Martian Lecture Series 4

I seem to be straying from "lecture" to "fiction." We'll see how things develop next!

"… as we settled in with cigars, the Brigadier handed over a copy of Punch, folded open to a middle page.

“This came in by the packet express yesterday, along with the papers,” he said, smiling strangely behind his walrus-whiskers. “Freddie and Frankie they’re calling us.”

The centrefold of the magazine was taken up with satirical diagrams, all about Mars and our expedition, including some rather shocking caricatures of myself. (I never knew my ears stood out like that until I read Punch!) Patriotic stuff on the whole, feeble-witted but honest. As I recall, there was….

1. Myself and Middleton as a two-headed giant, carrying a cavalry sword in one hand and an olive branch in the other, standing astride a canal.

2. Britannia in a hot air balloon, dropping packages labeled “Democracy” and “Good Government” and “Progress” on a bunch starving wretches that looked like something of a cross between Marsfolk and Zulus, living in huts shaped like great beehives.


3. Disraeli in wings, carrying a scroll marked “A Message of Peace” to Mars. I don’t know why he got in there, except perhaps that the artist seems to like drawin’ Yid noses. And, in any case, a column of riflemen is a strange sort of peace message.


4. Two ordinary soldiers shivering in cold, labeled as “Freddie” and “Frankie”. This last one raised my ire. Aside from the cheek of being portrayed as a ragamuffin in a busby, any schoolchild could have told them that it hardly snows on Mars.

Middleton cooled me down by showing me what it was about. An editorial the previous week in The Times was calling it a dem shame that the best the Empire could send to Mars was a single battalion, “barely big enough to garrison an African market village.” It called upon Her Majesty’s Government “so lately in power” to build up the planetary fleet and get some proper armies out into the stars.

Middleton harrumphed. “Public opinion is on our side, it seems. Though no one seems clear as to what it is you’re to be doing with this expedition, and why you should need a dozen armies to convince some tinpot potentate to sign a favorable treaty with Her Majesty,” he said.

“Is that what we’re up to?” I asked. “I was wondering, m’self.” I took a puff on the cigar, idly reflecting on history. I should have been playing closer attention to my host, because he was signaling behind me with his eyes.

“Of course, old Cortez had only six hundred men in arms when he slaughtered savages, if it should come to diplomacy by conquest,” I said, and immediately regretted it. Middleton’s face took on an expression of frozen politeness, and a basso profundo voice rang out behind me.

“I hope our friends should find no cause for conquest,” it intoned. I think it a credit to the hardening my nerves have received under fire over the years that I did not leap from my skin, but it took a few good puffs of the cigar to restore my tissues enough that I could turn about with an open smile.

And there in the doorway, filling it, was King Parhoon, monarch of Syrtis Major, eight-feet-high of spindly limbs, barrel chest, and a proud feathered head."

- from the memoirs of Brigadier Franklin Begg, HM Own Martian Rifles (Ret.)

More Mars!

waiwode has written his own 19th century Martian vignette!