I wrote at length last week about the first story in John Buchan’s 1912 collection of short stories, The Moon Endureth, for it was by far the most memorable. The others can be covered in a single article, but some of them too suggested the whimsical depths of Buchan’s imaginiation. ‘The Lemnian’ is about an islander who rather disliked the Athenian colonization of the Eastern Mediterranean and rather hoped the Persian invasion of Greece would succeed; but when he finds himself near Thermopylae when the invasion is happening, and is rescued from a fall on a cliff when trying to make his way to the sea to avoid both armies, he tells the Spartans that the Persians are making their way round. And so he ends up fighting alongside them in the famous battle when the small Spartan force defending the gates was destroyed, though the Persians then, seeing him to be different from the Spartans, claimed him as a hero of their own.
A very different sort of battle is the tale of a normally ineffective colonial administrator who shows remarkable initiative in dealing with a potentially bloody rebellion in an outpost in East Africa which he had been sent to govern. That is seen by the narrator as exemplifying the legend that the Kings of Orion were, when driven from their kingdom, ‘given each his habitation in some moral soul… the point is, he is always greater than ourselves, for he has been a king’.
This sort of spiritual added on value appears in other stories too, a couple of which deal with what would be described as old magic. Notable is ‘The Grove of Ashtaroth’, about a goddess who casts a spell on those who approach her grove, which the narrator believes must be destroyed. He does this, to save a friend caught up in a dream, but the story ends with his feeling ‘I had driven something lovely and admirable from its last refuge on earth’.
Then there is a romp about three Ministers being fed at dinner on a herb introduced by an Indian cook – by his former master who is furious at what he thinks a betrayal by the British – which makes them think the opposite of what they usually do. The two progressives turn into reactionaries, one of whom decides to send Indian labour to South Africa so that the Indian aristocrat swiftly reverses the spell and the two progressives revert to type.
The conservative, who had turned liberal and wanted as Foreign Secretary to confront the Germans, had fortunately fallen ill so war was averted. He only recovered in time to attend the second dinner at which the process was reversed, to the relief of his Prime Minister who told him, when he entered, that ‘Our policy towards Bosnia has always been one of non-interference’. The Foreign Secretary calls that nonsense, but then partakes of the restorative herb and by the end of the evening it seems the Prime Minister ‘had forgotten the purpose of the dinner, being dimly conscious that that purpose was now idle’.
Preposterous stuff, but lent added interest by the date of the story, since we now know that two years later the Bosnian crisis did lead to protracted war. One marvels then at the range of Buchan’s writing, for it moves from such high politics dealt with absurdly, to the rural concerns of Scottish peasants, with a strong dash of the wanderlust which so vividly characterizes Buchan’s books when he is dealing with his beloved Scottish highlands.
A range of pictures here to illustrate this remarkable book, images nothing to do with Buchan of Ashtaroth and Lemnos, an old edition, and then before Buchan himself Sir Edward Grey who was Foreign Secretary at the period to which the story in the book refers.