The modern form of economic migration is not caused by war but it is threatening to turn into a cause of war, as has happened many times before. An informative example of how a minority-majority conflict can lead to violence can be seen in sixteenth-century France. For thirty years following John Calvin’s break from the Roman Church in 1530, Catholics and Huguenots looked at each other with increasing mistrust. This mistrust occasionally sparked sporadic violence, and over time, the violence gradually escalated. In 1562, with the Huguenots numbering 12.5 percent of the French population, full-scale war finally broke out. The religious issues were intertwined with political differences, and foreign powers, such as England, Spain, the Low Countries, various German princes, and even the Papacy, were drawn into the struggle. By the time Henry IV was finally able to put an end to the eight Wars of Religion in 1598 by issuing the Edict of Nantes, more Frenchmen had been killed than in any other conflict prior to World War I, including the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars.
4. Conclusions
War is far from the only cause of migration. Other reasons, primarily economic, have always played an important role in encouraging people to leave their native lands. As the examples of the Puritans and the Huguenots show, religious motives can also be a factor. Yet even when these other reasons were the cause, war and migration have been closely linked in various and complex ways.
At some times, war and migration were essentially the same, as in the great migration of peoples during the first few centuries after Christ, the Arab expansion after 632 AD, the Magyar invasion of Europe, the Mongol invasions of China, and the movements of many African tribes from one part of the continent to another. At other times, the relationships between the two phenomena were more complicated, such as ethnic cleansings that rendered war unnecessary or took place after war’s end, mass avoidance of conscription, or soldiers bringing home concubines and war brides. All these various forms have often intermingled, all appear regularly in the annals of human history, and all will doubtless continue to do so in the future. The only thing that changes is their relative importance at any given point in time.
As far as the West is concerned, the most significant migration today is the massive influx of Muslims. The reason is that, unlike the people of the secularized West, Muslims take their religion, and the way of life it prescribes, seriously. As a consequence, they are much harder to integrate than other, more malleable immigrants.
For the present, it would be going too far to say that the refugees, as well as those who are responsible for their plight back in their homelands, are actively waging war against the West. They lack the leadership and organization required for the effective, large-scale violence that war entails. However, it must be recognized that more than a few in their midst are not averse to using violence in order to achieve their aims. They have, after all, invaded numerous countries without regard for the will of the people of those countries, and their presence is no less likely to spark resistance than the armed invasions of the past. Since war, as Clausewitz teaches, has a built-in tendency to escalate, the resistance can be expected to graduate into all-out armed conflict over time. Especially, as seems likely, if the influx continues and all the valiant efforts at integration prove futile.
From Berlin to Jerusalem, let those with ears to listen, listen!
Editor’s Introduction to:
THE LAST SHOW
by Matthew Joseph Harrington
It is often said of the Society for Creative Anachronism, it isn’t the way it was, but it’s the way it ought to have been. The same could be said of this story.
THE LAST SHOW
by Matthew Joseph Harrington
The 700-odd prisoners were moved to the new compound at the Sagan POW camp on April 1st, 1943. As was often the case during such a large operation, there was an amount of confusion among the Germans guarding them, and some escapes were attempted. They failed. The X Committee was subsequently established to improve their chances the next time.
“X”, of course, stood for “escape”.
More prisoners kept showing up as flyers were captured. One of the earliest additions was an American named Eric White, who’d joined the RAF at the end of ’39 and was a squadron leader by the time he was finally shot down. He was a short fellow who shaved his head, wore a thick handlebar mustache worthy of a melodrama villain, and kept his body hard as brick. He’d arrived on April 2nd, and spent a couple of days ambling around the camp sightseeing.
Early on the morning of the 5th, he went to the X headquarters hut and asked to speak with the head of the escape committee.
The very existence of the X committee was being kept secret from most of the prisoners. He was hustled inside, where Squadron Leader Bushell— big X— demanded, “Who the devil’s been talking out of turn?” He could be intimidating as Hell when he chose, and he chose.
“I wouldn’t know,” White replied mildly. “I’ve been watching movements. Every time an escape attempt fails, one of six men makes a beeline for this hut.”
“Oh, Hell,” said Junior Clark, who was in charge of security.
“The goons haven’t noticed yet,” said White. “I’ve been watching them too.”
“Ill wind,” Bushell remarked, relieved. “Here about a plan, then, are you?”
“Yes, but it needs a lot of help. And I don’t see how to get everybody out before the end of September.”
Interested, Bushell said, “Just how many men do you mean to get out?”
White gave him a blank look. “I just said. Everybody.”
There was a long moment of silence.
It was never certain just how many men broke it with the words, “Mad as a hatter,” but it was at least three.
Bushell was not among them. He waved for silence, gradually got it, and said, “There’s more than seven hundred men here.”
“I figure by then it’ll be closer to nine hundred,” White said, nodding. “We’ll need some kind of printing press for forged documents. I can carve blanks for casting type. Oh, and here.” He got out and passed over a small camera. “I’m afraid about half the film is used up, I was taking pictures of the route here from Saarbrücken. You’ll need to get more from the guards when you bribe them for developer.”
“You just happened to have brought along a camera?” Clark said.
“No, of course not, it would have been confiscated. I stole it when they photographed me. Oh, and you’ll need these.” He held out a child’s balloon, uninflated, that seemed to have fine gravel tied in the end. “Diamonds. To bribe the guards.”
“How in the world—” said Clark, who stopped and looked at the balloon in his palm with visible misgivings.
“It’s all right, that’s a clean one. I started with twelve, one outside the next. Washed the outer one off and threw it away whenever I got them back. Good thing they don’t feed prisoners much, they took their time getting me here. There’s only three layers left. The texture was starting to be noticeable.”
Bushell broke the ensuing silence with, “Where did you get so many diamonds?”
“Bought ’em in ’27 when the German banks crashed. Had a bad accident the year before, made me start thinking hard about the future. Turned out handy later.”
Clark looked him over suspiciously. “Just how old are you?”
White grinned. “As old as my tongue and a little bit older than my teeth. I beat the physical by shaving my head and using misdirection. I’m good at misdirection. Do you want to hear my plan?”
“I think we do,” said Bushell.
White told them. It took several minutes.
There followed another minute or so of dead silence. Clark finally said, “It’s impossible.”
“I hope the Germans think so,” said White.
“Do you have any idea how much of that damned yellow sand we’d have to hide?” Clark demanded.
“Something close to a thousand tons,” White said, and smiled. “I doubt anyone will be lookin
g at much of it too closely.”
And there was the heart of the matter. Slowly, smiles appeared on faces to match his own.
White had brought with him a remarkable collection of seeds in cellophane bags, along with a couple of books on gardening and nutrition, respectively. He had been permitted to keep these, possibly due to his practice of avidly proselytizing any German who couldn’t get away quickly enough on the subject of vegetarianism. (Hitler being a vegetarian, they could hardly just tell him to shut up.) White spoke German quite badly, at least when there were Germans about. This was ostensibly the reason it was left to Group Captain Massey, who was senior British officer, to make an appointment to see the camp commandant with some odd but fairly reasonable requests.
Colonel Von Lindeiner, who was an old-school Prussian and considered himself a fair man, was deeply suspicious of the idea of letting prisoners collect firewood in the surrounding forest, but had to acknowledge that without it most of the rest of the requests would be pointless. Besides, no RAF prisoner had ever broken his parole once given; and the huge vegetable gardens that were being planned would keep a lot of prisoners very busy indeed.
It completely overshadowed any suspicions he might have had about increasing the size of the theater to allow the whole camp to attend.
The tunnel between the camp theater and hut 119 was being started even as the requests were being approved. The conspicuous yellow sand that underlay the feeble gray topsoil of the compound was packed into the generous space under the sloping floor of the original theater. Boards were taken from hut bunks to provide shoring for the sides and roof of the tunnel.
White said that was temporary. The work of expansion covered the constant movement back and forth between the theater and all the huts nicely. An avid watch was kept on tools and lumber, but White had offered to flense the calluses off the feet of any man who stole so much as a nail. Nobody ever took him up on it.
The goons were less than pleased to learn the purpose of all the buckets. However, human sewage couldn’t be safely used as fertilizer without being sterilized, and that could hardly be done indoors. There wasn’t time or room to compost it, so it had to be brought to a boil to sterilize it, mixed with dirt, and buried in the garden plots. The resulting soil was acidic, which meant that a good deal of chalk was needed to neutralize it. Since that cut the stink, the Germans were more than pleased to supply it.
It was exceedingly fertile, and the amount of weeds that came up with the first vegetable shoots was not to be believed. The gardens took even more tending than the commandant had imagined. Some of the chalk was burned to make whitewash, which was applied to the sides of each hut, to reflect sunlight onto the gardens. Linseed oil was painted over the whitewash to keep it from being rinsed away in the rain. Nets of string were strung over the gardens to trap birds, most of which were killed and cleaned to make pots of soup. Trapped pigeons were kept alive in cages of wire netting to fatten and eat. Low fences were put around the gardens to block rodents, and gaps were left in the fences to keep them from simply gnawing through. The gaps held snares of string and wire, killing rats, mice, and even an occasional rabbit. These were skinned, cleaned, and stewed to feed the pigeons. Once all the cages were full, which was soon, fattened pigeons were roasted and replaced as fast as new ones were caught. After the sunflowers began to blossom, a couple of pigeons a day per hut wasn’t unusual.
It never once occurred to any of the Germans to wonder what happened to the skins and feathers. White was a pilferer of extraordinary talent, and had acquired considerable equipment from various parts of the camp. This included far more wire than anyone had supposed was available. The proteins of the feathers were broken down by electrolysis in brine, then the lye was neutralized with the acid that had been produced, leaving a brackish slush that was rendered into gelatin for a mimeograph. Once there was more gelatin than was needed by the forgers, the acid was used to break down potatoes into slush, which was dried and saved, as was the alkaline gel. White demonstrated that it was possible to live on about a pound of the combined powders a day, which when added to a quart or so of water made a nourishing if salty self-heating soup. However, not even he claimed to like the stuff.
The skins were scraped clean and cured by boiling in distilled vinegar— all the plant matter that wasn’t eaten was more than happy to participate in the production of vinegar on its own, let alone with encouragement— and stitched together into undergarments. The clothing situation being what it was, this was a Godsend even if nothing else came of it.
Meanwhile most of the chalk was being put to a much better use than gardening.
A shaft had been started straight down in every hut. These were shored with bed slats at first, and the yellow sand went under the theater. More sand was rinsed, dried, and put into cans with a little chalk, to about a third full. Men were assigned to shake cans of the mix until it stopped rattling, which meant the sand had ground up the chalk. The mix was roasted inside the stoves every hut had, then cooled and shaken up again. When wetted and pushed into rectangular casting frames it dried to a pretty good cement brick.
The tunnel from 104 out into the forest was twenty-five feet deep at its ceiling, and big enough for two men to work side by side, standing up, at the tunnel face. An arched framework made from bed slats would be pounded in at the start of each shift, and sand dug out around it to insert bricks to make a cement archway. Then the sand within the framework was dug out and moved, and the framework would be driven forward again. It was ridiculously fast.
Men in each hut tunneled sideways from the shafts to connect to adjacent huts. The wooden shaft liners were replaced with bricks, and the wood used to shore the tunnels until bricks could be moved in. Once the tunnels were finished, the wood was used to smoke pigeon meat for carrying later.
Escape attempts were made throughout the whole procedure, giving the Germans something to pay attention to. That was in addition to the extra attention they were paying to the gardens, trying to find yellow sand. None was going in— it all went under the theater. Bushell took White aside after a while and asked him, “Not that I object to the extra food, but what was the purpose of all the gardens if not to put the sand there?”
“Misdirection, for one thing,” said White.
“Misdirected us too, you think there’s an informer?” Bushell wasn’t sure whether to be offended or worried.
“Hardly, but the best actor is one who really believes in the part. Also, the men are putting on some weight and getting more sun. They’re not going to look so much like prisoners once they get out. More misdirection, later on.”
“They’re still not going to be out for long. We won’t be able to provide documents for more than a quarter of them.”
“They may be out longer than you think,” White said.
“Why d’you say that?”
White looked at him over that walrus mustache. “How good an actor are you?”
“Pretty bloody good.”
“Good enough to hide being in a ridiculously good mood for six more weeks?”
Bushell studied him for a long moment, then said, “Maybe not.”
White wasn’t spending all his time walking about and doing his ferocious course of exercise. (He’d offered to hold wrestling matches for entertainment, but nobody ever took him up on it twice.) In addition to being the best scrounger and all-around thief in the prisoner population, he turned out to be an excellent forger, a superlative tailor, and an extraordinary toolmaker. Just for example, he came up with a method of magnetizing compass needles that was far better than anybody could have reasonably hoped: bunch steel needles together, wrap them in a steel strap (hammered out of a bullybeef tin and baked with soot to add carbon to the wrought-iron), heat them red-hot with a torch (he made town gas for it by blowing steam over charcoal heated in a tin, and anybody who had to do welding or soldering blessed him daily), slip a densely-wrapped coil of electrical wire around it, and run current through until the metal
had cooled. You had to be terribly careful undoing the strap, because the needles would fly apart at the first opportunity. They were a sight more powerful than Wehrmacht field-issue.
He also consulted on other escape attempts. More misdirection, yes, but some of them worked. The most wildly successful involved two dozen men escorted out the gate in a delousing party by two other prisoners dressed as guards. Six of them made it all the way to Spain, where they arrived from their separate routes at the British Consulate on the same day.
White was also in charge of the language classes. He spoke German and French himself, both with a hilarious New York accent; his inspiration was to get all the men in each hut to learn the same language, and to speak nothing else while in the hut, a la Berlitz, but with more homework— they were learning to read and write it too. Men who were planning to use a different language for their escape identities were required to swap with someone else learning the hut language. There were a few who were hopeless cases, and they were sent to fill up spare bunks in any hut that didn’t have a full set of students, and partnered with men who were quick studies, to cover for them.
Traffic back and forth to the theater didn’t let up much, since White had also organized rehearsals and set production for half a dozen plays he’d learned off by heart. Von Lindeiner was conspicuously magnanimous about using the office mimeograph to make multiple copies of the scripts White had laboriously done in large print. It came to an awful lot of pages for each one. White produced bleach with the feather-dissolving works and took the lettering off about half the scripts. (Massey had asked for just as many as they needed, and then kept coming back with damaged scripts for replacements, until von Lindeiner printed up far more than necessary, on better paper. From then on the forger team had all the material to work with that they wanted.)
Of course the goons watched the theater traffic, but of course nobody was getting rid of sand above ground anymore.
There Will Be War Volume X Page 15
