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Library / Literature & Fiction

The Toys of Peace, and Other Papers

by Saki

Pages
about 220
Category
Literature & Fiction
Language
English
Reading time
4 h at 250 wpm
Start readingThe whole book, as cards or one word at a time. 2.2 h at 450 wpm in Read mode.

From the opening

“When peace comes,” wrote an officer of the 22nd Royal Fusiliers, the regiment in which Munro was a private and in which he rose to the rank of lance-sergeant, “Saki will give us the most wonderful of all the books about the war.” But that book of the war will not be written; for Munro has died for King and country. In this volume are his last tales. And it is because these tales, brilliant and elusive as butterflies, hide, rather than reveal, the character of the man who wrote them, give but a suggestion of his tenderness and simplicity, of his iron will, of his splendour in the grip of war, that it is my duty to write these pages about him, now that he lies in the kind earth of France. It is but to do what his choice of a pen-name makes me sure he himself would have done for a friend.

“Yon rising Moon that looks for us again, How oft hereafter will she wax and wane; How oft hereafter, rising, look for us! Through this same Garden—and for one in vain.

“And when like her, O Saki, you shall pass Among the Guests, star-scattered on the grass, And in your joyous errand reach the spot Where I made one—turn down an empty glass.”

The first time that Munro used the name of Saki was, I believe, in 1890, when he published in the Westminster Gazette the second of the political satires, which were afterwards collected in a volume, called Alice in Westminster. It was, I think, because the wistful philosophy of FitzGerald appealed to him, as it did to so many of his contemporaries, that he chose a pen-name from his verses. He loved the fleeting beauty of life. “There is one thing I care for and that is youth,” he once said. And he always remained youthful.

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