{"id":57,"date":"2025-06-17T15:33:27","date_gmt":"2025-06-17T15:33:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hartfordlit.wpenginepowered.com\/?p=57"},"modified":"2026-04-07T15:20:13","modified_gmt":"2026-04-07T15:20:13","slug":"excerpts-from-a-connecticut-yankee-in-king-arthurs-court-1889","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hartfordlit.org\/?p=57","title":{"rendered":"from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court"},"content":{"rendered":"

Clemens\u2019s fascination with English history developed with his visits to the country and his research for <\/em>The Prince and the Pauper (1881), a tale of a royal and a commoner changing places so each could find out what he had been envying. He was fascinated by the Elizabethan period and its wholesome frankness about sex and bodily functions, which he celebrated in a short obscene work called 1601: <\/em>Conversation as it Was by the Social Fireside, in the Time of the Tudors. The book was concealed to all but select male friends, but is now freely readable on the Internet.<\/em><\/p>\n

But it is in <\/em>A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur\u2019s Court (1889) that he skewers the cruelty of early England and brings lessons to the modern era. In it, a Hartford factory superintendent travels to the past and teaches the people of Arthur\u2019s time the value of modern inventions and practices (including baseball). This blend of social satire and humor concludes, however, in a brutal horror of explosive destruction, written in a friend\u2019s Hartford study. The story\u2019s prelude begins in Warwick Castle, northwest of London, which Clemens had visited in 1872.<\/em><\/p>\n

from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court<\/em>\u00a0<\/strong><\/h2>\n

by Mark Twain<\/p>\n

A Word of Explanation<\/strong><\/h5>\n

It was in Warwick Castle that I came across the curious stranger whom I am going to talk about. He attracted me by three things: his candid simplicity, his marvelous familiarity with ancient armor, and the restfulness of his company\u2014for he did all the talking. We fell together, as modest people will, in the tail of the herd that was being shown through, and he at once began to say things which interested me. As he talked along, softly, pleasantly, flowingly, he seemed to drift away imperceptibly out of this world and time, and into some remote era and old forgotten country; and so he gradually wove such a spell about me that I seemed to move among the spectres and shadows and dust and mould of a gray antiquity, holding speech with a relic of it! Exactly as I would speak of my nearest personal friends or enemies, or my most familiar neighbors, he spoke of Sir Bedivere, Sir Bors de Ganis, Sir Launcelot of the Lake, Sir Galahad, and all the other great names of the Table Round\u2014and how old, old, unspeakably old, and faded and dry and musty and ancient he came to look, as he went on! Presently he turned to me and said, just as one might speak of the weather, or any other common matter\u2014<\/p>\n

\u201cYou know about transmigration of souls; do you know about transposition of epochs\u2014and bodies?\u201d<\/p>\n

I said I had not heard of it. He was so little interested\u2014just as when people speak of the weather\u2014that he did not notice whether I made him any answer or not. There was half a moment of silence; immediately interrupted by the droning voice of the salaried cicerone:<\/p>\n

\u201cAncient hauberk, date of the sixth century, time of King Arthur and the Round Table; said to have belonged to the knight Sir Sagramour le Desirous; observe the round hole through the chain-mail in the left breast; can\u2019t be accounted for; supposed to have been done with a bullet since invention of firearms\u2014perhaps maliciously by Cromwell\u2019s soldiers.\u201d<\/p>\n

My acquaintance smiled\u2014not a modern smile, but one that must have gone out of general use many, many centuries ago\u2014and muttered, apparently to himself:<\/p>\n

\u201cWit ye well, I saw it done<\/em>.\u201d Then, after a pause, added: \u201cI did it myself.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the time I had recovered from the electric surprise of this remark, he was gone.<\/p>\n

All that evening I sat by my fire at the Warwick Arms, steeped in a dream of the olden time, while the rain beat upon the windows and the wind roared about the eaves and corners. From time to time I dipped into old Sir Thomas Malory\u2019s enchanting book, and fed at its rich feast of prodigies and adventures, breathed-in the fragrance of its obsolete names, and dreamed again.<\/p>\n

\u2026As I laid the book down there was a knock at the door, and my stranger came in. I gave him a pipe and a chair, and made him welcome. I also comforted him with a hot Scotch whisky; gave him another one; then still another\u2014hoping always for his story. After a fourth persuader, he drifted into it himself, in a quite simple and natural way:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Stranger\u2019s History.<\/strong><\/h5>\n

I am an American. I was born and reared in Hartford, in the State of Connecticut\u2014anyway, just over the river, in the country. So I am a Yankee of the Yankees\u2014and practical; yes, and nearly barren of sentiment, I suppose\u2014or poetry, in other words. My father was a blacksmith, my uncle was a horse-doctor, and I was both, along at first. Then I went over to the great Colt arms-factory and learned my real trade; learned all there was to it; learned to make everything: guns, revolvers, cannon, boilers, engines, all sorts of labor-saving machinery. Why, I could make anything a body wanted\u2014anything in the world, it didn\u2019t make any difference what; and if there wasn\u2019t any quick, new-fangled way to make a thing, I could invent one\u2014and do it as easy as rolling off a log. I became head superintendent; had a couple of thousand men under me.<\/p>\n

Well, a man like that, is a man that is full of fight \u2014that goes without saying. With a couple of thousand rough men under one, one has plenty of that sort of amusement. I had, anyway. At last I met my match, and I got my dose. It was during a misunderstanding conducted with crowbars with a fellow we used to call Hercules. He laid me out with a crusher alongside the head that made everything crack, and seemed to spring every joint in my skull and make it overlap its neighbor. Then the world went out in darkness, and I didn\u2019t feel anything more, and didn\u2019t know anything at all\u2014at least for a while.<\/p>\n

When I came to again, I was sitting under an oak tree, on the grass, with a whole beautiful and broad country landscape all to myself\u2014nearly. Not entirely; for there was a fellow on a horse, looking down at me\u2014a fellow fresh out of a picture-book. He was in old-time iron armor from head to heel, with a helmet on his head the shape of a nail-keg with slits in it; and he had a shield, and a sword, and a prodigious spear; and his horse had armor on, too, and a steel horn projecting from his forehead, and gorgeous red and green silk trappings that hung down all around him like a bed-quilt, nearly to the ground.<\/p>\n

\u201cFair sir, will ye just?\u201d said this fellow.<\/p>\n

\u201cWill I which?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWill ye try a passage of arms for land or lady or for\u2014\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat are you giving me?\u201d I said. \u201cGet along back to your circus, or I\u2019ll report you.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now what does this man do but fall back a couple of hundred yards and then come rushing at me as hard as he could tear , with his nail-keg bent down nearly to his horse\u2019s neck, and his long spear pointed straight ahead. I saw he meant business; so I was up the tree when he arrived.<\/p>\n

He allowed that I was his property, the captive of his spear. There was argument on his side\u2014and the bulk of the advantage; so I judged it best to humor him. We fixed up an agreement whereby I was to go with him and he was not to hurt me. I came down, and we started away, I walking by the side of his horse. We marched comfortably along, through glades and over brooks which I could not remember to have seen before\u2014which puzzled me and made me wonder\u2014and yet we did not come to any circus or sign of a circus. So I gave up the idea of a circus, and concluded he was from an asylum. But we never came to any asylum\u2014so I was up a stump, as you may say. I asked him how far we were from Hartford. He said he had never heard of the place; which I took to be a lie, but allowed it to go at that. At the end of an hour we saw a far-away town sleeping in a valley by a winding river; and beyond it on a hill, a vast gray fortress, with towers and turrets, the first I had ever seen, out of a picture.<\/p>\n

\u201cBridgeport?\u201d said I, pointing.<\/p>\n

\u201cCamelot,\u201d said he.<\/p>\n

My stranger had been showing signs of sleepiness. He caught himself nodding, now; and smiled one of those pathetic obsolete smiles of his, and said:<\/p>\n

\u201cI find I can\u2019t go on; but come with me, I\u2019ve got it all written out, and you can read it if you like.\u201d<\/p>\n

In his chamber, he said:<\/p>\n

\u201cFirst, I kept a journal; then by and by, after years, I took the journal and turned it into a book. How long ago that was!\u201d<\/p>\n

He handed me his manuscript, and pointed out the place where I should begin:<\/p>\n

\u201cBegin here\u2014I\u2019ve already told you what goes before.\u201d He was steeped in drowsiness by this time. As I went out at his door I heard him murmur sleepily:<\/p>\n

\u201cGive you good den, fair sir.\u201d<\/p>\n

I sat down by my fire and examined my treasure. The first part of it\u2014the great bulk of it\u2014was parchment, and yellow with age. I scanned a leaf particularly, and saw that it was a palimpsest. Under the old dim writing of the Yankee historian appeared traces of a penmanship which was older and dimmer still\u2014Latin words and sentences: fragments from old monkish legends, evidently. I turned to the place indicated by my stranger, and began to read\u2014as follows.<\/p>\n

[Click 2 for next section]<\/p>\n

\n

Hank, the Hartford man who finds himself in 6th century England, soon becomes King Arthur’s right-hand man: the Boss. With his knowledge of democracy and technology (thanks to his living in the Constitution State and working in Hartford’s Colt Factory), he begins to reshape feudal England in the image of 19th century New England. Twain aims his satire not only at the monarchy and feudalism from which America broke free, but also at political issues of his own era, like the continued disenfranchisement of African Americans through such methods as share-cropping and the general exploitation the working class by the rich and powerful.<\/em><\/p>\n

Sandy is Hank’s companion and later becomes his wife.<\/em><\/p>\n

Excerpt from Chapter XIII Freemen!<\/strong><\/h5>\n

We were off before sunrise, Sandy riding and I limping along behind. In half an hour we came upon a group of ragged poor creatures who had assembled to mend the thing which was regarded as a road. They were as humble as animals to me; and when I proposed to breakfast with them, they were so flattered, so overwhelmed by this extraordinary condescension of mine that at first they were not able to believe that I was in earnest. My lady put up her scornful lip and withdrew to one side; she said in their hearing that she would as soon think of eating with the other cattle\u2014a remark which embarrassed these poor devils merely because it referred to them, and not because it insulted or offended them, for it didn\u2019t. And yet they were not slaves, not chattels. By a sarcasm of law and phrase they were freemen. Seven-tenths of the free population of the country were of just their class and degree: small \u201cindependent\u201d farmers, artisans, etc.; which is to say, they were the nation, the actual Nation; they were about all of it that was useful, or worth saving, or really respect-worthy, and to subtract them would have been to subtract the Nation and leave behind some dregs, some refuse, in the shape of a king, nobility and gentry, idle, unproductive, acquainted mainly with the arts of wasting and destroying, and of no sort of use or value in any rationally constructed world.<\/p>\n

And yet, by ingenious contrivance, this gilded minority, instead of being in the tail of the procession where it belonged, was marching head up and banners flying, at the other end of it; had elected itself to be the Nation, and these innumerable clams had permitted it so long that they had come at last to accept it as a truth; and not only that, but to believe it right and as it should be. The priests had told their fathers and themselves that this ironical state of things was ordained of God; and so, not reflecting upon how unlike God it would be to amuse himself with sarcasms, and especially such poor transparent ones as this, they had dropped the matter there and become respectfully quiet.<\/p>\n

The talk of these meek people had a strange enough sound in a formerly American ear. They were freemen, but they could not leave the estates of their lord or their bishop without his permission; they could not prepare their own bread, but must have their corn ground and their bread baked at his mill and his bakery, and pay roundly for the same; they could not sell a piece of their own property without paying him a handsome percentage of the proceeds, nor buy a piece of somebody else\u2019s without remembering him in cash for the privilege; they had to harvest his grain for him gratis, and be ready to come at a moment\u2019s notice, leaving their own crop to destruction by the threatened storm; they had to let him plant fruit trees in their fields, and then keep their indignation to themselves when his heedless fruit-gatherers trampled the grain around the trees; they had to smother their anger when his hunting parties galloped through their fields laying waste the result of their patient toil; they were not allowed to keep doves themselves, and when the swarms from my lord\u2019s dovecote settled on their crops they must not lose their temper and kill a bird, for awful would the penalty be; when the harvest was at last gathered, then came the procession of robbers to levy their blackmail upon it: first the Church carted off its fat tenth, then the king\u2019s commissioner took his twentieth, then my lord\u2019s people made a mighty inroad upon the remainder; after which, the skinned freeman had liberty to bestow the remnant in his barn, in case it was worth the trouble; there were taxes, and taxes, and taxes, and more taxes, and taxes again, and yet other taxes\u2014upon this free and independent pauper, but none upon his lord the baron or the bishop, none upon the wasteful nobility or the all-devouring Church; if the baron would sleep unvexed, the freeman must sit up all night after his day\u2019s work and whip the ponds to keep the frogs quiet; if the freeman\u2019s daughter\u2014but no, that last infamy of monarchical government is unprintable; and finally, if the freeman, grown desperate with his tortures, found his life unendurable under such conditions, and sacrificed it and fled to death for mercy and refuge, the gentle Church condemned him to eternal fire, the gentle law buried him at midnight at the cross-roads with a stake through his back, and his master the baron or the bishop confiscated all his property and turned his widow and his orphans out of doors.<\/p>\n

And here were these freemen assembled in the early morning to work on their lord the bishop\u2019s road three days each\u2014gratis; every head of a family, and every son of a family, three days each, gratis, and a day or so added for their servants.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

These poor ostensible freemen who were sharing their breakfast and their talk with me, were as full of humble reverence for their king and Church and nobility as their worst enemy could desire. There was something pitifully ludicrous about it. I asked them if they supposed a nation of people ever existed, who, with a free vote in every man\u2019s hand, would elect that a single family and its descendants should reign over it forever, whether gifted or boobies, to the exclusion of all other families\u2014including the voter\u2019s; and would also elect that a certain hundred families should be raised to dizzy summits of rank, and clothed on with offensive transmissible glories and privileges to the exclusion of the rest of the nation\u2019s families\u2014including his own.<\/p>\n

They all looked unhit, and said they didn\u2019t know; that they had never thought about it before, and it hadn\u2019t ever occurred to them that a nation could be so situated that every man could have a say in the government. I said I had seen one\u2014and that it would last until it had an Established Church. Again they were all unhit\u2014at first. But presently one man looked up and asked me to state that proposition again; and state it slowly, so it could soak into his understanding. I did it; and after a little he had the idea, and he brought his fist down and said he didn\u2019t believe a nation where every man had a vote would voluntarily get down in the mud and dirt in any such way; and that to steal from a nation its will and preference must be a crime and the first of all crimes. I said to myself:<\/p>\n

\u201cThis one\u2019s a man. If I were backed by enough of his sort, I would make a strike for the welfare of this country, and try to prove myself its loyalest citizen by making a wholesome change in its system of government.\u201d<\/p>\n

You see my kind of loyalty was loyalty to one\u2019s country, not to its institutions or its office-holders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease, and death. To be loyal to rags, to shout for rags, to worship rags, to die for rags\u2014that is a loyalty of unreason, it is pure animal; it belongs to monarchy, was invented by monarchy; let monarchy keep it. I was from Connecticut, whose Constitution declares \u201cthat all political power is inherent in the people, and all free governments are founded on their authority and instituted for their benefit; and that they have at all times an undeniable and indefeasible right to alter their form of government in such a manner as they may think expedient.\u201d<\/p>\n

Under that gospel, the citizen who thinks he sees that the commonwealth\u2019s political clothes are worn out, and yet holds his peace and does not agitate for a new suit, is disloyal; he is a traitor. That he may be the only one who thinks he sees this decay, does not excuse him; it is his duty to agitate anyway, and it is the duty of the others to vote him down if they do not see the matter as he does.<\/p>\n

And now here I was, in a country where a right to say how the country should be governed was restricted to six persons in each thousand of its population. For the nine hundred and ninety-four to express dissatisfaction with the regnant system and propose to change it, would have made the whole six shudder as one man, it would have been so disloyal, so dishonorable, such putrid black treason. So to speak, I was become a stockholder in a corporation where nine hundred and ninety-four of the members furnished all the money and did all the work, and the other six elected themselves a permanent board of direction and took all the dividends. It seemed to me that what the nine hundred and ninety-four dupes needed was a new deal.<\/p>\n

[Click 3 for next final section]<\/p>\n


\nUltimately, Twain’s satire falls on the human race, showing how all the good Hank sought to create with universal education, printing presses, factories, and voting rights are in the end destroyed by organized religion and human greed. In the hands of people — even in Hank’s hands — technology becomes the means not for liberation but for destruction.<\/em><\/p>\n

Clarence is Hank’s assistant.<\/em><\/p>\n

Excerpt from Chapter XL Three Years Later<\/strong><\/h5>\n

When I broke the back of knight-errantry that time, I no longer felt obliged to work in secret. So, the very next day I exposed my hidden schools, my mines, and my vast system of clandestine factories and workshops to an astonished world. That is to say, I exposed the nineteenth century to the inspection of the sixth.<\/p>\n

Well, it is always a good plan to follow up an advantage promptly. The knights were temporarily down, but if I would keep them so I must just simply paralyze them\u2014nothing short of that would answer. You see, I was \u201cbluffing\u201d that last time in the field; it would be natural for them to work around to that conclusion, if I gave them a chance. So I must not give them time; and I didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

I renewed my challenge, engraved it on brass, posted it up where any priest could read it to them, and also kept it standing in the advertising columns of the paper.<\/p>\n

I not only renewed it, but added to its proportions. I said, name the day, and I would take fifty assistants and stand up against the massed chivalry of the whole earth and destroy it.<\/p>\n

I was not bluffing this time. I meant what I said; I could do what I promised. There wasn\u2019t any way to misunderstand the language of that challenge. Even the dullest of the chivalry perceived that this was a plain case of \u201cput up, or shut up.\u201d They were wise and did the latter. In all the next three years they gave me no trouble worth mentioning.<\/p>\n

Consider the three years sped. Now look around on England. A happy and prosperous country, and strangely altered. Schools everywhere, and several colleges; a number of pretty good newspapers. Even authorship was taking a start; Sir Dinadan the Humorist was first in the field, with a volume of gray-headed jokes which I had been familiar with during thirteen centuries. If he had left out that old rancid one about the lecturer I wouldn\u2019t have said anything; but I couldn\u2019t stand that one. I suppressed the book and hanged the author.<\/p>\n

Slavery was dead and gone; all men were equal before the law; taxation had been equalized. The telegraph, the telephone, the phonograph, the typewriter, the sewing-machine, and all the thousand willing and handy servants of steam and electricity were working their way into favor. We had a steamboat or two on the Thames, we had steam warships, and the beginnings of a steam commercial marine; I was getting ready to send out an expedition to discover America.<\/p>\n

We were building several lines of railway, and our line from Camelot to London was already finished and in operation. I was shrewd enough to make all offices connected with the passenger service places of high and distinguished honor. My idea was to attract the chivalry and nobility, and make them useful and keep them out of mischief. The plan worked very well, the competition for the places was hot. The conductor of the 4.33 express was a duke; there wasn\u2019t a passenger conductor on the line below the degree of earl. They were good men, every one, but they had two defects which I couldn\u2019t cure, and so had to wink at: they wouldn\u2019t lay aside their armor, and they would \u201cknock down\u201d fare\u2014I mean rob the company.<\/p>\n

There was hardly a knight in all the land who wasn\u2019t in some useful employment. They were going from end to end of the country in all manner of useful missionary capacities; their penchant for wandering, and their experience in it, made them altogether the most effective spreaders of civilization we had. They went clothed in steel and equipped with sword and lance and battle-axe, and if they couldn\u2019t persuade a person to try a sewing-machine on the installment plan, or a melodeon, or a barbed-wire fence, or a prohibition journal, or any of the other thousand and one things they canvassed for, they removed him and passed on.<\/p>\n

I was very happy. Things were working steadily toward a secretly longed-for point. You see, I had two schemes in my head which were the vastest of all my projects. The one was to overthrow the Catholic Church and set up the Protestant faith on its ruins\u2014not as an Established Church, but a go-as-you-please one; and the other project was to get a decree issued by and by, commanding that upon Arthur\u2019s death unlimited suffrage should be introduced, and given to men and women alike\u2014at any rate to all men, wise or unwise, and to all mothers who at middle age should be found to know nearly as much as their sons at twenty-one. Arthur was good for thirty years yet, he being about my own age\u2014that is to say, forty\u2014and I believed that in that time I could easily have the active part of the population of that day ready and eager for an event which should be the first of its kind in the history of the world\u2014a rounded and complete governmental revolution without bloodshed. The result to be a republic. Well, I may as well confess, though I do feel ashamed when I think of it: I was beginning to have a base hankering to be its first president myself. Yes, there was more or less human nature in me; I found that out.<\/p>\n

Clarence was with me as concerned the revolution, but in a modified way. His idea was a republic, without privileged orders, but with a hereditary royal family at the head of it instead of an elective chief magistrate. He believed that no nation that had ever known the joy of worshiping a royal family could ever be robbed of it and not fade away and die of melancholy. I urged that kings were dangerous. He said, then have cats. He was sure that a royal family of cats would answer every purpose. They would be as useful as any other royal family, they would know as much, they would have the same virtues and the same treacheries, the same disposition to get up shindies with other royal cats, they would be laughably vain and absurd and never know it, they would be wholly inexpensive; finally, they would have as sound a divine right as any other royal house, and \u201cTom VII, or Tom XI, or Tom XIV by the grace of God King,\u201d would sound as well as it would when applied to the ordinary royal tomcat with tights on. \u201cAnd as a rule,\u201d said he, in his neat modern English, \u201cthe character of these cats would be considerably above the character of the average king, and this would be an immense moral advantage to the nation, for the reason that a nation always models its morals after its monarch\u2019s. The worship of royalty being founded in unreason, these graceful and harmless cats would easily become as sacred as any other royalties, and indeed more so, because it would presently be noticed that they hanged nobody, beheaded nobody, imprisoned nobody, inflicted no cruelties or injustices of any sort, and so must be worthy of a deeper love and reverence than the customary human king, and would certainly get it. The eyes of the whole harried world would soon be fixed upon this humane and gentle system, and royal butchers would presently begin to disappear; their subjects would fill the vacancies with catlings from our own royal house; we should become a factory; we should supply the thrones of the world; within forty years all Europe would be governed by cats, and we should furnish the cats. The reign of universal peace would begin then, to end no more forever…. Me-e-e-yow-ow-ow-ow\u2014fzt!\u2014wow!\u201d<\/p>\n

Hang him, I supposed he was in earnest, and was beginning to be persuaded by him, until he exploded that cat-howl and startled me almost out of my clothes. But he never could be in earnest. He didn\u2019t know what it was. He had pictured a distinct and perfectly rational and feasible improvement upon constitutional monarchy, but he was too feather-headed to know it, or care anything about it, either.<\/p>\n

\n

The Church steps in and sways popular opinion against Hank and his reforms. Everything he had worked to create in 6th century England is now being dismantled — the schools, newspapers, railroads, factories, and democratic principles — and Hank, Clarence, and the few still faithful to Hank’s vision are in peril. <\/em><\/p>\n

With armies of knights upon them, Hank and his faithful band make a final stand.<\/em><\/p>\n

Excerpt from Chapter LIII The Battle of Sand-Belt<\/strong><\/h5>\n

At last we could make out details. All the front ranks, no telling how many acres deep, were horsemen\u2014plumed knights in armor. Suddenly we heard the blare of trumpets; the slow walk burst into a gallop, and then\u2014well, it was wonderful to see! Down swept that vast horse-shoe wave\u2014it approached the sand-belt\u2014my breath stood still; nearer, nearer\u2014the strip of green turf beyond the yellow belt grew narrow\u2014narrower still\u2014became a mere ribbon in front of the horses\u2014then disappeared under their hoofs. Great Scott! Why, the whole front of that host shot into the sky with a thunder-crash, and became a whirling tempest of rags and fragments; and along the ground lay a thick wall of smoke that hid what was left of the multitude from our sight.<\/p>\n

Time for the second step in the plan of campaign! I touched a button, and shook the bones of England loose from her spine!<\/p>\n

In that explosion all our noble civilization-factories went up in the air and disappeared from the earth. It was a pity, but it was necessary. We could not afford to let the enemy turn our own weapons against us.<\/p>\n

Now ensued one of the dullest quarter-hours I had ever endured. We waited in a silent solitude enclosed by our circles of wire, and by a circle of heavy smoke outside of these. We couldn\u2019t see over the wall of smoke, and we couldn\u2019t see through it. But at last it began to shred away lazily, and by the end of another quarter-hour the land was clear and our curiosity was enabled to satisfy itself. No living creature was in sight! We now perceived that additions had been made to our defenses. The dynamite had dug a ditch more than a hundred feet wide, all around us, and cast up an embankment some twenty-five feet high on both borders of it. As to destruction of life, it was amazing. Moreover, it was beyond estimate. Of course, we could not count the dead, because they did not exist as individuals, but merely as homogeneous protoplasm, with alloys of iron and buttons.<\/p>\n

No life was in sight, but necessarily there must have been some wounded in the rear ranks, who were carried off the field under cover of the wall of smoke; there would be sickness among the others\u2014there always is, after an episode like that. But there would be no reinforcements; this was the last stand of the chivalry of England; it was all that was left of the order, after the recent annihilating wars.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

We heard muffled sounds approaching, and we sank down to the ground where we were. We made out another knight vaguely; he was coming very stealthily, and feeling his way. He was near enough now for us to see him put out a hand, find an upper wire, then bend and step under it and over the lower one. Now he arrived at the first knight\u2014and started slightly when he discovered him. He stood a moment\u2014no doubt wondering why the other one didn\u2019t move on; then he said, in a low voice, \u201cWhy dreamest thou here, good Sir Mar\u2014\u201d then he laid his hand on the corpse\u2019s shoulder\u2014and just uttered a little soft moan and sunk down dead. Killed by a dead man, you see\u2014killed by a dead friend, in fact. There was something awful about it.<\/p>\n

These early birds came scattering along after each other, about one every five minutes in our vicinity, during half an hour. They brought no armor of offense but their swords; as a rule, they carried the sword ready in the hand, and put it forward and found the wires with it. We would now and then see a blue spark when the knight that caused it was so far away as to be invisible to us; but we knew what had happened, all the same; poor fellow, he had touched a charged wire with his sword and been electrocuted. We had brief intervals of grim stillness, interrupted with piteous regularity by the clash made by the falling of an iron-clad; and this sort of thing was going on, right along, and was very creepy there in the dark and lonesomeness.<\/p>\n

We concluded to make a tour between the inner fences. We elected to walk upright, for convenience\u2019s sake; we argued that if discerned, we should be taken for friends rather than enemies, and in any case we should be out of reach of swords, and these gentry did not seem to have any spears along. Well, it was a curious trip. Everywhere dead men were lying outside the second fence\u2014not plainly visible, but still visible; and we counted fifteen of those pathetic statues\u2014dead knights standing with their hands on the upper wire.<\/p>\n

One thing seemed to be sufficiently demonstrated: our current was so tremendous that it killed before the victim could cry out. Pretty soon we detected a muffled and heavy sound, and next moment we guessed what it was. It was a surprise in force coming! whispered Clarence to go and wake the army, and notify it to wait in silence in the cave for further orders. He was soon back, and we stood by the inner fence and watched the silent lightning do its awful work upon that swarming host. One could make out but little of detail; but he could note that a black mass was piling itself up beyond the second fence. That swelling bulk was dead men! Our camp was enclosed with a solid wall of the dead\u2014a bulwark, a breastwork, of corpses, you may say. One terrible thing about this thing was the absence of human voices; there were no cheers, no war cries; being intent upon a surprise, these men moved as noiselessly as they could; and always when the front rank was near enough to their goal to make it proper for them to begin to get a shout ready, of course they struck the fatal line and went down without testifying.<\/p>\n

I sent a current through the third fence now; and almost immediately through the fourth and fifth, so quickly were the gaps filled up. I believed the time was come now for my climax; I believed that that whole army was in our trap. Anyway, it was high time to find out. So I touched a button and set fifty electric suns aflame on the top of our precipice.<\/p>\n

Land, what a sight! We were enclosed in three walls of dead men! All the other fences were pretty nearly filled with the living, who were stealthily working their way forward through the wires. The sudden glare paralyzed this host, petrified them, you may say, with astonishment; there was just one instant for me to utilize their immobility in, and I didn\u2019t lose the chance. You see, in another instant they would have recovered their faculties, then they\u2019d have burst into a cheer and made a rush, and my wires would have gone down before it; but that lost instant lost them their opportunity forever; while even that slight fragment of time was still unspent, I shot the current through all the fences and struck the whole host dead in their tracks! There was a groan you could hear! It voiced the death-pang of eleven thousand men. It swelled out on the night with awful pathos.<\/p>\n

A glance showed that the rest of the enemy\u2014perhaps ten thousand strong\u2014were between us and the encircling ditch, and pressing forward to the assault. Consequently we had them all! and had them past help. Time for the last act of the tragedy. I fired the three appointed revolver shots\u2014which meant:<\/p>\n

\u201cTurn on the water!\u201d<\/p>\n

There was a sudden rush and roar, and in a minute the mountain brook was raging through the big ditch and creating a river a hundred feet wide and twenty-five deep.<\/p>\n

\u201cStand to your guns, men! Open fire!\u201d<\/p>\n

The thirteen gatlings began to vomit death into the fated ten thousand. They halted, they stood their ground a moment against that withering deluge of fire, then they broke, faced about and swept toward the ditch like chaff before a gale. A full fourth part of their force never reached the top of the lofty embankment; the three-fourths reached it and plunged over\u2014to death by drowning.<\/p>\n

Within ten short minutes after we had opened fire, armed resistance was totally annihilated, the campaign was ended, we fifty-four were masters of England. Twenty-five thousand men lay dead around us.<\/p>\n

But how treacherous is fortune! In a little while\u2014say an hour\u2014happened a thing, by my own fault, which\u2014but I have no heart to write that. Let the record end here.<\/p>\n

Chapter XLIV A Postscript by Clarence<\/strong><\/h5>\n

I, Clarence, must write it for him. He proposed that we two go out and see if any help could be accorded the wounded. I was strenuous against the project. I said that if there were many, we could do but little for them; and it would not be wise for us to trust ourselves among them, anyway. But he could seldom be turned from a purpose once formed; so we shut off the electric current from the fences, took an escort along, climbed over the enclosing ramparts of dead knights, and moved out upon the field. The first wounded mall who appealed for help was sitting with his back against a dead comrade. When The Boss bent over him and spoke to him, the man recognized him and stabbed him. That knight was Sir Meliagraunce, as I found out by tearing off his helmet. He will not ask for help any more.<\/p>\n

We carried The Boss to the cave and gave his wound, which was not very serious, the best care we could. In this service we had the help of Merlin, though we did not know it. He was disguised as a woman, and appeared to be a simple old peasant goodwife. In this disguise, with brown-stained face and smooth shaven, he had appeared a few days after The Boss was hurt and offered to cook for us, saying her people had gone off to join certain new camps which the enemy were forming, and that she was starving. The Boss had been getting along very well, and had amused himself with finishing up his record.<\/p>\n

We were glad to have this woman, for we were short handed. We were in a trap, you see\u2014a trap of our own making. If we stayed where we were, our dead would kill us; if we moved out of our defenses, we should no longer be invincible. We had conquered; in turn we were conquered. The Boss recognized this; we all recognized it. If we could go to one of those new camps and patch up some kind of terms with the enemy\u2014yes, but The Boss could not go, and neither could I, for I was among the first that were made sick by the poisonous air bred by those dead thousands. Others were taken down, and still others. To-morrow\u2014<\/p>\n

To-morrow. It is here. And with it the end. About midnight I awoke, and saw that hag making curious passes in the air about The Boss\u2019s head and face, and wondered what it meant. Everybody but the dynamo-watch lay steeped in sleep; there was no sound. The woman ceased from her mysterious foolery, and started tip-toeing toward the door. I called out:<\/p>\n

\u201cStop! What have you been doing?\u201d<\/p>\n

She halted, and said with an accent of malicious satisfaction:<\/p>\n

\u201cYe were conquerors; ye are conquered! These others are perishing\u2014you also. Ye shall all die in this place\u2014every one\u2014except him. He sleepeth now\u2014and shall sleep thirteen centuries. I am Merlin!\u201d<\/p>\n

Then such a delirium of silly laughter overtook him that he reeled about like a drunken man, and presently fetched up against one of our wires. His mouth is spread open yet; apparently he is still laughing. I suppose the face will retain that petrified laugh until the corpse turns to dust.<\/p>\n

The Boss has never stirred\u2014sleeps like a stone. If he does not wake to-day we shall understand what kind of a sleep it is, and his body will then be borne to a place in one of the remote recesses of the cave where none will ever find it to desecrate it. As for the rest of us\u2014well, it is agreed that if any one of us ever escapes alive from this place, he will write the fact here, and loyally hide this Manuscript with The Boss, our dear good chief, whose property it is, be he alive or dead.<\/p>\n

THE END OF THE MANUSCRIPT<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[END OF SELECTION]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Clemens\u2019s fascination with English history developed with his visits to the country and his research for The Prince and the Pauper (1881), a tale of a royal and a commoner changing places so each could find out what he had been envying. He was fascinated by the Elizabethan period and its wholesome frankness about sex … Continue reading from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[83,5],"tags":[39,18,53,68,51,13,56,61,40,67,66,47,24,28,50,57,60,58,25,10],"class_list":["post-57","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mark-twain","category-samuel-l-clemens","tag-catholicism","tag-civil-war","tag-class","tag-colt-factory","tag-connecticut-setting","tag-constitution","tag-democracy","tag-emancipation","tag-fiction","tag-firearms","tag-guns","tag-hartford-setting","tag-innovation","tag-manufacturing","tag-old-world","tag-satire","tag-slavery","tag-social-commentary","tag-technology","tag-womens-rights"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hartfordlit.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hartfordlit.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hartfordlit.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hartfordlit.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hartfordlit.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=57"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hartfordlit.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hartfordlit.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=57"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hartfordlit.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=57"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hartfordlit.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=57"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}