When William Came by Saki (HH Munro)

I have just finished reading When William Came by Saki (HH Munro).

The novel was written in 1913 and predicts a war between the United Kingdom and Germany which the Germans win.  The prediction of a blitzkrieg subjugation of a great power in only a few weeks was astonishingly accurate, except that it happened to France in 1940 rather than to us in 1914.  The book deals with the aftermath of such an invasion and the choices faced by the population:  exile, resistance, or collaboration.

The book was written by Saki to warn of the military build-up in Germany and the necessity for the United Kingdom to prepare for it ("Beat your sword into a ploughshare if you like, but beat your enemy into smithereens first"). 

Sake is also concerned about the issues of degeneracy in the population ("the natural transition of the unathletic boy into the podgy unhealthy-looking man...") and effeminacy ("One gets tired of everything, said Plarsey with a fat little sigh of resignation, I can't tell you how tired I am of Rubenstein and one day I suppose I shall be tired of Mozart and violette de Parme and rosewood.  I never thought it possible that I could ever tire of jonquils, and now I simply won't have one in the house...")

The United Kingdom is jeered at as a nation of shopkeepers that is no longer a nation.

Foreigners are everywhere, and without a fight seem to have taken over the country.

A few pockets of resistance remain, and there is a vivid description of Torywood, a great country house where the old allegiances are still maintained.

HH Munro died fighting in the First World War, and it is interesting to speculate how he would have developed as a writer had he lived.  He believed in the cause he was fighting and he died for it.  We should respect his beliefs (and those of many thousands of other casualties who thought the same) and not trivialise their experience with rubbish interpretations of history such as Wipers Times and Chickens.