The Kowtow

Britain and France had to choose between war and dishonour. They chose dishonour. They will have war.

Winston Churchill on the Munich Agreement, 1938

John Derbyshire looks at the easily-wrought "confessions" of the kidnapped Royal Navy sailors and marines and compares them to Private John Moyse.

Who? Unless you're up on your history of the Anglo-French expedition to Peking in 1860 you may need this reminder:

How on earth can Britons behave like that? A previous generation would not have done so. I knew the women of my mother’s generation pretty well (Mum was born in 1912), and I am certain that any one of them, given that headscarf and told to put it on, would have said: “You can hang me with it if you like, but I’ll be damned if I’ll wear the filthy thing.” The men likewise. What on earth has happened to the British? Where is John Moyse?

Well, he is of course on Wikipedia. Who isn’t? To spare you the trouble of reading all through, Moyse was a British soldier of the East Kent Regiment, nick-named “The Buffs” on account of their 17th-century uniforms, which prominently featured that color. Moyse was captured by the Chinese during the Second Opium War of the late 1850s. Taken before a Mandarin, he was ordered to kowtow, but refused. He was thereupon clubbed to death and decapitated, and his body thrown on a dung-heap. Sir Francis Doyle wrote a poem to celebrate Moyse’s defiance of the enemy. You can read the poem here.

Sir Harry Flashman had his own take on it based on his "eye witness" account:

That was how it happened-- The stories that he laughed in defiance, or made a speech about not bowing his head to any heathen, or recited a prayer, or even that he died drunk-- they're false. I'd say he was taken flat aback at the mere notion of kow-towing, and when it sank in, he wasn't having it, not if it cost him his life. You may ask, was he a hero or just a fool, and I'll not answer-- For I know this much, that each man has his price, and his was higher than yours or mine. That's all. I know one other thing-- whenever I hear someone say Proud as Lucifer, I think, no, proud as Private Moyes.

Derbyshire is a bit harsh on the captives; they are, after all, operating under standing orders and it's a bit much to judge another man in a tight situation when you aren't in his shoes, but the fact that a group of modern Britons acquiesced so quickly to the Iranian equivalent of the kowtow when their grandparents would have said "f*** you" and damn the consequences is painfully telling-- not so much on the seamen, but on a time where such humiliation is accepted by Britons and their government without so much as a shrug. However, such indifference in the face of tyranny cannot go for long without a heavy price.

Today, the white feather carries no stigma; no able-bodied man squirms with shame at the knowledge that he stays safe at home while a woman goes to war and risks captivity, death or worse in his place; and the words Ἢ τὰν ἢ ἐπὶ τᾶς are meaningless in more than their Greek, but that will have to change in the years to come unless we want to end up paraphrasing Churchill to our cost.