All I knew was that I was stuck between my
hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who
tried to make my job impossible. With one part of my mind I thought of the British
Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in saecula saecutorum,
upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy
in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest's guts. Feelings like
these are the normal by-products of imperialism; ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you
can catch him off duty.
One day something happened which in a roundabout way was enlightening. It was a
tiny incident in itself, but it gave me a better glimpse than I had had before of the
real nature of imperialism--the real motives for which despotic governments act.
Early one morning the sub-inspector at a police station the other end of the town
rang me up on the phone and said that an elephant was ravaging the bazaar. Would
I please come and do something about it? I did not know what I could do, but I
wanted to see what was happening and I got on to a pony and started out. I took my
rifle, an old . 44 Winchester and much too small to kill an elephant, but I thought the
noise might be useful in terrorem. Various Burmans stopped me on the way and told
me about the elephant's doings. It was not, of course, a wild elephant, but a tame
one which had gone "must. " It had been chained up, as tame elephants always are
when their attack of "must" is due, but on the previous night it had broken its chain
and escaped. Its mahout, the only person who could manage it when it was in that
state, had set out in pursuit, but had taken the wrong direction and was now twelve
hours' journey away, and in the morning the elephant had suddenly reappeared in
the town. The Burmese population had no weapons and were quite helpless against
it. It had already destroyed somebody's bamboo hut, killed a cow and raided some
fruit-stalls and devoured the stock; also it had met the municipal rubbish van and,
when the driver jumped out and took to his heels, had turned the van over and
inflicted violences upon it.
The Burmese sub-inspector and some Indian constables were waiting for me in the
quarter where the elephant had been seen. It was a very poor quarter, a labyrinth of
squalid bamboo huts, thatched with palmleaf, winding all over a steep hillside. I
remember that it was a cloudy, stuffy morning at the beginning of the rains. We
began questioning the people as to where the elephant had gone and, as usual,
failed to get any definite information. That is invariably the case in the East; a story
always sounds clear enough at a distance, but the nearer you get to the scene of
events the vaguer it becomes. Some of the people said that the elephant had gone in
one direction, some said that he had gone in another, some professed not even to
have heard of any elephant. I had almost made up my mind that the whole story
was a pack of lies, when we heard yells a little distance away. There was a loud,
scandalized cry of "Go away, child! Go away this instant! " and an old woman with a
switch in her hand came round the corner of a hut, violently shooing away a crowd of
naked children. Some more women followed, clicking their tongues and exclaiming;
evidently there was something that the children ought not to have seen. I rounded
the hut and saw a man's dead body sprawling in the mud. He was an Indian, a black
Dravidian coolie, almost naked, and he could not have been dead many minutes. The
people said that the elephant had come suddenly upon him round the corner of the
hut, caught him with its trunk, put its foot on his back and ground him into the
earth. This was the rainy season and the ground was soft, and his face had scored a
trench a foot deep and a couple of yards long. He was lying on his belly with arms
crucified and head sharply twisted to one side. His face was coated with mud, the
eyes wide open, the teeth bared and grinning with an expression of unendurable
agony. (Never tell me, by the way, that the dead look peaceful. Most of the corpses I
have seen looked devilish. ) The friction of the great beast's foot had stripped the
skin from his back as neatly as one skins a rabbit. As soon as I saw the dead man I
sent an orderly to a friend's house nearby to borrow an elephant rifle. I had already
sent back the pony, not wanting it to go mad with fright and throw me if it smelt the
elephant.
The orderly came back in a few minutes with a rifle and five cartridges, and
meanwhile some Burmans had arrived and told us that the elephant was in the
paddy fields below, only a few hundred yards away. As I started forward practically
the whole population of the quarter flocked out of the houses and followed me. They
had seen the rifle and were all shouting excitedly that I was going to shoot the
elephant. They had not shown much interest in the elephant when he was merely
ravaging their homes, but it was different now that he was going to be shot. It was a
bit of fun to them, as it would be to an English crowd; besides they wanted the
meat. It made me vaguely uneasy. I had no intention of shooting the elephant--I
had merely sent for the rifle to defend myself if necessary--and it is always
unnerving to have a crowd following you. I marched down the hill, looking and
feeling a fool, with the rifle over my shoulder and an ever-growing army of people
jostling at my heels. At the bottom, when you got away from the huts, there was a
metalled road and beyond that a miry waste of paddy fields a thousand yards across,
not yet ploughed but soggy from the first rains and dotted with coarse grass. The
elephant was standing eight yards from the road, his left side towards us. He took
not the slightest notice of the crowd's approach. He was tearing up bunches of grass,
beating them against his knees to clean them and stuffing them into his mouth.
I had halted on the road. As soon as I saw the elephant I knew with perfect certainty
that I ought not to shoot him. It is a serious matter to shoot a working elephant--it is
comparable to destroying a huge and costly piece of machinery--and obviously one
ought not to do it if it can possibly be avoided. And at that distance, peacefully
eating, the elephant looked no more dangerous than a cow. I thought then and I
think now that his attack of "must" was already passing off; in which case he would
merely wander harmlessly about until the mahout came back and caught him.
Moreover, I did not in the least want to shoot him. I decided that I would watch him
for a little while to make sure that he did not turn savage again, and then go home.
But at that moment I glanced round at the crowd that had followed me. It was an
immense crowd, two thousand at the least and growing every minute. It blocked the
road for a long distance on either side. I looked at the sea of yellow faces above the
garish clothes-faces all happy and excited over this bit of fun, all certain that the
elephant was going to be shot. They were watching me as they would watch a
conjurer about to perform a trick. They did not like me, but with the magical rifle in
my hands I was momentarily worth watching. And suddenly I realized that I should
have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to
do it; I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly. And it
was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped
the hollowness, the futility of the white man's dominion in the East. Here was I, the
white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd--seemingly
the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to
and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that
when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes
a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the
condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the "natives," and
so in every crisis he has got to do what the "natives" expect of him. He wears a
mask, and his face grows to fit it. I had got to shoot the elephant. I had committed
myself to doing it when I sent for the rifle. A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has
got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things. To come all that
way, rifle in hand, with two thousand people marching at my heels, and then to trail
feebly away, having done nothing--no, that was impossible. The crowd would laugh
at me. And my whole life, every white man's life in the East, was one long struggle
not to be laughed at.
But I did not want to shoot the elephant.
I watched him beating his bunch of grass
against his knees, with that preoccupied grandmotherly air that elephants have. It
seemed to me that it would be murder to shoot him. At that age I was not
squeamish about killing animals, but I had never shot an elephant and never wanted
to. (Somehow it always seems worse to kill a large animal. ) Besides, there was the
beast's owner to be considered. Alive, the elephant was worth at least a hundred
pounds; dead, he would only be worth the value of his tusks, five pounds, possibly.
But I had got to act quickly. I turned to some experienced-looking Burmans who had
been there when we arrived, and asked them how the elephant had been behaving.
They all said the same thing: he took no notice of you if you left him alone, but he
might charge if you went too close to him.
It was perfectly clear to me what I ought to do. I ought to walk up to within, say,
twenty-five yards of the elephant and test his behavior. If he charged, I could shoot;
if he took no notice of me, it would be safe to leave him until the mahout came back.
But also I knew that I was going to do no such thing. I was a poor shot with a rifle
and the ground was soft mud into which one would sink at every step. If the
elephant charged and I missed him, I should have about as much chance as a toad
under a steam-roller. But even then I was not thinking particularly of my own skin,
only of the watchful yellow faces behind. For at that moment, with the crowd
watching me, I was not afraid in the ordinary sense, as I would have been if I had
been alone. A white man mustn't be frightened in front of "natives"; and so, in
general, he isn't frightened. The sole thought in my mind was that if anything went
wrong those two thousand Burmans would see me pursued, caught, trampled on and
reduced to a grinning corpse like that Indian up the hill. And if that happened it was
quite probable that some of them would laugh. That would never do.
There was only one alternative. I shoved the cartridges into the magazine and lay
down on the road to get a better aim. The crowd grew very still, and a deep, low,
happy sigh, as of people who see the theatre curtain go up at last, breathed from
innumerable throats. They were going to have their bit of fun after all. The rifle was
a beautiful German thing with cross-hair sights. I did not then know that in shooting
an elephant one would shoot to cut an imaginary bar running from ear-hole to ear-
hole. I ought, therefore, as the elephant was sideways on, to have aimed straight at
his ear-hole, actually I aimed several inches in front of this, thinking the brain would
be further forward.
When I pulled the trigger I did not hear the bang or feel the kick--one never does
when a shot goes home--but I heard the devilish roar of glee that went up from the
crowd. In that instant, in too short a time, one would have thought, even for the
bullet to get there, a mysterious, terrible change had come over the elephant. He
neither stirred nor fell, but every line of his body had altered. He looked suddenly
stricken, shrunken, immensely old, as though the frightful impact of the bullet had
paralysed him without knocking him down. At last, after what seemed a long time--it
might have been five seconds, I dare say--he sagged flabbily to his knees. His mouth
slobbered. An enormous senility seemed to have settled upon him. One could have
imagined him thousands of years old. I fired again into the same spot. At the second
shot he did not collapse but climbed with desperate slowness to his feet and stood
weakly upright, with legs sagging and head drooping. I fired a third time. That was
the shot that did for him. You could see the agony of it jolt his whole body and knock
the last remnant of strength from his legs. But in falling he seemed for a moment to
rise, for as his hind legs collapsed beneath him he seemed to tower upward like a
huge rock toppling, his trunk reaching skyward like a tree. He trumpeted, for the
first and only time. And then down he came, his belly towards me, with a crash that
seemed to shake the ground even where I lay.
I got up. The Burmans were already racing past me across the mud. It was obvious
that the elephant would never rise again, but he was not dead. He was breathing
very rhythmically with long rattling gasps, his great mound of a side painfully rising
and falling. His mouth was wide open--I could see far down into caverns of pale pink
throat. I waited a long time for him to die, but his breathing did not weaken. Finally I
fired my two remaining shots into the spot where I thought his heart must be. The
thick blood welled out of him like red velvet, but still he did not die. His body did not
even jerk when the shots hit him, the tortured breathing continued without a pause.
He was dying, very slowly and in great agony, but in some world remote from me
where not even a bullet could damage him further. I felt that I had got to put an end
to that dreadful noise. It seemed dreadful to see the great beast Lying there,
powerless to move and yet powerless to die, and not even to be able to finish him. I
sent back for my small rifle and poured shot after shot into his heart and down his
throat. They seemed to make no impression. The tortured gasps continued as
steadily as the ticking of a clock.
In the end I could not stand it any longer and went away. I heard later that it took
him half an hour to die. Burmans were bringing dahs and baskets even before I left,
and I was told they had stripped his body almost to the bones by the afternoon.
Afterwards, of course, there were endless discussions about the shooting of the
elephant. The owner was furious, but he was only an Indian and could do nothing.
Besides, legally I had done the right thing, for a mad elephant has to be killed, like a
mad dog, if its owner fails to control it. Among the Europeans opinion was divided.
The older men said I was right, the younger men said it was a damn shame to shoot
an elephant for killing a coolie, because an elephant was worth more than any damn
Coringhee coolie. And afterwards I was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it
put me legally in the right and it gave me a sufficient pretext for shooting the
elephant. I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it
solely to avoid looking a fool.
You and the Atomic Bomb
by George Orwell, October 19, 1945
Considering how likely we all are to be blown to pieces by it within the next five years,
the atomic bomb has not roused so much discussion as might have been expected. The
newspapers have published numerous diagrams, not very helpful to the average man, of
protons and neutrons doing their stuff, and there has been much reiteration of the useless
statement that the bomb "ought to be put under international control. " But curiously little
has been said, at any rate in print, about the question that is of most urgent interest to all
of us, namely: "How difficult are these things to manufacture? "
Such information as we— that is, the big public— possess on this subject has come to us in
a rather indirect way, apropos of President Truman's decision not to hand over certain
secrets to the USSR. Some months ago, when the bomb was still only a rumour, there
was a widespread belief that splitting the atom was merely a problem for the physicists,
and that when they had solved it a new and devastating weapon would be within reach of
almost everybody. (At any moment, so the rumour went, some lonely lunatic in a
laboratory might blow civilisation to smithereens, as easily as touching off a firework. )
Had that been true, the whole trend of history would have been abruptly altered. The
distinction between great states and small states would have been wiped out, and the
power of the State over the individual would have been greatly weakened. However, it
appears from President Truman's remarks, and various comments that have been made on
them, that the bomb is fantastically expensive and that its manufacture demands an
enormous industrial effort, such as only three or four countries in the world are capable of
making. This point is of cardinal importance, because it may mean that the discovery of
the atomic bomb, so far from reversing history, will simply intensify the trends which
have been apparent for a dozen years past.
It is a commonplace that the history of civilisation is largely the history of weapons. In
particular, the connection between the discovery of gunpowder and the overthrow of
feudalism by the bourgeoisie has been pointed out over and over again. And though I
have no doubt exceptions can be brought forward, I think the following rule would be
found generally true: that ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to
make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and
simple, the common people have a chance. Thus, for example, tanks, battleships and
bombing planes are inherently tyrannical weapons, while rifles, muskets, long-bows and
hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong
stronger, while a simple weapon— so long as there is no answer to it— gives claws to the
weak.
The great age of democracy and of national self-determination was the age of the musket
and the rifle. After the invention of the flintlock, and before the invention of the
percussion cap, the musket was a fairly efficient weapon, and at the same time so simple
that it could be produced almost anywhere. Its combination of qualities made possible the
success of the American and French revolutions, and made a popular insurrection a more
serious business than it could be in our own day. After the musket came the breech-
loading rifle. This was a comparatively complex thing, but it could still be produced in
scores of countries, and it was cheap, easily smuggled and economical of ammunition.
Even the most backward nation could always get hold of rifles from one source or
another, so that Boers, Bulgars, Abyssinians, Moroccans— even Tibetans— could put up a
fight for their independence, sometimes with success. But thereafter every development
in military technique has favoured the State as against the individual, and the
industrialised country as against the backward one. There are fewer and fewer foci of
power. Already, in 1939, there were only five states capable of waging war on the grand
scale, and now there are only three— ultimately, perhaps, only two. This trend has been
obvious for years, and was pointed out by a few observers even before 1914. The one
thing that might reverse it is the discovery of a weapon— or, to put it more broadly, of a
method of fighting— not dependent on huge concentrations of industrial plant.
From various symptoms one can infer that the Russians do not yet possess the secret of
making the atomic bomb; on the other hand, the consensus of opinion seems to be that
they will possess it within a few years. So we have before us the prospect of two or three
monstrous super-states, each possessed of a weapon by which millions of people can be
wiped out in a few seconds, dividing the world between them. It has been rather hastily
assumed that this means bigger and bloodier wars, and perhaps an actual end to the
machine civilisation. But suppose— and really this the likeliest development— that the
surviving great nations make a tacit agreement never to use the atomic bomb against one
another? Suppose they only use it, or the threat of it, against people who are unable to
retaliate? In that case we are back where we were before, the only difference being that
power is concentrated in still fewer hands and that the outlook for subject peoples and
oppressed classes is still more hopeless.
When James Burnham wrote The Managerial Revolution it seemed probable to many
Americans that the Germans would win the European end of the war, and it was therefore
natural to assume that Germany and not Russia would dominate the Eurasian land mass,
while Japan would remain master of East Asia. This was a miscalculation, but it does not
affect the main argument. For Burnham's geographical picture of the new world has
turned out to be correct. More and more obviously the surface of the earth is being
parceled off into three great empires, each self-contained and cut off from contact with
the outer world, and each ruled, under one disguise or another, by a self-elected oligarchy.
The haggling as to where the frontiers are to be drawn is still going on, and will continue
for some years, and the third of the three super-states— East Asia, dominated by China— is
still potential rather than actual. But the general drift is unmistakable, and every scientific
discovery of recent years has accelerated it.
We were once told that the aeroplane had "abolished frontiers"; actually it is only since
the aeroplane became a serious weapon that frontiers have become definitely impassable.
The radio was once expected to promote international understanding and co-operation; it
has turned out to be a means of insulating one nation from another. The atomic bomb may
complete the process by robbing the exploited classes and peoples of all power to revolt,
and at the same time putting the possessors of the bomb on a basis of military equality.
Unable to conquer one another, they are likely to continue ruling the world between
them, and it is difficult to see how the balance can be upset except by slow and
unpredictable demographic changes.
For forty or fifty years past, Mr. H. G. Wells and others have been warning us that man is
in danger of destroying himself with his own weapons, leaving the ants or some other
gregarious species to take over. Anyone who has seen the ruined cities of Germany will
find this notion at least thinkable. Nevertheless, looking at the world as a whole, the drift
for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery.
We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the
slave empires of antiquity. James Burnham's theory has been much discussed, but few
people have yet considered its ideological implications— that is, the kind of world-view,
the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a state which
was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of "cold war" with its neighbors.
Had the atomic bomb turned out to be something as cheap and easily manufactured as a
bicycle or an alarm clock, it might well have plunged us back into barbarism, but it
might, on the other hand, have meant the end of national sovereignty and of the highly-
centralised police state. If, as seems to be the case, it is a rare and costly object as difficult
to produce as a battleship, it is likelier to put an end to large-scale wars at the cost of
prolonging indefinitely a "peace that is no peace. "
Review of Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
I t is a sign of the speed at which events are
moving that Hurst and Blackett’s unexpur-
gated edition of Mein Kampf , published only a year
ago, is edited from a pro-Hitler angle. The obvious
intention of the translator’s preface and notes is to tone
down the book’s ferocity and present Hitler in as
kindly a light as possible. For at that date Hitler was
still respectable. He had crushed the German labour
movement, and for that the property-owning classes
were willing to forgive him almost anything. Both Left
and Right concurred in the very shallow notion that
National Socialism was merely a version of Conser-
vatism.
Then suddenly it turned out that Hitler was not
respectable after all. As one result of this, Hurst and
Blackett’s edition was reissued in a new jacket explain-
ing that all profits would be devoted to the Red Cross.
Nevertheless, simply on the internal evidence of Mein
Kampf, it is difficult to believe that any real change
has taken place in Hitler’s aims and opinions. When
one compares his utterances of a year or so ago with
those made fifteen years earlier, a thing that strikes
one is the rigidity of his mind, the way in which his
world-view doesn’t develop. It is the fixed vision of a
monomaniac and not likely to be much affected by the
temporary manoeuvres of power politics. Probably, in
Hitler’s own mind, the Russo-German Pact represents
no more than an alteration of time-table. The plan laid
down in Mein Kampf was to smash Russia first, with
the implied intention of smashing England afterwards.
Now,' as it has turned out, England has got to be dealt
with first, because Russia was the more easily bribed
of the two. But Russia’s turn will come when England
is out of the picture — that, no doubt, is how Hitler sees
it. Whether it will turn out that way is of course a
different question.
Suppose that Hitler’s programme could be put into
effect. What he envisages, a hundred years hence, is a
continuous state of 250 million Germans with plenty of
“living room” (i. e. stretching to Afghanistan or there-
abouts), a horrible brainless empire in which, essen-
tially, nothing ever happens except the training of
young men for war and the endless breeding of fresh
cannon-fodder. How was it that he was able to put this
monstrous vision across? It is easy to say that at one
stage of his career he was financed by the heavy indus-
trialists, who saw in him the man who would smash
the Socialists and Communists. They would not have
backed him, however, if he had not talked a great
movement into existence already. Again, the situation
in Germany, with its seven million unemployed, was
obviously favourable for demagogues. But Hitler could
not have succeeded against his many rivals if it had not
From The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of
George Orwell, Volume 2, edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian
Angus, copyright © 1968 by Sonia Brownell Orwell. Re-
printed by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.
been for the attraction of his own personality, which
one can feel even in the clumsy writing of Mein
Kampf, and which is no doubt overwhelming when one
hears his speeches. . . . The fact is that there is some-
thing deeply appealing about him. One feels it again
when one sees his photographs — and I recommend
especially the photograph at the beginning of Hurst
and Blackett’s edition, which shows Hitler in his early
Brownshirt days. It is a pathetic, dog-like face, the
face of a man suffering under intolerable wrongs. In a
rather more manly way it reproduces the expression of
innumerable pictures of Christ crucified, and there is
little doubt that that is how Hitler sees himself. The
initial, personal cause of his grievance against the
universe can only be guessed at; but at any rate the
grievance is here. He is the martyr, the victim, Pro-
metheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero
who fights single-handed against impossible odds. If
he were killing a mouse he would know how to make it
seem like a dragon. One feels, as with Napoleon, that
he is fighting against destiny, that he can’t win, and
yet that he somehow deserves to. The attraction of
such a pose is of course enormous; half the films that
one sees turn upon some such theme.
Also he has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic
attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the
last war, certainly all “progressive” thought, has as-
sumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond
ease, security and avoidance of pain. In such a view of
life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and
the military virtues. The Socialist who finds his chil-
dren playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is
never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers;
tin pacifists somehow won’t do. Hitler, because in his
own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength,
knows that human beings don't only want comfort,
safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control
and, in general, common sense; they also, at least
intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to
mention drums, flags and loyalty -parades. However
they may be as economic theories, Fascism and
Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any
hedonistic conception of life. The same is probably
true of Stalin’s militarised version of Socialism. All
three of the great dictators have enhanced their power
by imposing intolerable burdens on their peoples.
Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more
grudging way, have said to people “I offer you a good
time,” Hitler has said to them “I offer you struggle,
danger and death,” and as a result a whole nation
flings itself at his feet. Perhaps later on they will get
sick of it and change their minds, as at the end of the
last war. After a few years of slaughter and starvation
“Greatest happiness of the greatest number” is a good
slogan, but at this moment “Better an end with honor
than a horror without end” is a winner. Now that we
are fighting against the man who coined it, we ought
not to underrate its emotional appeal.
