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Invasion Literature
When William Came
by Saki
(First published 1914)
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At the time of writing When William Came was set several years in the
future, after a fictional war between Germany and Great Britain, which
Germany had won. The book is a story of life in London after Germany
occupation, and the changes that come with it. Novels such as this harnessed
England's fear of invasion to such an extent that the daily press published
public sightings of German spies and saboteurs on a regular basis. Such was
the paranoia that the British Secret Service was purportedly established to
investigate these espionage claims.
In 1914, Monro felt that appeasement was the
wrong way to deal with Germany; he wanted to sound a warning that if the
British did not prepare for war, the consequence would be subjugation. This
novel is the consequence, propaganda swiftly overtaken by events; he wanted
to portray a Britain which had lost a war and been annexed by Germany to
shock public opinion towards war preparation.
From a late twentieth century perspective, one really striking thing about
the novel is the naivéte of the "horrors" of the occupation compared with eg.
the treatment of the Poles by Nazi Germany.
Some of the predictions are interesting, given the aftermath of the war. One
particularly ironic comment is the reasoning given by German newspapers
campaigning for the annexation of a defeated Britain: "They pointed out that
Britain, defeated and humiliated, but with enormous powers of recuperation,
would be a dangerous and inevitable enemy for the Germany of tomorrow..."
This is a pretty good description of the situation in postwar Germany which
was so important in the rise of the Nazis to power.
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Saki (1870-1916) was a Scottish-born
writer whose stories satirized the Edwardian social scene. Munro's columns
and short stories were published under the pen name 'Saki', who was the
cupbearer in The Rubayat of Omar Khayyam. Saki's stories were full of witty
sayings - ie. "The cook was a good cook, as cooks go; and as cooks go she
went."
Saki was born Hector Hugh Munro in Akyab, Burma (now Myanmar), the son of
Charles Augustus Munro, an inspector-general in the Burma police. Munro's
mother, the former Mary Frances Mercer, died in 1872 - she was killed by a
runaway cow in an English country lane. In 1893 Munro joined the Burma
police. Three years later he was back in England and started his career as a
journalist, writing for the Westminster Gazette.
In 1900 Munro's first book, THE RISE OF THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE, appeared. It is
a historical study modelled upon Gibbon's famous The Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire. The book was received with hostile reviews in America. It was
followed in 1902 with a collection of short stories, NOT-SO-STORIES. From
1902 to 1908 Munro worked as a foreign correspondent for The Morning Post in
the Balkans, Russia and Paris, and then returned to London. In 1914 his
novel WHEN WILLIAM CAME appeared, in which he portrayed what might happen if
the German emperor conquered England.´
After the outbreak of World War I, although officially too old, Munro
volunteered for the army as an ordinary soldier. He was killed by a sniper's
bullet on November 14, 1916 in France, near Beaumont-Hamel. Munro was
sheltering in a shell crater. His last words, according to several sources,
were: "Put that damned cigarette out!"
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