One of the little benefits of a life spent reading is that sometimes events will juxtapose themselves against the weirdest bits of text. So for example, back around 2005, when I was fecklessly working for the Dorothy Day Center, a homeless shelter, in St. Paul, Minnesota, and on my lunch break dipping into an old G.K. Chesterton miscellany that I’d found at the downtown library, I stumbled on a fascinating essay from around 1906. At that time, a man named Wilhelm Voigt was in the news for stealing a bunch of money from the Prussian army by pretending to be an officer. Chesterton writes of the affair:
… The most absurd part of this absurd fraud (at least, to English eyes) is one which, oddly enough, has received comparatively little comment. I mean the point at which the Mayor asked for a warrant, and the Captain pointed to the bayonets of his soldiery and said. "These are my authority." One would have thought any one would have known that no soldier would talk like that. … [G]enuine professional soldiers do not talk like Adelphi villains and utter theatrical epigrams in praise of abstract violence.