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The North Atlantic Treaty Organization The Enduring
Alliance 3rd 3rd Edition Julian Lindley-French Digital
Instant Download
Author(s): Julian Lindley-French
ISBN(s): 9781032391991, 1032391995
Edition: 3
File Details: PDF, 1.68 MB
Year: 2023
Language: english
THE NORTH ATLANTIC
TREATY ORGANIZATION

This book is the concise story of NATO. It considers the origins, development,
challenges, structure, and direction of the Alliance against the backdrop of
a changing world and a changing Europe, the changing relationship of the
United States to its Allies, the twin threats posed by both Russia and terrorism,
the emerging challenge of China, and the EU-NATO relationship. Crucially,
the book considers the impact of new and emerging disruptive technologies on
NATO planning, force and resources, as well as NATO’s place in a changing
world. Women, peace, and security are discussed, together with NATO’s role
in combating climate change. Central to the book is a debate over the future
of deterrence and defense and the role of nuclear, conventional, cyber, and
information strategies in a new deterrent posture. The book concludes by
looking out to 2030 and beyond. The worldwide market will include academia,
the student body on all aspects of IS, strategic studies, Cold War history, think-
tanks, international institutions, and interested readers.

Julian Lindley-French is Chairman of The Alphen Group (TAG). In April

2021, Lindley-French published a major new book titled Future War and the
Defence of Europe (Oxford University Press) with U.S. General (Ret.) John R.
Allen and U.S. Lieutenant General (Ret.) Frederick (Ben) Hodges.
Global Institutions
Edited by Thomas G. Weiss, The CUNY Graduate Center, New York, USA
and Rorden Wilkinson, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

About the series

The “Global Institutions Series” provides cutting-edge books about many
aspects of what we know as “global governance.” It emerges from our shared
frustrations with the state of available knowledge – electronic and print-wise –
for research and teaching. The series is designed as a resource for those inter-
ested in exploring issues of international organization and global governance.
And since the frst volumes appeared in 2005, we have taken signifcant strides
toward flling many conceptual gaps.
The books in the series also provide a segue to the foundation volume that
ofers the most comprehensive textbook treatment available dealing with all the
major issues, approaches, institutions, and actors in contemporary global gov-
ernance. The second edition of our edited work International Organization and
Global Governance (2018) contains essays by many of the authors in the series.
Understanding global governance – past, present, and future – is far from a
fnished journey. The books in this series nonetheless represent signifcant steps
toward a better way of conceiving contemporary problems and issues as well as,
hopefully, doing something to improve world order. We value the feedback from
our readers and their role in helping shape the on-going development of the series.

The United Nations Trusteeship

Legacies, Continuities, and Change
Edited by Jan Lüdert, Maria Ketzmerick and Julius Heise

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization

The Enduring Alliance
Julian Lindley-French

A complete list of titles can be viewed online here: www.routledge.com/

Global-Institutions/book-series/GI
THE NORTH
ATLANTIC TREATY
ORGANIZATION
The Enduring Alliance
Third Edition

Julian Lindley-French
Designed cover image: © Shutterstock
Third edition published 2023
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2023 Julian Lindley-French
The right of Julian Lindley-French to be identifed as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identifcation and explanation without
intent to infringe.
First edition published by Routledge 2006
Second edition published by Routledge 2015
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-032-39328-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-39199-1 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-34923-5 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003349235
Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
For Ukraine
CONTENTS

About the Author viii

Foreword x

Introduction 1

1 NATO Fortuna Redux? 8

2 Facing Down the Soviets 27

3 The Second Cold War 50

4 Strategic Vacation 69

5 Reinventing NATO 86

6 NATO 101 98

7 NATO Today 105

8 Future NATO 120

Bibliography and Further Reading 148

Index 158
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Julian Lindley-French is Chairman of The Alphen Group (TAG), Senior Fel-

low at the Institute for Statecraft in London, Director of Europa Analytica, Fel-
low of the Canadian Global Afairs Institute and a member of the U.S.-German
Loisach Group of the George C. Marshall Center and the Munich Security
Conference. He has authored 12 books and many articles and reports. In Janu-
ary 2022 he published the TAG NATO Shadow Strategic Concept co-written
(inter alia) by a former NATO secretary-general, a deputy secretary-general, a
deputy of Supreme Allied Commander Europe, a chairman of NATO Military
Committee, UK CHOD, COMUSAREUR, an assistant secretary-general
of Policy Planning, a deputy assistant secretary-general, an assistant secretary
of Defense and two ambassadors. In 2021, Lindley-French published a major
new book titled Future War and the Defence of Europe (Oxford University Press)
with U.S. General (Ret.) John R. Allen and U.S. Lieutenant General (Ret.)
Frederick (Ben) Hodges. In 2022, Franck Kosmos Press published a German
language edition. In 2021, he also published a report for CEPA in Washington
titled Military Mobility: Moving Mountains for European Defence. In April 2021,
he completed a major report for the European Parliament, titled Honest Broker?
The EU, Strategic Autonomy and Security in the Future Arctic, while in September
he completed another, titled The Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP)
and the Eastern Partnership. Lindley-French was educated at the University of
Oxford, UEA, and at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. He
holds three advanced degrees, has held three professorial chairs (Professor of
Military Art and Science and Eisenhower Professor of Defence Strategy, Neth-
erlands Defence Academy and Special Professor of Strategic Studies, Leiden
University) and senior policy and project positions for the EU, NATO and the
UN. He was Vice-President of the Atlantic Treaty Association in Brussels and
Distinguished Visiting Research Fellow of the National Defense University in
Washington. In 2015, he was made an Honorary Member of the Association of
Anciens of the NATO Defence College in Rome. He served General Sir David
Richards and General Sir Nicholas Houghton on the UK Chief of Defence
 About the Author ix

Staf’s Strategic Advisory Group and was Head of the Commander’s Initia-
tive Group (CIG) for Lieutenant General Sir Richard Shirref, COMARRC.
In November 2017, he co-published the Future Tasks of the Adapted Alliance
(The GLOBSEC NATO Adaptation Reports). The fnal report was presented
to the NATO Secretary-General. In 2022, he was appointed Director of the
high-level The Future War and Deterrence Conference. In 2023, he published
NATO: The Enduring Alliance (3rd Edition) and in 2024, he will publish The
Retreat from Strategy.
FOREWORD

This Third Edition of Julian Lindley-French’s The North Atlantic Treaty Organi-
zation brings his excellent, succinct telling of NATO’s long story right up
to date. NATO is the story of the world’s most powerful political-military
alliance – an alliance of liberal democracies that has stood as a sentinel and
shield against autocracy and intolerance and which defned the West. Lindley-
French introduces the reader to the latest chapter in NATO’s journey from
an American-led protectorate of Europeans ravaged by World War II facing
the massed divisions of the Red Army in 1949 to the alliance of equals forged
in freedom and a commitment to liberty. It is a commitment that shines as
brightly today as it did when the North Atlantic Treaty was signed on an April
day in Washington all those years ago.
Lindley-French does not shy away from the many challenges and tensions
that have sufused the NATO story. The Korean War and German rearmament
pot-marked the 1950s. Sputnik and the missile gap opened the prospect of
America de-coupling from Europe’s defense. The Thirteen Days of the Cuban
Missile Crisis brought the world close to the possible use of nuclear weapons,
just as it may be today as Putin blunders and blusters in Ukraine. Détente in
the late 1960s ofered a spring of hope, even as the Prague Spring was crushed.
And then came the Euromissiles Crisis as an increasingly desperate Soviet
Union failed in its costly attempt to divide North Americans and Europeans.
In 1989, the Berlin Wall, that symbol of division came crashing down as
Europe and the free world entered a new era of hope that was only possible
because of the steadfastness of an Alliance that is as necessary today as it was
then. The mark of NATO’s success was the many former Warsaw Pact adver-
saries that chose to join the Alliance as free states in the years after the Cold
War. That they could choose was because NATO’s defense of freedom had
prevailed.
As North Americans and Europeans again face the threat of autocracy it is a
very diferent Alliance that exists today in an ever-deepening partnership with
that other great success story, the European Union. It is an Alliance that in
 Foreword xi

2022 has re-committed itself to the defense of freedom, both allies and demo-
cratic partners the world over.
As a former secretary-general of NATO I had the great honor of serving
our Alliance during tumultuous years in the wake of 9/11. It is often said that
if NATO did not exist it would have to be invented. Thankfully, the Alliance
does exist and will continue to exist, and the world will be far, far, better for
the fact that it exists. Lindley-French brilliantly explains why.
Professor Emeritus Jaap de Hoop Schefer, NATO Secretary-General
2004–2009
INTRODUCTION

Massacre
It is 17 July 2014. Flight MH17, a Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777-200 ER
passenger aircraft, is cruising at 33,000 feet above Torez in the Donetsk Oblast
of Eastern Ukraine with 283 passengers and 15 crew members on-board. It is
some two hours into a routine fight from Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport to
Kuala Lumpur International Airport. Suddenly the plane vanishes from radar
screens. Shortly thereafter pro-Russian separatists claim to have shot down
a Ukrainian AN-26 military transport aircraft in the same area with a BUK
surface-to-air missile. It is the greatest act of mass aviation murder in European
history. The loss of MH17 also marks the moment when Ukraine’s civil war
turns into a new confrontation between the Russian Federation and the West.
That same day Islamic State fghters capture the Homs gas feld in Syria and
kill some 270 Syrian soldiers, many of them brutally executed. The downing of
MH17 and the advance of Islamic State captures NATO’s twenty-frst-century
dilemma: can NATO close the gap between the emerging challenges and
threats the Allies must face together and the power NATO must generate if it is
to successfully deter aggressors and defend its members? A dilemma made more
pressing by the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. The core
message of this book is that is precisely the challenge NATO has always faced,
and will continue to face. It is what NATO is for. Taken together Russia’s 2022
invasion of Ukraine, as well as the emergence of China as a proto-military and
autocratic superpower, is a powerful reminder that illegitimate military power
poses not just a danger to the democratic world of the twenty-frst century. As
the 2022 NATO Strategic Concept implies, the nature and pace of systemic
change are also forcing NATO to face tough questions about where member-
ship of the Alliance ends and partnership begins.
Since its founding in 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO) has been a big security and defense organization tasked with crafting
coherent deterrence and defense with and for members from very diferent

DOI: 10.4324/9781003349235-1
2 Introduction

strategic backgrounds and cultures.1 Such difering traditions and the diferent
strategic visions they spawn create the political tension with which the Alliance
has always had to contend. It will be made more complex by the accession of
Finland and Sweden to the Alliance. At the core of NATO’s many conten-
tions was and is a profoundly difering view of risk. Throughout the Cold
War Americans sought to maintain the invulnerability of continental North
America, while Europeans saw vulnerability as simply a fact of life; Americans
saw security and defense as intrinsically linked to their ideas of power and lib-
erty, while Europeans saw security and defense as intrinsically linked to where
they lived; Americans saw the Cold War as a global struggle, Europeans as
simply the latest chapter in a seemingly eternal European power struggle; and
while Americans contained Soviet-communism, Europeans coped with Rus-
sians. For much of NATO’s existence Europeans were in retreat from global
leadership, while Americans were assuming it. Today? In the wake of the failed
U.S.-led campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, the crippling of their respective
economies by the COVID-19 pandemic, the deep social and political divi-
sions it has spawned and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, neither Europeans nor
Americans are any longer sure of the foundations upon which the transatlantic
relationship rests: their respective place in the world, the enduring value of
the West as either idea or place or indeed the depth of their strategic relation-
ship with each other. As NATO embarks on a new post-Afghanistan strate-
gic mission with a major war raging in Europe, it faces a world in which an
over-stretched and distracted America can no longer assume leadership, while
a deeply divided Europe questions the very nature and utility of power and
Europe’s place and role in the world.
For all today’s uncertainty NATO’s story still remains one of success. That
the Alliance made the major contribution to winning the Cold War cannot
be questioned. The political solidarity of democracies is an awesome weapon
when credible and cohesive, a fact that should not be lost on those seeking
today to challenge the West.
And yet, if NATO did not exist, someone would indeed need to invent it.
The democracies will always need a big security and defense organization in
which they can come together to deal with a twenty-frst century that seems all
too capable of painting a big and very nasty picture. Equally, NATO has never
been particularly comfortable, nor indeed successful, at dealing with the com-
plexity of wars within states, which begs a fundamental question: where should
the Alliance invest its main efort given the 360 degrees of threat to which
its leaders routinely refer?2 The disastrous 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan
followed the “war of all against all” that ground its way so tragically across
the Balkans during the 1990s. Both conficts challenged the very purpose and
utility of NATO. The Afghanistan campaign and the Wars of the Yugoslav
Succession demonstrated the difculties the Alliance was forced to confront as
 Introduction 3

it moved away from state-on-state peer confrontation à la Cold War, through

the strategic vacation of the 1990s, to far distant strategic stabilization missions
in the foothills of the Hindu Kush. Now, the Alliance must pivot back toward
strategic peer-on-peer state competition with Russia (and China?) and its chill-
ing frisson of Cold War.
Today, NATO must confront a new-old threat, Russia. In 2014 Russia
seized Crimea from Ukraine, and on 24 February 2022 Russian forces entered
the rest of Ukraine, triggering the frst major state-on-state European war since
1945. President Putin has demonstrated through blood that President George
H. W. Bush’s 1990 vision of a Europe whole and free is still a very long way
from being realized, if it ever will be. Moscow has also reminded NATO’s
Europeans that military power is still as much a currency of infuence and
coercion as ever and that the EU, for all its geopolitical ambitions, is a bit like
taking a lawyer to the OK Corral gunfght. This very twenty-frst-century
reality is steadily being reinforced by China’s burgeoning military capability
in East Asia and the threat it poses to the Republic of China (Taiwan). The
August 2022 visit of then House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi led
to major Chinese military exercises in the Taiwan Strait. It also highlighted
a dilemma at the very heart of NATO’s purpose: could the United States at
one and the same time both lead the defense of Europe and protect Taiwan, to
which it is committed?
This book is about NATO’s changing world, its past, present and future
and thus the answer to the question at the heart of this study: why does NATO
endure? What is NATO’s place in a dangerously new/old world which its
Founding Fathers (they were all men) would have understood better than
many of today’s leaders – the world of Great Powers and Superpowers. The
2022 NATO Strategic Concept still dutifully refers to crisis management and
co-operative security in the face of terrorism, state failure, regional confict,
instability, and so on. And yet, Winston Churchill, Dean Acheson (and George
C. Marshall), Ernest Bevin and Robert Schuman could have written much of
the latest Strategic Concept with its renewed emphasis on collective defense
and enhanced resilience, even if the emerging and disruptive technologies of
hybrid, cyber and hyperwar would have seemed to them to be straight out of
the pages of Buck Rogers.3 These men understood power and weakness and
just what was needed to ensure minimum deterrence in the face of an appar-
ently overwhelming threat. Above all, these great statesmen of the past had a
clear and frm understanding of the need to deal with the world as it is, not as
they would prefer it to be.
That goal will not be easy to realize. Given the failure of both the United
States and the Alliance in Afghanistan, the post-pandemic economic crash and
yet another age of austerity the West is now facing, NATO’s future can no longer
be taken for granted. Not for the frst time in its now long history, the Alliance
4 Introduction

faces a profound challenge to both project stabilizing power (even “defense”

requires power projection) and at the same time protect people in such a way that
is both credible and afordable. Given the circumstances, that means big change.
NATO started life as a U.S.-led hub with European spokes. However, if NATO
is to endure it must become a European hub into which American power can
be plugged. There will be no Global NATO, but the Alliance must know its
place in the world. By 2030, at the very latest, future NATO will thus need to
be transformed into a U.S.-enabled pan-European military security organization
built around a European high-end, frst responder force that can deal with all and
any contingency in and around Europe. As is evident from the war in Ukraine,
the crisis in Europe is being exploited by China precisely to stretch U.S. forces
thin the world over. Therefore, helping the United States remain strong where
she needs to be strong will be the quid pro quo of transatlantic burden-sharing
in the second quarter of the twenty-frst century and the minimum European
down-payment on a continued American security guarantee for Europe.

Seven Core Messages

War is back: Nearly 75 years on from NATO’s founding a new unstable global
balance of power is emerging and with it system-defning geopolitical com-
petition between Great Powers. A major war has once again broken out in
Europe and NATO is again required to deter and defend a dangerous, auto-
cratic adversary. China and the Indo-Pacifc are now the enforced focus of
American national security and defense policy.
Strategic terror is mutating: Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri are dead
and his cohorts are but bit-part actors. Islamic State in the Middle East and its
intolerant call for jihad does not mean the threat of Salafsm is expunged in the
wake of its defeat in the Levant. The West and its partners are thus engaged in
a Thirty Years War not of its making and which will efect Western societies as
much as partner states. It is a war that will take sustained engagement across the
diplomatic, informational military and economic (DIME).
China is a European power: The twenty-frst century will be Asia’s age, typi-
fed by the rise of China, but it will also be an age of global democracies and
thus globalized, interconnected insecurity. China is thus a European power
as much as the U.S. is an Indo-Pacifc power. Many European states are now
in debt to Beijing and signifcant parts of Europe’s critical infrastructure are
owned by Chinese state enterprises. The COVID pandemic has also revealed
the control freakery of the Chinese state, which has been extended abroad
by aggressive wolf warrior diplomacy. NATO is unlikely to confront China
directly, but any power that impacts on the U.S. will impact on the Alliance.
Security globalization will endure even if economic globalization does not: The post-
pandemic tensions between China and the West have challenged long-held
 Introduction 5

shibboleths about economic globalization and mutual dependency. China takes

a very realist view of power and order typifed by President Xi’s determina-
tion to make China the world’s pre-eminent power by 2049. The connectivity
that is globalization is now under increasing pressure together with the supply
chains that are its essence. Even as economic globalization retreats and mutates,
security globalization, and the threat of regional crises rapidly becoming global
crises will become more dangerous, not less.
NATO must modernize its cornerstone collective defense instrument: Article 5 of
the 1949 Washington Treaty remains the collective defense cornerstone of the
Alliance. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine confrms the need for just such an instru-
ment. However, to remain credible NATO collective defense is in desperate
need of modernization. Deterrence is only credible if NATO is a credible
warfghter. Created in an age of heavy metal when “defense” meant large num-
bers of aircraft and tanks focused on the North German Plain, today’s collective
defense means signifcant numbers of technologically-advanced mobile forces,
cyber, and missile defenses with all the necessary supporting architectures.
Critically, NATO remains a nuclear alliance precisely because credible nuclear
deterrence remains its ultima ratio regnum.
New technologies will transform NATO’s battlespace: The transformation of the
battlefeld is only just beginning. Over the coming 20 years artifcial intel-
ligence, machine-learning, quantum computing, hypersonic weapon systems,
intelligence drone swarms, Nanotechnologies and a host of other emerging
and disruptive technologies will transform warfare into hyperwar in which
machines will do much of the “deciding” and responding. NATO must be
at the forefront of such developments to both deter adversaries and main-
tain interoperability between the U.S. future force and the European future
force. Equally, a new balance will need to be struck between machine-enabled
humans in warfare and human-enabled machines.
The symbiotic relationship between mass disruption and mass destruction will be
critical to NATO’s future defense: In a world so electronically dependent and yet
so fractious with borders ever more virtual, if they exist at all, mass disruption
could be akin to mass destruction for societies dependent on digital critical
infrastructures. To prevail in what is going to be a big, dangerous century,
NATO will need new partners, new strategy and new tools, but above all, a
new place in the security of the states and peoples that today comprise the West
and its democratic partners the world over.

The Structure of the Book

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization: The Enduring Alliance goes back to
NATO’s origins to paint a big security picture of the Alliance’s vital twenty-
frst-century mission. The book deals with all of NATO’s fundamental factors:
6 Introduction

history, structure, policy, capability, and change. The center of gravity of the
book is the strategic vision and political cohesion of the Alliance that makes
NATO what it is: the enduring alliance. The book places NATO in the con-
text of the change that has taken place over more than 70 years and indeed will
take place in the years to come: the what, the why, the how, the when, and the
what-next of NATO.
Chapter 1 explores the Alliance in the aftermath of the attacks on New
York and Washington on 11 September 2001 as Americans go to war . . .
but Europeans do not. The challenges of going to Afghanistan are considered
together with the politics of confrontation within the Alliance as Old Atlantic
confronts Old Europe in the run-up to the Iraq War. Central to the chapter
is the difcult search for a new strategic consensus as the sheer scale of the
challenges posed by what President George W. Bush dubs the Global War on
Terror become apparent.
Chapter 2 demonstrates that crises, both internal and external, have long
provided the essential political tension within the Alliance that has driven
change. An in-depth analysis is undertaken of the events and people that shaped
NATO from its very inception in the challenging aftermath of World War II
to the dawn of détente. NATO grapples with a series of crises, from the Berlin
airlift to the Korean War and the European Defense Community, from the
Missile Gap to the Cuban Missile Crisis, and from France’s 1966 withdrawal
from military NATO to the beginning of superpower dialog and détente.
Chapter 3, The Second Cold War, explores the widening gap between
Americans and Europeans during the Second Cold War and how the Euromis-
siles Crisis that dangerously de-stabilizes NATO actually refects the very plu-
ralism that has always given this multi-voiced democratic security community
its essential strength. From splits during the 1973 Yom Kippur War to fric-
tion over European integration and on to eventual victory in the Cold War,
NATO somehow prevails as the essential platform for mutual military solidar-
ity, the shield of democracy and a vital mechanism for internal Alliance crisis
management.
Chapter 4, Strategic Vacation, considers NATO’s search for a new role in
the wake of the Cold War and examines the many challenges and contradic-
tions imposed upon the Alliance by victory. Defense forces are cut across the
Alliance, even as Yugoslavia collapses into a violent war of all against all. The
chapter considers NATO’s enlargement and the stuttering relationship with
an emerging European Union as both Brussels-based institutions begin a long
and difcult journey to fnd an accommodation acceptable to all members of
both institutions.
Chapter 5, Reinventing NATO, looks at the many eforts to adapt the Alli-
ance to the challenges and complexities of the 1990s and the search to become
an efective crisis prevention and management agency. The search for a deeper
 Introduction 7

EU-NATO relationship is further explored, particularly the Berlin-plus mech-

anism for Alliance-enabled EU operations. The enlargement of the Alliance in
pursuit of a Europe whole and free takes place in parallel with eforts to forge
a partnership with Russia, which is quickly soured by the 1999 Kosovo War.
Chapter 6, NATO 101, deals with the fundamentals of the Alliance and
provides basic details of NATO’s contemporary membership, structure and
responsibilities. NATO’s political and military decision-making structures are
explained in depth.
Chapter 7, NATO Today, considers the contemporary state of the Alliance
in the wake of the disastrous 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan and in the face
of Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. It considers lessons from the
war in Ukraine for the Alliance and how they relate to NATO Agenda 2030
and NATO Strategic Concept 2022, to which the June 2022 NATO Madrid
Summit agreed.
Chapter 8, Future NATO, ofers a radical NATO Strategic Concept to
compare and contrast with the Alliance’s ofcial version. It questions the stra-
tegic ambition of the NATO Allies, their cohesion, military capabilities and
security capacities before concluding with a challenge: can NATO endure
given the fast-changing character of war and the technologies that will make
both deterrence and defense far faster, far more complex, and far more danger-
ous than perhaps anything with which the Alliance has had to confront thus
far? After all, NATO is history in the making, and history never stops.
This, then, is the story of NATO: The Enduring Alliance.

Notes
1 Sir Lawrence Freedman in his 2013 book Strategy: A History suggests that strategy “is
the central political art. It is about getting more out of a situation than the starting
balance of power would suggest. In other words it is the art of creating power.” This is
a challenge with which NATO has struggled throughout its existence. See Freedman,
Sir Lawrence, Strategy: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) p. xiii.
2 The 2014 NATO Warsaw Summit Communique of 9 July 2016 stated, “Our eforts
to enhance the Alliance's role in projecting stability will be guided by enduring prin-
ciples, including a 360 degree approach, commitment to democracy, human rights
and the rule of law, complementarity with international actors, in particular with the
UN, EU, and the OSCE and focusing on NATO’s added value, local ownership and
buy-in, partner involvement, inclusiveness, tailored cooperation, long-term commit-
ment, prioritization and sustainability, and overall coherence.” https://www.nato.int/
cps/en/natohq/ofcial_texts_133169.htm
3 Buck Roger is an American science fction hero who frst appeared in a U.S. newspa-
per in January 1929.
Other documents randomly have
different content
 ‘Two windows for a tunnel six hundred feet long and sixty-five
feet deep? You must put in the electric light—a few arc lights and
fifteen hundred incandescents. What do you do in case of leaks? How
many pumps have you?’
‘None, sir.’
‘You must provide pumps. How do you get water for the
passengers and the animals?’
‘We let down the buckets from the windows.’
‘It is inadequate. What is your motive power?’
‘What is my which?’
‘Motive power. What power do you use in driving the ship?’
‘None.’
‘You must provide sails or steam. What is the nature of your
steering apparatus?’
‘We haven’t any.’
‘Haven’t you a rudder?’
‘No, sir.’
‘How do you steer the vessel?’
‘We don’t.’
‘You must provide a rudder, and properly equip it. How many
anchors have you?’
‘None.’
‘You must provide six. One is not permitted to sail a vessel like
this without that protection. How many life-boats have you?’
‘None, sir.’
‘Provide twenty-five. How many life-preservers?’
‘None.’
‘You will provide two thousand. How long are you expecting
your voyage to last?’
‘Eleven or twelve months.’
‘Eleven or twelve months. Pretty slow—but you will be in time
for the Exposition. What is your ship sheathed with—copper?’
‘Her hull is bare—not sheathed at all.’
 ‘Dear man, the wood-boring creatures of the sea would riddle
her like a sieve and send her to the bottom in three months. She
cannot be allowed to go away in this condition; she must be
sheathed. Just a word more: Have you reflected that Chicago is an
inland city, and not reachable with a vessel like this?’
‘Shecargo? What is Shecargo? I am not going to Shecargo.’
‘Indeed? Then may I ask what the animals are for?’
‘Just to breed others from.’
‘Others? Is it possible that you haven’t enough?’
‘For the present needs of civilisation, yes; but the rest are going
to be drowned in a flood, and these are to renew the supply.’
‘A flood?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Are you sure of that?’
‘Perfectly sure. It is going to rain forty days and forty nights.’
‘Give yourself no concern about that, dear sir, it often does that
here.’
‘Not this kind of rain. This is going to cover the mountain-tops,
and the earth will pass from sight.’
‘Privately—but of course not officially—I am sorry you revealed
this, for it compels me to withdraw the option I gave you as to sails or
steam. I must require you to use steam. Your ship cannot carry the
hundredth part of an eleven-months’ water-supply for the animals.
You will have to have condensed water.’
‘But I tell you I am going to dip water from outside with
buckets.’
‘It will not answer. Before the flood reaches the mountain-tops
the fresh waters will have joined the salt seas, and it will all be salt.
You must put in steam and condense your water. I will now bid you
good-day, sir. Did I understand you to say that this was your very
first attempt at ship-building?’
‘My very first, sir, I give you the honest truth. I built this Ark
without having ever had the slightest training or experience or
instruction in marine architecture.’
 ‘It is a remarkable work, sir, a most remarkable work. I consider
that it contains more features that are new—absolutely new and
unhackneyed—than are to be found in any other vessel that swims
the seas.’
‘This compliment does me infinite honour, dear sir, infinite; and
I shall cherish the memory of it while life shall last. Sir, I offer my
duty, and most grateful thanks. Adieu.’
No, the German inspector would be limitlessly courteous to
Noah, and would make him feel that he was among friends, but he
wouldn’t let him go to sea with that Ark.
 COLUMBUS’S CRAFT
Between Noah’s time and the time of Columbus naval
architecture underwent some changes, and from being unspeakably
bad was improved to a point which may be described as less
unspeakably bad. I have read somewhere, some time or other, that
one of Columbus’s ships was a ninety-ton vessel. By comparing that
ship with the ocean greyhounds of our time one is able to get down to
a comprehension of how small that Spanish bark was, and how little
fitted she would be to run opposition in the Atlantic passenger trade
to-day. It would take seventy-four of her to match the tonnage of the
‘Havel’ and carry the ‘Havel’s’ trip. If I remember rightly, it took her
ten weeks to make the passage. With our ideas this would now be
considered an objectionable gait. She probably had a captain, a mate,
and a crew consisting of four seamen and a boy. The crew of a
modern greyhound numbers two hundred and fifty persons.
Columbus’s ship being small and very old, we know that we may
draw from these two facts several absolute certainties in the way of
minor details which history has left unrecorded. For instance, being
small, we know that she rolled and pitched and tumbled in any
ordinary sea, and stood on her head or her tail, or lay down with her
ear in the water, when storm-seas ran high; also, that she was used to
having billows plunge aboard and wash her decks from stem to stern;
also, that the storm-racks were on the table all the way over, and
that, nevertheless, a man’s soup was oftener landed in his lap than in
his stomach; also, that the dining-saloon was about ten feet by seven,
dark, airless, and suffocating with oil-stench; also, that there was
only about one state-room—the size of a grave—with a tier of two or
three berths in it, of the dimensions and comfortableness of coffins,
and that when the light was out, the darkness in there was so thick
and real that you could bite into it and chew it like gum; also, that the
only promenade was on the lofty poop-deck astern (for the ship was
shaped like a high-quarter shoe)—a streak sixteen feet long by three
feet wide, all the rest of the vessel being littered with ropes and
flooded by the seas.
 We know all these things to be true, from the mere fact that we
know the vessel was small. As the vessel was old, certain other truths
follow as matters of course. For instance, she was full of rats, she was
full of cockroaches, the heavy seas made her seams open and shut
like your fingers, and she leaked like a basket; where leakage is, there
also, of necessity, is bilgewater; and where bilgewater is, only the
dead can enjoy life. This is on account of the smell. In the presence of
bilgewater, Limburger cheese becomes odourless and ashamed.
From these absolutely sure data we can competently picture the
daily life of the great discoverer. In the early morning he paid his
devotions at the shrine of the Virgin. At eight bells he appeared on
the poop-deck promenade. If the weather was chilly, he came up clad
from plumed helmet to spurred heel in magnificent plate armour
inlaid with arabesques of gold, having previously warmed it at the
galley fire. If the weather was warm, he came up in the ordinary
sailor toggery of the time: great slouch hat of blue velvet, with a
flowing brush of snowy ostrich plumes, fastened on with a flashing
cluster of diamonds and emeralds; gold-embroidered doublet of
green velvet, with slashed sleeves exposing under-sleeves of crimson
satin; deep collar and cuff-ruffles of rich limp lace; trunk hose of
pink velvet, with big knee knots of brocaded yellow ribbon; pearl-
tinted silk stockings, clocked and daintily embroidered; lemon-
coloured buskins of unborn kid, funnel-topped, and drooping low to
expose the pretty stockings; deep gauntlets of finest white heretic
skin, from the factory of the Holy Inquisition, formerly part of the
person of a lady of rank; rapier with sheath crusted with jewels, and
hanging from a broad baldric upholstered with rubies and sapphires.
He walked the promenade thoughtfully; he noted the aspects of
the sky and the course of the wind; he kept an eye out for drifting
vegetation and other signs of land; he jawed the man at the wheel for
pastime; he got out an imitation egg and kept himself in practice on
his old trick of making it stand on its end; now and then he hove a
life-line below and fished up a sailor who was drowning on the
quarter-deck; the rest of his watch he gaped and yawned and
stretched and said he wouldn’t make the trip again to discover six
Americas. For that was the kind of natural human person Columbus
was when not posing for posterity.
 At noon he took the sun and ascertained that the good ship had
made three hundred yards in twenty-four hours, and this enabled
him to win the pool. Anybody can win the pool when nobody but
himself has the privilege of straightening out the ship’s run and
getting it right.
The Admiral has breakfasted alone, in state: bacon, beans, and
gin; at noon he dines alone in state: bacon, beans, and gin; at six he
sups alone in state: bacon, beans, and gin; at 11 P.M. he takes a night
relish, alone, in state: bacon, beans, and gin. At none of these orgies
is there any music; the ship-orchestra is modern. After his final meal
he returned thanks for his many blessings, a little over-rating their
value, perhaps, and then he laid off his silken splendours or his
gilded hardware, and turned in, in his little coffin-bunk, and blew out
his flickering stencher, and began to refresh his lungs with inverted
sighs freighted with the rich odours of rancid oil and bilgewater. The
sighs returned as snores, and then the rats and the cockroaches
swarmed out in brigades and divisions and army corps and had a
circus all over him.
Such was the daily life of the great discoverer in his marine
basket during several historic weeks; and the difference between his
ship and his comforts and ours is visible almost at a glance.
When he returned, the King of Spain, marvelling, said—as
history records:
‘This ship seems to be leaky. Did she leak badly?’
‘You shall judge for yourself, sire. I pumped the Atlantic Ocean
through her sixteen times on the passage.’
This is General Horace Porter’s account. Other authorities say
fifteen.
It can be shown that the differences between that ship and the
one I am writing these historical contributions in, are in several
respects remarkable. Take the matter of decoration, for instance. I
have been looking around again, yesterday and to-day, and have
noted several details which I conceive to have been absent from
Columbus’s ship, or at least slurred over and not elaborated and
perfected. I observe state-room doors three inches thick, of solid oak,
and polished. I note companionway vestibules with walls, doors, and
ceilings panelled in polished hard-woods, some light, some dark, all
dainty and delicate joiner-work, and yet every joint compact and
tight; with beautiful pictures inserted, composed of blue tiles—some
of the pictures containing as many as sixty tiles—and the joinings of
those tiles perfect. These are daring experiments. One would have
said that the first time the ship went straining and labouring through
a storm-tumbled sea those tiles would gape apart and drop out. That
they have not done so is evidence that the joiner’s art has advanced a
good deal since the days when ships were so shackly that when a
giant sea gave them a wrench the doors came unbolted. I find the
walls of the dining-saloon upholstered with mellow pictures wrought
in tapestry, and the ceiling aglow with pictures done in oil. In other
places of assembly I find great panels filled with embossed Spanish
leather, the figures rich with gilding and bronze. Everywhere I find
sumptuous masses of colour—colour, colour, colour—colour all
about, colour of every shade and tint and variety; and as a result, the
ship is bright and cheery to the eye, and this cheeriness invades one’s
spirit and contents it. To fully appreciate the force and spiritual value
of this radiant and opulent dream of colour, one must stand outside
at night in the pitch dark and the rain, and look in through a port,
and observe it in the lavish splendour of the electric lights. The old-
time ships were dull, plain, graceless, gloomy, and horribly
depressing. They compelled the blues; one could not escape the blues
in them. The modern idea is right: to surround the passenger with
conveniences, luxuries, and abundance of inspiriting colour. As a
result, the ship is the pleasantest place one can be in, except,
perhaps, one’s home.
 A VANISHED SENTIMENT
One thing is gone, to return no more for ever—the romance of
the sea. Soft sentimentality about the sea has retired from the
activities of this life, and is but a memory of the past, already remote
and much faded. But within the recollection of men still living, it was
in the breast of every individual; and the further any individual lived
from salt water the more of it he kept in stock. It was as pervasive, as
universal, as the atmosphere itself. The mere mention of the sea, the
romantic sea, would make any company of people sentimental and
mawkish at once. The great majority of the songs that were sung by
the young people of the back settlements had the melancholy
wanderer for subject, and his mouthings about the sea for refrain.
Picnic parties, paddling down a creek in a canoe when the twilight
shadows were gathering, always sang
Homeward bound, homeward bound
From a foreign shore;

and this was also a favourite in the West with the passengers on
sternwheel steamboats. There was another—
My boat is by the shore,
And my bark is on the sea,
But before I go, Tom Moore,
Here’s a double health to thee.

And this one, also—

Oh, pilot, ’tis a fearful night,
There’s danger on the deep.

And this—
A life on the ocean wave,
And a home on the rolling deep,
Where the scattered waters rave,
And the winds their revels keep!
And this—
A wet sheet and a flowing sea,
And a wind that follows fair.

And this—
My foot is on my gallant deck,
Once more the rover is free!

And the ‘Larboard Watch’—the person referred to below is at the

masthead, or somewhere up there—
Oh, who can tell what joy he feels,
As o’er the foam his vessel reels,
And his tired eyelids slumb’ring fall,
He rouses at the welcome call
Of ‘Larboard watch—ahoy!’

Yes, and there was for ever and always some jackass-voiced
person braying out—
Rocked in the cradle of the deep,
I lay me down in peace to sleep!

Other favourites had these suggestive titles: ‘The Storm at Sea;’

‘The Bird at Sea;’ ‘The Sailor Boy’s Dream;’ ‘The Captive Pirate’s
Lament;’ ‘We are far from Home on the Stormy Main’—and so on,
and so on, the list is endless. Everybody on a farm lived chiefly amid
the dangers of the deep in those days, in fancy.
But all that is gone now. Not a vestige of it is left. The iron-clad,
with her unsentimental aspect and frigid attention to business,
banished romance from the war-marine, and the unsentimental
steamer has banished it from the commercial marine. The dangers
and uncertainties which made sea life romantic have disappeared
and carried the poetic element along with them. In our day the
passengers never sing sea-songs on board a ship, and the band never
plays them. Pathetic songs about the wanderer in strange lands far
from home, once so popular and contributing such fire and colour to
the imagination by reason of the rarity of that kind of wanderer, have
lost their charm and fallen silent, because everybody is a wanderer in
the far lands now, and the interest in that detail is dead. Nobody is
worried about the wanderer; there are no perils of the sea for him,
there are no uncertainties. He is safer in the ship than he would
probably be at home, for there he is always liable to have to attend
some friend’s funeral, and stand over the grave in the sleet,
bareheaded—and that means pneumonia for him, if he gets his
deserts; and the uncertainties of his voyage are reduced to whether
he will arrive on the other side in the appointed afternoon, or have to
wait till morning.
The first ship I was ever in was a sailing vessel. She was twenty-
eight days going from San Francisco to the Sandwich Islands. But the
main reason for this particularly slow passage was, that she got
becalmed, and lay in one spot fourteen days in the centre of the
Pacific, two thousand miles from land. I hear no sea-songs in this
present vessel, but I heard the entire layout in that one. There were a
dozen young people—they are pretty old now I reckon—and they
used to group themselves on the stern, in the starlight or the
moonlight, every evening, and sing sea-songs till after midnight, in
that hot, silent, motionless calm. They had no sense of humour, and
they always sang ‘Homeward Bound,’ without reflecting that that was
practically ridiculous, since they were standing still and not
proceeding in any direction at all; and they often followed that song
with ‘Are we almost there, are we almost there, said the dying girl as
she drew near home?’
It was a very pleasant company of young people, and I wonder
where they are now. Gone, oh, none knows whither; and the bloom
and grace and beauty of their youth, where is that? Among them was
a liar; all tried to reform him, but none could do it. And so, gradually,
he was left to himself, none of us would associate with him. Many a
time since I have seen in fancy that forsaken figure, leaning forlorn
against the taffrail, and have reflected that perhaps if we had tried
harder, and been more patient, we might have won him from his
fault and persuaded him to relinquish it. But it is hard to tell; with
him the vice was extreme, and was probably incurable. I like to think
—and, indeed, I do think—that I did the best that in me lay to lead
him to higher and better ways.
There was a singular circumstance. The ship lay becalmed that
entire fortnight in exactly the same spot. Then a handsome breeze
came fanning over the sea, and we spread our white wings for flight.
But the vessel did not budge. The sails bellied out, the gale strained
at the ropes, but the vessel moved not a hair’s breadth from her
place. The captain was surprised. It was some hours before we found
out what the cause of the detention was. It was barnacles. They
collect very fast in that part of the Pacific. They had fastened
themselves to the ship’s bottom; then others had fastened themselves
to the first bunch, others to these, and so on, down and down and
down, and the last bunch had glued the column hard and fast to the
bottom of the sea, which is five miles deep at that point. So the ship
was simply become the handle of a walking-cane five miles long—
yes, and no more movable by wind and sail than a continent is. It was
regarded by every one as remarkable.
Well, the next week—however, Sandy Hook is in sight.
 PLAYING COURIER

A time would come when we must go from Aix-les-Bains to Geneva,

and from thence, by a series of day-long and tangled journeys, to
Bayreuth in Bavaria. I should have to have a courier, of course, to
take care of so considerable a party as mine.
But I procrastinated. The time slipped along, and at last I woke
up one day to the fact that we were ready to move and had no
courier. I then resolved upon what I felt was a foolhardy thing, but I
was in the humour of it. I said I would make the first stage without
help—I did it.
I brought the party from Aix to Geneva by myself—four people.
The distance was two hours and more, and there was one change of
cars. There was not an accident of any kind, except leaving a valise
and some other matters on the platform—a thing which can hardly
be called an accident, it is so common. So I offered to conduct the
party all the way to Bayreuth.
This was a blunder, though it did not seem so at the time. There
was more detail than I thought there would be: 1. Two persons whom
we had left in a Genevan pension some weeks before must be
collected and brought to the hotel. 2. I must notify the people on the
Grand Quay who store trunks to bring seven of our stored trunks to
the hotel and carry back seven which they would find piled in the
lobby. 3. I must find out what part of Europe Bayreuth was in and
buy seven railway tickets for that point. 4. I must send a telegram to
a friend in the Netherlands. 5. It was now two in the afternoon, and
we must look sharp and be ready for the first night train, and make
sure of sleeping-car tickets. 6. I must draw money at the bank.
It seemed to me that the sleeping-car tickets must be the most
important thing, so I went to the station myself to make sure; hotel
messengers are not always brisk people. It was a hot day and I ought
to have driven, but it seemed better economy to walk. It did not turn
out so, because I lost my way and trebled the distance. I applied for
the tickets, and they asked me which route I wanted to go by, and
that embarrassed me and made me lose my head, there were so
many people standing around, and I not knowing anything about the
routes, and not supposing there were going to be two; so I judged it
best to go back and map out the road and come again.
I took a cab this time, but on my way upstairs at the hotel I
remembered that I was out of cigars, so I thought it would be well to
get some while the matter was in my mind. It was only round the
corner and I didn’t need the cab. I asked the cabman to wait where
he was. Thinking of the telegram and trying to word it in my head, I
forgot the cigars and the cab, and walked on indefinitely. I was going
to have the hotel people send the telegram, but as I could not be far
from the Post Office by this time, I thought I would do it myself. But
it was further than I had supposed. I found the place at last, and
wrote the telegram and handed it in. The clerk was a severe-looking,
fidgety man, and he began to fire French questions at me in such a
liquid form that I could not detect the joints between his words, and
this made me lose my head again. But an Englishman stepped up
and said the clerk wanted to know where he was to send the
telegram. I could not tell him, because it was not my telegram, and I
explained that I was merely sending it for a member of my party. But
nothing would pacify the clerk but the address; so I said that if he
was so particular I would go back and get it.
However, I thought I would go and collect those lacking two
persons first, for it would be best to do everything systematically and
in order, and one detail at a time. Then I remembered the cab was
eating up my substance down at the hotel yonder; so I called another
cab, and told the man to go down and fetch it to the Post Office and
wait till I came.
I had a long hot walk to collect those people, and when I got
there they couldn’t come with me because they had heavy satchels,
and must have a cab. I went away to find one, but before I ran across
any I noticed that I had reached the neighbourhood of the Grand
Quay—at least, I thought I had—so I judged I could save time by
stepping around and arranging about the trunks. I stepped around
about a mile, and although I did not find the Grand Quay, I found a
cigar shop, and remembered about the cigars. I said I was going to
Bayreuth, and wanted enough for the journey. The man asked me
which route I was going to take. I said I did not know. He said he
would recommend me to go by Zurich and various other places
which he named, and offered to sell me seven second-class through
tickets for $22 apiece, which would be throwing off the discount
which the railroads allowed him. I was already tired of riding second
class on first-class tickets, so I took him up.
By-and-by I found Natural & Co.’s storage office, and told them
to send seven of our trunks to the hotel and pile them up in the
lobby. It seemed to me that I was not delivering the whole of the
message; still, it was all I could find in my head.
Next I found the bank, and asked for some money, but I had left
my letter of credit somewhere and was not able to draw. I
remembered now that I must have left it lying on the table where I
wrote my telegram; so I got a cab and drove to the Post Office and
went upstairs, and they said that a letter of credit had indeed been
left on the table, but that it was now in the hands of the police
authorities, and it would be necessary for me to go there and prove
property. They sent a boy with me, and we went out the back way
and walked a couple of miles and found the place; and then I
remembered about my cabs, and asked the boy to send them to me
when he got back to the Post Office. It was nightfall now, and the
Mayor had gone to dinner. I thought I would go to dinner myself, but
the officer on duty thought differently, and I stayed. The Mayor
dropped in at half past ten, but said it was too late to do anything to-
night—come at 9.30 in the morning. The officer wanted to keep me
all night, and said I was a suspicious-looking person, and probably
did not own the letter of credit, and didn’t know what a letter of
credit was, but merely saw the real owner leave it lying on the table,
and wanted to get it because I was probably a person that would
want anything he could get, whether it was valuable or not. But the
Mayor said he saw nothing suspicious about me, and that I seemed a
harmless person, and nothing the matter with me but a wandering
mind, and not much of that. So I thanked him and he set me free,
and I went home in my three cabs.
As I was dog-tired, and in no condition to answer questions with
discretion, I thought I would not disturb the Expedition at that time
of night, as there was a vacant room I knew of at the other end of the
hall; but I did not quite arrive there, as a watch had been set, the
Expedition being anxious about me. I was placed in a galling
situation. The Expedition sat stiff and forbidding, on four chairs in a
row, with shawls and things all on, satchels and guide-books in lap.
They had been sitting like that for four hours, and the glass going
down all the time. Yes, and they were waiting—waiting for me. It
seemed to me that nothing but a sudden, happily contrived, and
brilliant tour de force could break this iron front and make a
diversion in my favour; so I shied my hat into the arena, and
followed it with a skip and a jump, shouting blithely:
‘Ha, ha, here we all are, Mr. Merryman!’
Nothing could be deeper or stiller than the absence of applause
which followed. But I kept on; there seemed no other way, though
my confidence, poor enough before, had got a deadly check, and was
in effect gone.
I tried to be jocund out of a heavy heart; I tried to touch the
other hearts there and soften the bitter resentment in those faces by
throwing off bright and airy fun, and making of the whole ghastly
thing a joyously humorous incident; but this idea was not well
conceived. It was not the right atmosphere for it. I got not one smile;
not one line in those offended faces relaxed; I thawed nothing of the
winter that looked out of those frosty eyes. I started one more breezy,
poor effort, but the head of the Expedition cut into the centre of it,
and said:
‘Where have you been?’
I saw by the manner of this that the idea was to get down to cold
business now. So I began my travels, but was cut short again.
‘Where are the two others? We have been in frightful anxiety
about them.’
‘Oh, they’re all right. I was to fetch a cab. I will go straight off,
and——’
‘Sit down! Don’t you know it is 11 o’clock? Where did you leave
them?’
‘At the pension.’
‘Why didn’t you bring them?’
 ‘Because we couldn’t carry the satchels. And so I thought——’
‘Thought! You should not try to think. One cannot think without
the proper machinery. It is two miles to that pension. Did you go
there without a cab?’
‘I—well, I didn’t intend to; it only happened so.’
‘How did it happen so?’
‘Because I was at the Post Office, and I remembered that I had
left a cab waiting here, and so, to stop the expense, I sent another cab
to—to——’
‘To what?’
‘Well, I don’t remember now, but I think the new cab was to
have the hotel pay the old cab, and send it away.’
‘What good would that do?’
‘What good would it do? It would stop the expense, wouldn’t it?’
‘By putting the new cab in its place to continue the expense?’
I didn’t say anything.
‘Why didn’t you have the new cab come back for you?’
‘Oh, that is what I did! I remember now. Yes, that is what I did.
Because I recollect that when I——’
‘Well, then, why didn’t it come back for you?’
‘To the Post Office? Why, it did.’
‘Very well, then, how did you come to walk to the pension?’
‘I—I don’t quite remember how that happened. Oh, yes, I do
remember now. I wrote the despatch to send to the Netherlands, and
——’
‘Oh, thank goodness, you did accomplish something! I wouldn’t
have had you fail to send——What makes you look like that? You are
trying to avoid my eye. That despatch is the most important thing
that——You haven’t sent that despatch!’
‘I haven’t said I didn’t send it.’
‘You don’t need to. Oh, dear, I wouldn’t have had that telegram
fail for anything. Why didn’t you send it?’
‘Well, you see, with so many things to do and think of, I—they’re
very particular there, and after I had written the telegram——’
 ‘Oh, never mind, let it go, explanations can’t help the matter
now—what will he think of us?’
‘Oh, that’s all right, that’s all right! He’ll think we gave the
telegram to the hotel people, and that they——’
‘Why, certainly! Why didn’t you do that? There was no other
rational way.’
‘Yes, I know, but then I had it on my mind that I must be sure
and get to the bank and draw some money——’
‘Well, you are entitled to some credit, after all, for thinking of
that, and I don’t wish to be too hard on you, though you must
acknowledge yourself that you have cost us all a good deal of trouble,
and some of it not necessary. How much did you draw?’
‘Well, I—I had an idea that—that——’
‘That what?’
‘That—well, it seems to me that in the circumstances—so many
of us, you know, and—and——’
‘What are you mooning about? Do turn your face this way and
let me——Why, you haven’t drawn any money!’
‘Well, the banker said——’
‘Never mind what the banker said. You must have had a reason
of your own. Not a reason, exactly, but something which——’
‘Well, then, the simple fact was that I hadn’t my letter of credit.’
‘Hadn’t your letter of credit?’
‘Hadn’t my letter of credit.’
‘Don’t repeat me like that. Where was it?’
‘At the Post Office.’
‘What was it doing there?’
‘Well, I forgot it, and left it there.’
‘Upon my word, I’ve seen a good many couriers, but of all the
couriers that ever I——’
‘I’ve done the best I could.’
‘Well, so you have, poor thing, and I’m wrong to abuse you so
when you’ve been working yourself to death while we’ve been sitting
here, only thinking of our vexations instead of feeling grateful for
what you were trying to do for us. It will all come out right. We can
take the 7.30 train in the morning just as well. You’ve bought the
tickets?’
‘I have—and it’s a bargain, too. Second class.’
‘I’m glad of it. Everybody else travels second class, and we might
just as well save that ruinous extra charge. What did you pay?’
‘Twenty-two dollars apiece—through to Bayreuth.’
‘Why, I didn’t know you could buy through tickets anywhere but
in London and Paris.’
‘Some people can’t, maybe; but some people can—of whom I am
one of which, it appears.’
‘It seems a rather high price.’
‘On the contrary, the dealer knocked off his commission.’
‘Dealer?’
‘Yes—I bought them at a cigar shop.’
‘That reminds me. We shall have to get up pretty early, and so
there should be no packing to do. Your umbrella, your rubbers, your
cigars——What is the matter?’
‘Hang it! I’ve left the cigars at the bank.’
‘Just think of it! Well, your umbrella?’
‘I’ll have that all right. There’s no hurry.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘Oh, that’s all right; I’ll take care of——’
‘Where is that umbrella?’
‘It’s just the merest step—it won’t take me——’
‘Where is it?’
‘Well, I think I left it at the cigar shop; but any way——’
‘Take your feet out from under that thing. It’s just as I expected!
Where are your rubbers?’
‘They—well——’
‘Where are your rubbers?’
‘It’s got so dry now—well, everybody says there’s not going to be
another drop of——’
 ‘Where—are—your—rubbers?’
‘Well, you see—well, it was this way. First, the officer said——’
‘What officer?’
‘Police officer; but the Mayor, he——’
‘What Mayor?’
‘Mayor of Geneva; but I said——’
‘Wait. What is the matter with you?’
‘Who, me? Nothing. They both tried to persuade me to stay, and
——’
‘Stay where?’
‘Well—the fact is——’
‘Where have you been? What’s kept you out till half past ten at
night?’
‘Oh, you see, after I lost my letter of credit, I——’
‘You are beating around the bush a good deal. Now, answer the
question in just one straightforward word. Where are those rubbers?’
‘They—well, they’re in the county jail.’
I started a placating smile, but it petrified. The climate was
unsuitable. Spending three or four hours in jail did not seem to the
Expedition humorous. Neither did it to me, at bottom.
I had to explain the whole thing, and of course it came out then
that we couldn’t take the early train, because that would leave my
letter of credit in hock still. It did look as if we had all got to go to bed
estranged and unhappy, but by good luck that was prevented. There
happened to be mention of the trunks, and I was able to say I had
attended to that feature.
‘There, you are just as good and thoughtful and painstaking and
intelligent as you can be, and it’s a shame to find so much fault with
you, and there shan’t be another word of it! You’ve done beautifully,
admirably, and I’m sorry I ever said one ungrateful word to you.’
This hit deeper than some of the other things, and made me
uncomfortable, because I wasn’t feeling as solid about that trunk
errand as I wanted to. There seemed, somehow, to be a defect about
it somewhere, though I couldn’t put my finger on it, and didn’t like to
stir the matter just now, it being late and maybe well enough to let
well enough alone.
Of course there was music in the morning, when it was found
that we couldn’t leave by the early train. But I had no time to wait; I
got only the opening bars of the overture, and then started out to get
my letter of credit.
It seemed a good time to look into the trunk business and rectify
it if it needed it, and I had a suspicion that it did. I was too late. The
concierge said he had shipped the trunks to Zurich the evening
before. I asked him how he could do that without exhibiting passage
tickets.
‘Not necessary in Switzerland. You pay for your trunks and send
them where you please. Nothing goes free but your hand baggage.’
‘How much did you pay on them?’
‘A hundred and forty francs.’
‘Twenty-eight dollars. There’s something wrong about that trunk
business, sure.’
Next I met the porter. He said:
‘You have not slept well, is it not? You have the worn look. If you
would like a courier, a good one has arrived last night, and is not
engaged for five days already, by the name of Ludi. We recommend
him; “das heisst,” the Grande Hotel Beau Rivage recommends him.’
I declined with coldness. My spirit was not broken yet. And I did
not like having my condition taken notice of in this way. I was at the
county jail by nine o’clock, hoping that the Mayor might chance to
come before his regular hour; but he didn’t. It was dull there. Every
time I offered to touch anything, or look at anything, or do anything,
or refrain from doing anything, the policeman said it was ‘defendu.’ I
thought I would practise my French on him, but he wouldn’t have
that either. It seemed to make him particularly bitter to hear his own
tongue.
The Mayor came at last, and then there was no trouble; for the
minute he had convened the Supreme Court—which they always do
whenever there is valuable property in dispute—and got everything
shipshape, and sentries posted, and had prayer, by the chaplain, my
unsealed letter was brought and opened, and there wasn’t anything
in it but some photographs: because, as I remembered now, I had
taken out the letter of credit so as to make room for the photographs,
and had put the letter in my other pocket, which I proved to
everybody’s satisfaction by fetching it out and showing it with a good
deal of exultation. So then the court looked at each other in a vacant
kind of way, and then at me, and then at each other again, and finally
let me go, but said it was imprudent for me to be at large, and asked
me what my profession was. I said I was a courier. They lifted up
their eyes in a kind of reverent way and said, ‘Du lieber Gott!’ and I
said a word of courteous thanks for their apparent admiration and
hurried off to the bank.
However, being a courier was already making me a great stickler
for order and system and one thing at a time and each thing in its
own proper turn; so I passed by the bank and branched off and
started for the two lacking members of the Expedition. A cab lazied
by and I took it upon persuasion. I gained no speed by this, but it was
a reposeful turn out and I liked reposefulness. The week-long
jubilations over the six-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Swiss
liberty and the Signing of the Compact was at flood tide, and all the
streets were clothed in fluttering flags.
The horse and the driver had been drunk three days and nights,
and had known no stall nor bed meantime. They looked as I felt—
dreamy and seedy. But we arrived in course of time. I went in and
rang, and asked a housemaid to rush out the lacking members. She
said something which I did not understand, and I returned to the
chariot. The girl had probably told me that those people did not
belong on her floor, and that it would be judicious for me to go
higher, and ring from floor to floor till I found them; for in those
Swiss flats there does not seem to be any way to find the right family
but to be patient and guess your way along up. I calculated that I
must wait fifteen minutes, there being three details inseparable from
an occasion of this sort: 1, put on hats and come down and climb in;
2, return of one to get ‘my other glove’; 3, presently, return of the
other one to fetch ‘my French Verbs at a Glance.’ I would muse
during the fifteen minutes and take it easy.
A very still and blank interval ensued, and then I felt a hand on
my shoulder and started. The intruder was a policeman. I glanced up
and perceived that there was new scenery. There was a good deal of a
crowd, and they had that pleased and interested look which such a
crowd wears when they see that somebody is out of luck. The horse
was asleep, and so was the driver, and some boys had hung them and
me full of gaudy decorations stolen from the innumerable banner
poles. It was a scandalous spectacle. The officer said:
‘I’m sorry, but we can’t have you sleeping here all day.’
I was wounded, and said with dignity:
‘I beg your pardon, I was not sleeping; I was thinking.’
‘Well, you can think, if you want to, but you’ve got to think to
yourself; you disturb the whole neighbourhood.’
It was a poor joke, and it made the crowd laugh. I snore at night
sometimes, but it is not likely that I would do such a thing in the
daytime and in such a place. The officer undecorated us, and seemed
sorry for our friendlessness, and really tried to be humane, but he
said we mustn’t stop there any longer or he would have to charge us
rent—it was the law, he said, and he went on to say in a sociable way
that I was looking pretty mouldy, and he wished he knew——
I shut him off pretty austerely, and said I hoped one might
celebrate a little, these days, especially when one was personally
concerned.
‘Personally?’ he asked. ‘How?’
‘Because six hundred years ago an ancestor of mine signed the
Compact.’
He reflected a moment, than looked me over and said:
‘Ancestor! It’s my opinion you signed it yourself. For of all the
old ancient relics that ever I—but never mind about that. What is it
you are waiting here for so long?’
I said:
‘I’m not waiting here so long at all. I’m waiting fifteen minutes
till they forget a glove and a book and go back and get them.’ Then I
told him who they were that I had come for.
He was very obliging, and began to shout inquiries to the tiers of
heads and shoulders projecting from the windows above us. Then a
woman away up there sang out:
‘Oh, they? Why, I got them a cab and they left here long ago—
half-past eight, I should say.’
 It was annoying. I glanced at my watch, but didn’t say anything.
The officer said:
‘It is a quarter of twelve, you see. You should have inquired
better. You have been asleep three-quarters of an hour, and in such a
sun as this! You are baked—baked black. It is wonderful. And you
will miss your train, perhaps. You interest me greatly. What is your
occupation?’
I said I was a courier. It seemed to stun him, and before he could
come to we were gone.
When I arrived in the third story of the hotel I found our
quarters vacant. I was not surprised. The moment a courier takes his
eye off his tribe they go shopping. The nearer it is to train time the
surer they are to go. I sat down to try and think out what I had best
do next, but presently the hall boy found me there, and said the
Expedition had gone to the station half an hour before. It was the
first time I had known them to do a rational thing, and it was very
confusing. This is one of the things that make a courier’s life so
difficult and uncertain. Just as matters are going the smoothest, his
people will strike a lucid interval, and down go all his arrangements
to wreck and ruin.
The train was to leave at twelve noon sharp. It was now ten
minutes after twelve. I could be at the station in ten minutes. I saw I
had no great amount of leeway, for this was the lightning express,
and on the Continent the lightning expresses are pretty fastidious
about getting away some time during the advertised day. My people
were the only ones remaining in the waiting room; everybody else
had passed through and ‘mounted the train,’ as they say in those
regions. They were exhausted with nervousness and fret, but I
comforted them and heartened them up, and we made our rush.
But no; we were out of luck again. The doorkeeper was not
satisfied with the tickets. He examined them cautiously, deliberately,
suspiciously: then glared at me awhile, and after that he called
another official. The two examined the tickets and called another
official. These called others, and the convention discussed and
discussed, and gesticulated and carried on until I begged that they
would consider how time was flying, and just pass a few resolutions
and let us go. Then they said very courteously that there was a defect
in the tickets, and asked me where I got them.
 I judged I saw what the trouble was, now. You see, I had bought
the tickets in a cigar shop, and of course the tobacco smell was on
them: without doubt the thing they were up to was to work the
tickets through the Custom House and to collect duty on that smell.
So I resolved to be perfectly frank: it is sometimes the best way. I
said:
‘Gentlemen, I will not deceive you. These railway tickets——’
‘Ah! pardon, monsieur! These are not railway tickets.’
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘is that the defect?’
‘Ah, truly yes, monsieur. These are lottery tickets, yes; and it is a
lottery which has been drawn two years ago.’
I affected to be greatly amused; it is all one can do in such
circumstances; it is all one can do, and yet there is no value in it; it
deceives nobody, and you can see that everybody around pities you
and is ashamed of you. One of the hardest situations in life, I think, is
to be full of grief and a sense of defeat and shabbiness that way, and
yet have to put on an outside of archness and gaiety, while all the
time you know that your own expedition, the treasures of your heart,
and whose love and reverence you are by the custom of our
civilisation entitled to, are being consumed with humiliation before
strangers to see you earning and getting a compassion, which is a
stigma, a brand—a brand which certifies you to be—oh, anything and
everything which is fatal to human respect.
I said, cheerily, it was all right, just one of those little accidents
that was likely to happen to anybody—I would have the right tickets
in two minutes, and we would catch the train yet, and, moreover,
have something to laugh about all through the journey. I did get the
tickets in time, all stamped and complete; but then it turned out that
I couldn’t take them, because, in taking so much pains about the two
missing members, I had skipped the bank and hadn’t the money. So
then the train left, and there didn’t seem to be anything to do but go
back to the hotel, which we did; but it was kind of melancholy and
not much said. I tried to start a few subjects, like scenery and
transubstantiation, and those sorts of things, but they didn’t seem to
hit the weather right.
We had lost our good rooms, but we got some others which were
pretty scattering, but would answer. I judged things would brighten
now, but the Head of the Expedition said, ‘Send up the trunks.’ It
made me feel pretty cold. There was a doubtful something about that
trunk business. I was almost sure of it. I was going to suggest——
But a wave of the hand sufficiently restrained me, and I was
informed that we would now camp for three days and see if we could
rest up.
I said all right, never mind ringing; I would go down and attend
to the trunks myself. I got a cab and went straight to Mr. Charles
Natural’s place, and asked what order it was I had left there.
‘To send seven trunks to the hotel.’
‘And were you to bring any back?’
‘No.’
‘You are sure I didn’t tell you to bring back seven that would be
found piled in the lobby?’
‘Absolutely sure you didn’t.’
‘Then the whole fourteen are gone to Zurich or Jericho or
somewhere, and there is going to be more débris around that hotel
when the Expedition——’
I didn’t finish, because my mind was getting to be in a good deal
of a whirl, and when you are that way you think you have finished a
sentence when you haven’t, and you go mooning and dreaming away,
and the first thing you know you get run over by a dray or a cow or
something.
I left the cab there—I forgot it—and on my way back I thought it
all out and concluded to resign, because otherwise I should be nearly
sure to be discharged. But I didn’t believe it would be a good idea to
resign in person; I could do it by message. So I sent for Mr. Ludi and
explained that there was a courier going to resign on account of
incompatibility or fatigue or something, and as he had four or five
vacant days, I would like to insert him into that vacancy if he thought
he could fill it. When everything was arranged I got him to go up and
say to the Expedition that, owing to an error made by Mr. Natural’s
people, we were out of trunks here, but would have plenty in Zurich,
and we’d better take the first train, freight, gravel, or construction,
and move right along.
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