The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts by Louis De Bernières

love, and no one had ever been in love with her. She was without sexuality, but all the poor people of the earth were her family, and she had seen the pistacos with her own eyes of a child.

6
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THE GENERAL PLANS HIS LEAVE
    HE WAS CALLED Carlo after his Italian grandfather and he was the finest possible kind of soldier; that is to say he was not at all interested in swaggering about intimidating people, in social climbing, in glamorous warmongering, or in genuine Scotch whisky. He was on the contrary a sensitive and intelligent man of broad education and many interests, which is why the military authorities treated him with enough suspicion to send him to Cesar, and also why the civil authorities were so obstructive when he got there. A man of integrity in high office was a
rara avis
that could very easily disrupt the smooth operation of corruption and incompetence even more than a man of arbitrary megalomania or extreme violence. He caused enormous resentment on his second day of office by jailing the police chief for the rape of a mestiza woman, and doubling the sentence when the guilty man courteously and discreetly offered him a large bribe according to time-honoured custom and practice. Everyone thought he was mad or, even worse, a Communist when he publicly denounced the city police chief. The police force spontaneously came out on strike. Nobody noticed the difference, and the strike was in any case rapidly ended when the lepidopterological General threatened a thorough investigation into the record of every single policeman in the department.
    General Carlo Maria Fuerte had to his credit an anthology of respectable verse on patriotic themes, and the most complete work on the nation’s butterflies that had ever been compiled. Since his country was the world’s foremost producer of those cardboard books with pictures that can be moved by pulling tags, his book incorporated a life-size representation of the calicos butterfly that looked like an owl. It could be made to flap its wings and move its antennae. It was a great mortification to him that this splendid and compendious work had been bought by practically every important library in the world, but not a single copy had sold in his own country. He attributed this to lack of patriotism, not realising that comparatively few people could read, that even if they could, they could not have afforded the book, and if they could both read and afford it, then they were the kind of people who would have got their servants to squash any butterfly that came near them. He was now compiling a work on the nation’s humming-birds, meticulously illustrated in oils done with the help of his own photographs, and was unaware that he had discovered three species hitherto undocumented. Like his butterfly project, his
Picaflores de la Cordillera y La Sierra Nevada
was motivated by patriotism.
    There are two types of patriotism, although sometimes the two are mingled in one breast. The first kind one might call nationalism; nationalists believe that all other countries are inferior in every respect, and one would do them a favour by dominating them. Other countries are always in the wrong, they are less free, less civilised, are less glorious in battle, are perfidious, prone to falling for insane and alien ideologies which no reasonable person could believe, are irreligious and abnormal. Such patriots are the most common variety, and their patriotism is the most contemptible thing on earth.
    The second type of patriot is best described by returning to the example of General Fuerte. General Fuerte did not believe in ‘my country, right or wrong’; on the contrary, he loved his land despite the faults he could so clearly see and that he laboured to correct. It was his frequently stated opinion that anyone who supported their country when it was obviously inthe wrong, or who failed to see its faults, was the worst kind of traitor. Whereas the first kind of patriot really glories in his