Warm and Witty Side of Attila the Hun Read online

  THE WARM AND WITTY SIDE

  OF

  ATTILA THE HUN

  A collection of desultory historical anecdotes compiled (with all due deference to such historical accuracy as they may or may not contain)

  By Professor Jeffrey Sackett

  B.A., M.A., M.S.Ed., Th.D., Ph.D., Five time Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, author, raconteur, bon vivant, blah blah blah

  First Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  Illustrations by Paulette Sheldon Sackett

  B.F.A., M.F.A., artist, art teacher, wife, mother,

  and One Heck of a Good-lookin' Gal

  Cover Design by David Dodd / Copy-Edited by Hunter Goatley

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  MONARCHS

  PRIME MINISTERS

  PRESIDENTS

  VICE-PRESIDENTS

  DICTATORS

  RELIGIOUS FIGURES

  MISCELLANEOUS STORIES ABOUT INTERESTING PEOPLE

  JOKES FROM THE PAST

  STORIES WITHOUT CATEGORIES

  NATIONAL QUALITIES

  FAMOUS LAST WORDS AND EPITAPHS

  THE STORY I COULD NOT TELL IN CLASS

  The Warm & Witty Side of Attila the Hun

  INTRODUCTION

  The Author Sitting on Charlemagne's Throne

  I became interested in History because of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.1 was a five year old child, sitting at the kitchen table in my parents' apartment in Queens, eating a hamburger as my mother did the ironing, when the show on the radio—the Arthur Godfrey Show, I seem to recall—was interrupted by a news bulletin from Washington. "Soviet troops have occupied Budapest. Artillery fire and rifle fire can be heard in all parts of the capital. Short wave radio picked up this plea for help..." And then a shrill, trembling, heavily accented voice could be heard saying, "Send us guns, send us help, send us anything. The Russians are in the streets! Russian tanks are in the streets!"

  Well, I was terrified. I had no idea where Budapest was—in Brooklyn, for all I knew—and though I knew very little about the Russians, what I had learned about them from listening to my family was that they were hounds from hell, the devil's spawn. I panicked and started crying. To calm me down, my mother told me that Budapest and Russia were nowhere near Queens. She must have called my father at work to tell him what I was going through, because when he came home that night he brought with him a child's world atlas. (You know the kind of book I mean. Here are all the countries, here are pictures of the children of all the countries, they all dress funny but they are all just like you.) That book began my lifelong love affair with History, because a little snippet of historical background accompanied each map and picture. I had learned about Paul Revere and Abraham Lincoln and Davy Crockett, etc., in Kindergarten, but it had never occurred to me that stuff had actually happened elsewhere around the world. I simply had to find out what all that stuff was!

  It was eight years later that the impact important events can have upon one's personal life was brought dramatically home to me. I was a thirteen-year-old freshman in Forest Hills High School, Queens, New York, and the event was the Kennedy assassination.

  I was, as noted, already interested in History and politics, but in November of that year what I was mostly interested in was Jane Mahoney, who was arguably the most beautiful girl whose dainty foot ever graced the grass of God's green earth. That's how she appeared to my adolescent eyes, anyway. I was madly in love with her. She, however, did not know I was alive.

  When I saw her in the hallway between classes I would always make a point of trying to talk to her. She never looked me in the eye, looking instead in all directions around me as if to imply, "There's something in my way but I don't know what it is." But then a sheer accident, a happenstance as it were, of alphabetical seating made Jane my table partner in science lab. It was then that I decided that there is indeed a God.

  Every generation has its indelible moment, a moment when everyone remembers exactly where he or she was, what he or she was doing, when the moment came. For my parents' generation, it was when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. For my daughters' generation, it was 9/11. For my generation, it was the assassination of JFK.

  Early in the afternoon on Friday, November 22, 1963, I was in Mr. Lukas' General Science class. (They didn't have Earth Science in those days; freshmen took a general intro to the sciences.) Jane and I and all the other kids were separating hydrogen from oxygen in water when the P. A. switched on and the principal, Dr. Ryan, said, "May I have your attention. A confirmed news report informs us that President John F. Kennedy is dead. The report further indicates that he was the victim of an assassin's bullet."

  Ryan said that school would be dismissed soon, and then softly read the 23rd Psalm as the shock of the news sank in. (For reading the 23rd Psalm in a public school today, of course, he would have been fired by the School’s Chancellor, would have been sued by vicious atheist bigots, and would have had both his license and his pension revoked by the State Ed Department. But I digress.) Anyway, I remember that Mr. Lukas's face was as white as a sheet. All around the room people were beginning to cry, and Jane broke down completely. She was Irish Catholic, and Kennedy, an Irish Catholic president, was like a saint to her. I instinctively put my hand comfortingly on her shoulder and she proceeded to bury her face in my chest and weep uncontrollably as I embraced her.

  The details of the assassination were of course as yet unclear, Lee Harvey Oswald was still a name unknown to the public, so all manner of possible explanations of this terrible event occurred to me. Three thoughts were running through my mind at that moment. The first thought was that the assassination might be the prelude to an invasion by a hostile power. Made sense. Kill the leader and then attack. The second thought was that this might presage a rebellion by some radical political group in America. This also made sense. Throw the nation into confusion and then raise the standard of revolt.

  The third thought that occurred to me, the most important thought, was this: I am hugging Jane Mahoney. I have my arms wrapped around Jane Mahoney. She has perfume in her hair, and it is right up against my face. This is a good thing. This is great. This is the silver lining in the grey cloud.

  We all went home a few minutes later, not to return until the next week, at which time Jane seemed to have again forgotten I was alive. C 'est l 'amore, C 'est la vie.

  There have been many other occasions in my life when events in the world around me, past and present, were made real to me by personal experience. In my youth I travelled extensively, to visit as many of the places in America and Europe I had read about as possible. I went to the beach at Hastings, England, and saw the memorial to Harold, the last Anglo-Saxon king of England, who was killed there in 1066 by the forces of William the Conqueror. I have visited the battlefields of Waterloo and Gettysburg. I have visited the three-hundred-and-fifty-year-old graves of my ancestors, one of whom was my namesake and the mayor of the town of Sandwich, England. I was physically thrown out of Aachen Cathedral in Germany when I ignored the barrier to run over and sit on Charlemagne's throne. I was arrested at the Schatzkammer in Vienna (the royal treasury, housing the Hapsburg crown jewels) when I inadvertently tried to enter through a delivery entrance and set off a deafening barrage of alarms. I took three classes of high school juniors on a field trip to the Statue of Liberty on the day that the PLF (the Puerto Rican Liberation Front) seized control of Liberty Island. I found myself in the rifle sights of an East German border guard as I took photos over the Berlin Wall. I attended Oktoberfest in Munich and got into a fistfight with a Japanese tourist in the Hojbrauhaus. (The people I was with tell m
e that I decided to take exception to Pearl Harbor for some reason, probably because I had had a few steins of beer too many; they also told me that on the whole I enjoyed Oktoberfest immensely; I woke up the next day in Augsburg.) I have also seen many important people up close and personal (e.g., Robert F. Kennedy, Margaret Thatcher, Mayor Lindsay, Pope Paul VI, Prince Charles, Helmuth Kohl, Mayor Koch).

  And graves. God, the graves I've visited, contemplating the names, dates, and on occasion epitaphs. Napoleon's massive brown marble sarcophagus in the Hotel des Invalides in Paris, and the simple marker of T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) in a little country churchyard in Sussex, England; the crypt beneath Westminster Abbey, where Elizabeth I is interred close beside Mary Queen of Scots, the cousin she ordered beheaded; the Edinburgh grave of Robert the Bruce, the King of Scots who broke the English at Bannockburn; the Kaisargruft (Imperial Crypt) in Vienna, where the Hapsburg emperors and empresses are interred, including Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination precipitated World War One; the chapel in Windsor Castle where a large rectangular marker identifies the burial site of Henry VIII and Queen Jane, who bore his long-desired male heir; the burial sites of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Grant, both Roosevelts; Beethoven in Vienna; Rembrandt in Amsterdam; and one of my favorites, because I love his poetry and no one ever goes there, Robert Burns in Dumfries, Scotland; etc., etc., etc.

  And the places of death. Battlefields, such as Hastings and Waterloo, already mentioned: Saratoga, 1777; my ancestral village, Sackets (sic) Harbor, 1812; Leipzig, 1813; and the camps, the concentration camps, Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen ...

  My point is this: things happen, interesting things, terrible things, wonderful things, and they are all interesting, important things that have had impacts upon the lives of all of us. It is this that I find makes the study of History endlessly fascinating. I have been a teacher of History for forty years and a student of History for fifty years, and shall continue to be one until the day I die. In the course of my studies I have come across many stories which for one reason or another impressed themselves upon my memory, and as a teacher I have used many of them in the classroom, in high school and college both, to make points, illustrate ideas, and simply to amuse my students. These random anecdotal memories form the basis of this little book. In it the reader will find stories arranged somewhat topically but in no particular order. The reader will not find a bibliography, references, citations, or anything indicating the sources of these stories because, quite frankly, I never bothered to write anything of that sort down. I did have to look a few things up, such as the name of the recently deceased last survivor of the 1915 Christmas Truce ... I mean, who would remember something like that?... but by and large all of this is from memory, bolstered by decades of repetition.

  I once had a student ask me point blank and in all seriousness, "Do you really know all this stuff, or are you just making it up?" Delightful question, and unwittingly flattering. There is no need for any serious teacher of History to make up any unbelievable stories, because so much of it is unbelievable in the first place. I mean, really, think about it: if the story of Henry VIII and his six wives hadn't actually happened, for example, would anyone believe it? Is there any drama more intense than the story of Cleopatra, Caesar, Antony, and Octavian? (Heck, the entire story of the Julio-Claudian dynasty reads like one long soap opera!) And if Shakespeare had known the details of the life of his two-thousand-mile-away contemporary Ivan the Terrible, my God, what a tragic drama he could have written! (Speaking of which, let us not forget that Macbeth is based on a true story.)

  There is no particular order to these anecdotes (except that I tried to adhere to chronology with the presidents), and no claim is made to comprehensiveness or, for that matter, importance. This is simply a collection of things I have come across over the years, things that I remembered, things with which I amused, horrified, and intrigued my students, nothing more, nothing less. Think of it as the mental junkyard of an aging History teacher.

  If the reader is constrained by the chains of political correctness, please be forewarned that the writer is not. There may be material here that some people will find offensive. I don't care. Other readers may recognize some of these stories and may object to inaccuracies or distortions. I don't care about that either. This is something of an eclectic and eccentric reminiscence, not an academic work.

  In the pages that follow the reader will find stories about kings and queens, presidents and dictators, personalities light and dark, events amusing and horrible. There are no funny stories about Attila the Hun, by the way. But there are a few real rib-ticklers about Hitler.

  J.S.

  P.S. If you notice that the same figure appears in each of the illustrations, rest assured that this is not your imagination. My dear wife is the illustrator, and she likes to use live models for her sketches. Therefore, the ubiquitous figure is me. Or is I. Whatever.

  MONARCHS

  The rituals of court propriety in England were very strict in the 16th century. Thus it was that a member of the gentry named Guy de Vere committed an unpardonable faux pas. He was presented to Queen Elizabeth I, and as he performed the required deep and elaborate bow, he emitted a loud effusion of intestinal gas. Overcome with shame, he went into voluntary self-imposed exile for many years. After a suitable length of time had passed, he returned to Englandand resumed his life. When, many years later, he was once again presented at court, his presentation and bow went smoothly and without incident.

  Until Queen Elizabeth regarded him with sudden recognition and said, “My lord, I had forgot the fart!”

  Court propriety was just as strict and unforgiving at the court of the Austro-Hungarian Hapsburgs. One had to be properly dressed at all times. The nobles could be counted upon to observe this requirement without regulation, as could members of the military who were uniformed, but to prevent commoners from dressing improperly it had become mandatory that whenever a common man was in the presence of the Emperor he had to wear a frock coat, which in German is called a Frak. (A frock coat was popular among gentlemen in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was a lengthy garment which extended down to the knees.)

  In 1916, as the Great War was raging, the aged Emperor Franz Josef was dying. This penultimate Austro-Hungarian emperor had been on the throne since 1848, and his days were understandably numbered. Early in the morning of November 20, 1916, the court physician was roused from sleep and was told that the Emperor was having difficulty breathing. Throwing on a shirt and some trousers, the doctor rushed to the Emperor’s soon-to-be death bed and was able by his ministrations to ease the old man's respiration. The Emperor was able to take a few deep breaths and then crooked his finger weakly to summon the doctor closer. The doctor inclined his ear over the old man's mouth so as to be able to hear his words; whereupon Franz Josef took another deep breath and then shouted, "FRAK!"

  The Roman emperor Vespasian was married to beautiful and vivacious woman named Flavia. It came as a surprise when he announced his intention to divorce her. One of his friends, who felt secure enough in their friendship to be allowed to raise so delicate a subject, asked him why he would wish to separate from such a desirable woman.

  Vespasian pointed at his sandals and asked, "What are my sandals made of?"

  His friend glanced down. "Gold. "

  "Beautiful, are they not?"

  "Very."

  "But you do not know where they pinch my feet. I do."

  The Greek philosopher Diogenes was unimpressed by wealth, power, or fame. Thus it was that Alexander the Great, who succeeded his father Philip as ruler of Greece, desired to meet this man and attempt to draw him into friendship. Diogenes was sunning himself when Alexander approached him and offered him anything he might want, anything at all. Diogenes thought for a moment and then said, “Please step aside. You are blocking the sun.”

  A statement (Warning ... not funny ...) attributed to the Mongol emperor Genghis Khan: "There are four things that bestow ha
ppiness: killing one's enemies, torturing their sons, raping their daughters, and making their widows weep."

  The vagaries of languages often alter the meaning of words over time, occasionally with interesting results. When King James II of Great Britain and Ireland first beheld architect Christopher Wren's masterpiece, St. Paul's Cathedral in London, he pronounced it "awful, artificial, and amusing," which today would be regarded as derogatory remarks. But in the 17l century "awful" meant awe-inspiring, "artificial" meant "displaying artistic skill," and "amusing" meant "bestowing pleasure." Big difference.

  Vlad III (1431-1476) was voivode (prince) of the Romanian province of Wallachia from 1456 to 1462, and again briefly in 1476. He is known in his homeland as Vlad Tsepes, "Vlad the Impaler," because his favorite means of executing criminals and enemies was impalement, i.e., driving a long sharpened wooden stake through the body and then leaving the miscreant to writhe in agony until death mercifully dispatched him. He is better known in the West as "the son of the dragon." Dracula.

  Dracula had a reputation for sadistic brutality, which, given the sadistic brutality ubiquitous in 15th century Eastern Europe, speaks volumes. His most infamous act was the impalement of 20,000 rebels and captive enemies, though other stories that illustrate his nature have survived the passage of the centuries as well. (When Turkish envoys, devout Muslims all, refused to remove their hats in his presence, for example, he had their hats nailed to their heads.)

  He was killed in battle in 1476, and his head was sent to the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. His remains were eventually interred in a sarcophagus in the crypt of Snagov monastery on an island in the Danube near Bucharest.