The Collected Plays of George Bernard Shaw - 60 Titles in One Edition (Illustrated Edition). GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

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      1. Lieut.-General Burgoyne’s army, however reduced, will never admit that their retreat is cut off while they have arms in their hands.

      PROPOSITION.

      2. The officers and soldiers may keep the baggage belonging to them. The generals of the United States never permit individuals to be pillaged.

      ANSWER.

      2. Noted.

      PROPOSITION.

      3. The troops under his Excellency General Burgoyne will be conducted by the most convenient route to New England, marching by easy marches, and sufficiently provided for by the way.

      ANSWER.

      3. Agreed.

      PROPOSITION.

      4. The officers will be admitted on parole and will be treated with the liberality customary in such cases, so long as they, by proper behaviour, continue to deserve it; but those who are apprehended having broke their parole, as some British officers have done, must expect to be close confined.

      ANSWER.

      4. There being no officer in this army, under, or capable of being under, the description of breaking parole, this article needs no answer.

      PROPOSITION.

      5. All public stores, artillery, arms, ammunition, carriages, horses, etc., etc., must be delivered to commissaries appointed to receive them.

      ANSWER.

      5. All public stores may be delivered, arms excepted.

      PROPOSITION.

      6. These terms being agreed to and signed, the troops under his Excellency’s, General Burgoyne’s command, may be drawn up in their encampments, where they will be ordered to ground their arms, and may thereupon be marched to the riverside on their way to Bennington.

      ANSWER.

      6. This article is inadmissible in any extremity. Sooner than this army will consent to ground their arms in their encampments, they will rush on the enemy determined to take no quarter.

      And, later on, “If General Gates does not mean to recede from the 6th article, the treaty ends at once: the army will to a man proceed to any act of desperation sooner than submit to that article.”

      Here you have the man at his Burgoynest. Need I add that he had his own way; and that when the actual ceremony of surrender came, he would have played poor General Gates off the stage, had not that commander risen to the occasion by handing him back his sword.

      In connection with the reference to Indians with scalping knives, who, with the troops hired from Germany, made up about half Burgoyne’s force, I may mention that Burgoyne offered two of them a reward to guide a Miss McCrea, betrothed to one of the English officers, into the English lines.

      The two braves quarrelled about the reward; and the more sensitive of them, as a protest against the unfairness of the other, tomahawked the young lady. The usual retaliations were proposed under the popular titles of justice and so forth; but as the tribe of the slayer would certainly have followed suit by a massacre of whites on the Canadian frontier, Burgoyne was compelled to forgive the crime, to the intense disgust of indignant Christendom.

      BRUDENELL

      Brudenell is also a real person. At least an artillery chaplain of that name distinguished himself at Saratoga by reading the burial service over Major Fraser under fire, and by a quite readable adventure, chronicled by Burgoyne, with Lady Harriet Ackland. Lady Harriet’s husband achieved the remarkable feat of killing himself, instead of his adversary, in a duel. He overbalanced himself in the heat of his swordsmanship, and fell with his head against a pebble. Lady Harriet then married the warrior chaplain, who, like Anthony Anderson in the play, seems to have mistaken his natural profession.

      The rest of the Devil’s Disciple may have actually occurred, like most stories invented by dramatists; but I cannot produce any documents. Major Swindon’s name is invented; but the man, of course, is real. There are dozens of him extant to this day.

       Captain Brassbound’s Conversion (1900)

       Table of Contents

Table of Contents

       ACT I

       ACT II

       ACT III

       NOTES TO CAPTAIN BRASSBOUND’S CONVERSION

      ACT I

       Table of Contents

      On the heights overlooking the harbor of Mogador, a seaport on the west coast of Morocco, the missionary, in the coolness of the late afternoon, is following the precept of Voltaire by cultivating his garden. He is an elderly Scotchman, spiritually a little weatherbeaten, as having to navigate his creed in strange waters crowded with other craft but still a convinced son of the Free Church and the North African Mission, with a faithful brown eye, and a peaceful soul. Physically a wiry small-knit man, well tanned, clean shaven, with delicate resolute features and a twinkle of mild humor. He wears the sun helmet and pagri, the neutral-tinted spectacles, and the white canvas Spanish sand shoes of the modern Scotch missionary: but instead of a cheap tourist’s suit from Glasgow, a grey flannel shirt with white collar, a green sailor knot tie with a cheap pin in it, he wears a suit of clean white linen, acceptable in color, if not in cut, to the Moorish mind.

      The view from the garden includes much Atlantic Ocean and a long stretch of sandy coast to the south, swept by the north east trade wind, and scantily nourishing a few stunted pepper trees, mangy palms, and tamarisks. The prospect ends, as far as the land is concerned, in little hills that come nearly to the sea: rudiments, these, of the Atlas Mountains. The missionary, having had daily opportunities of looking at this seascape for thirty years or so, pays no heed to it, being absorbed in trimming a huge red geranium bush, to English eyes unnaturally big, which, with a dusty smilax or two, is the sole product of his pet flowerbed. He is sitting to his work on a Moorish stool. In the middle of the garden there СКАЧАТЬ