George Bernard Shaw a penn State Electronic Classics Series Publication

NOTES TO THE DEVIL’S DISCIPLE
BURGOYNE
General John Burgoyne, who is presented in this play for the
first time (as far as I am aware) on the English stage, is not a
conventional stage soldier, but as faithful a portrait as it is in
the nature of stage portraits to be. His objection to profane
swearing is not borrowed from Mr. Gilbert’s H. M. S. Pin-
afore: it is taken from the Code of Instructions drawn up by
himself for his officers when he introduced Light Horse into
the English army. His opinion that English soldiers should
be treated as thinking beings was no doubt as unwelcome to
the military authorities of his time, when nothing was thought
of ordering a soldier a thousand lashes, as it will be to those
modern victims of the flagellation neurosis who are so anx-
ious to revive that discredited sport. His military reports are
very clever as criticisms, and are humane and enlightened
within certain aristocratic limits, best illustrated perhaps by
his declaration, which now sounds so curious, that he should
blush to ask for promotion on any other ground than that of
family influence. As a parliamentary candidate, Burgoyne

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took our common expression “fighting an election” so very
literally that he led his supporters to the poll at Preston in
1768 with a loaded pistol in each hand, and won the seat,
though he was fined 1,000 pounds, and denounced by Junius,
for the pistols.
It is only within quite recent years that any general recog-
nition has become possible for the feeling that led Burgoyne,
a professed enemy of oppression in India and elsewhere, to
accept his American command when so many other officers
threw up their commissions rather than serve in a civil war
against the Colonies. His biographer De Fonblanque, writ-
ing in 1876, evidently regarded his position as indefensible.
Nowadays, it is sufficient to say that Burgoyne was an Impe-
rialist. He sympathized with the colonists; but when they
proposed as a remedy the disruption of the Empire, he re-
garded that as a step backward in civilization. As he put it to
the House of Commons, “while we remember that we are
contending against brothers and fellow subjects, we must
also remember that we are contending in this crisis for the
fate of the British Empire.” Eighty-four years after his de-
feat, his republican conquerors themselves engaged in a civil
war for the integrity of their Union. In 1886 the Whigs who
represented the anti-Burgoyne tradition of American Inde-
pendence in English politics, abandoned Gladstone and made
common cause with their political opponents in defence of
the Union between England and Ireland. Only the other
day England sent 200,000 men into the field south of the
equator to fight out the question whether South Africa should
develop as a Federation of British Colonies or as an indepen-
dent Afrikander United States. In all these cases the Union-
ists who were detached from their parties were called ren-
egades, as Burgoyne was. That, of course, is only one of the
unfortunate consequences of the fact that mankind, being
for the most part incapable of politics, accepts vituperation
as an easy and congenial substitute. Whether Burgoyne or
Washington, Lincoln or Davis, Gladstone or Bright, Mr.
Chamberlain or Mr. Leonard Courtney was in the right will
never be settled, because it will never be possible to prove
that the government of the victor has been better for man-
kind than the government of the vanquished would have been.
It is true that the victors have no doubt on the point; but to
the dramatist, that certainty of theirs is only part of the hu-

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The Devil’s Disciple
man comedy. The American Unionist is often a Separatist as
to Ireland; the English Unionist often sympathizes with the
Polish Home Ruler; and both English and American Union-
ists are apt to be Disruptionists as regards that Imperial An-
cient of Days, the Empire of China. Both are Unionists con-
cerning Canada, but with a difference as to the precise appli-
cation to it of the Monroe doctrine. As for me, the dramatist,
I smile, and lead the conversation back to Burgoyne.
Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga made him that occasion-
ally necessary part of our British system, a scapegoat. The
explanation of his defeat given in the play is founded on a
passage quoted by De Fonblanque from Fitzmaurice’s Life
of Lord Shelburne, as follows: “Lord George Germain, hav-
ing among other peculiarities a particular dislike to be put
out of his way on any occasion, had arranged to call at his
office on his way to the country to sign the dispatches; but
as those addressed to Howe had not been faircopied, and he
was not disposed to be balked of his projected visit to Kent,
they were not signed then and were forgotten on his return
home.” These were the dispatches instructing Sir William
Howe, who was in New York, to effect a junction at Albany
with Burgoyne, who had marched from Boston for that pur-
pose. Burgoyne got as far as Saratoga, where, failing the ex-
pected reinforcement, he was hopelessly outnumbered, and
his officers picked off, Boer fashion, by the American farmer-
sharpshooters. His own collar was pierced by a bullet. The
publicity of his defeat, however, was more than compensated
at home by the fact that Lord George’s trip to Kent had not
been interfered with, and that nobody knew about the over-
sight of the dispatch. The policy of the English Government
and Court for the next two years was simply concealment of
Germain’s neglect. Burgoyne’s demand for an inquiry was
defeated in the House of Commons by the court party; and
when he at last obtained a committee, the king got rid of it
by a prorogation. When Burgoyne realized what had hap-
pened about the instructions to Howe (the scene in which I
have represented him as learning it before Saratoga is not
historical: the truth did not dawn on him until many months
afterwards) the king actually took advantage of his being a
prisoner of war in England on parole, and ordered him to
return to America into captivity. Burgoyne immediately re-
signed all his appointments; and this practically closed his

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military career, though he was afterwards made Commander
of the Forces in Ireland for the purpose of banishing him
from parliament.
The episode illustrates the curious perversion of the En-
glish sense of honor when the privileges and prestige of the
aristocracy are at stake. Mr. Frank Harris said, after the di-
sastrous battle of Modder River, that the English, having lost
America a century ago because they preferred George III,
were quite prepared to lose South Africa to-day because they
preferred aristocratic commanders to successful ones. Horace
Walpole, when the parliamentary recess came at a critical
period of the War of Independence, said that the Lords could
not be expected to lose their pheasant shooting for the sake
of America. In the working class, which, like all classes, has
its own official aristocracy, there is the same reluctance to
discredit an institution or to “do a man out of his job.” At
bottom, of course, this apparently shameless sacrifice of great
public interests to petty personal ones, is simply the prefer-
ence of the ordinary man for the things he can feel and un-
derstand to the things that are beyond his capacity. It is stu-
pidity, not dishonesty.
Burgoyne fell a victim to this stupidity in two ways. Not
only was he thrown over, in spite of his high character and
distinguished services, to screen a court favorite who had
actually been cashiered for cowardice and misconduct in the
field fifteen years before; but his peculiar critical tempera-
ment and talent, artistic, satirical, rather histrionic, and his
fastidious delicacy of sentiment, his fine spirit and human-
ity, were just the qualities to make him disliked by stupid
people because of their dread of ironic criticism. Long after
his death, Thackeray, who had an intense sense of human
character, but was typically stupid in valuing and interpret-
ing it, instinctively sneered at him and exulted in his defeat.
That sneer represents the common English attitude towards
the Burgoyne type. Every instance in which the critical ge-
nius is defeated, and the stupid genius (for both tempera-
ments have their genius) “muddles through all right,” is popu-
lar in England. But Burgoyne’s failure was not the work of
his own temperament, but of the stupid temperament. What
man could do under the circumstances he did, and did hand-
somely and loftily. He fell, and his ideal empire was dismem-
bered, not through his own misconduct, but because Sir

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The Devil’s Disciple
George Germain overestimated the importance of his Kentish
holiday, and underestimated the difficulty of conquering
those remote and inferior creatures, the colonists. And King
George and the rest of the nation agreed, on the whole, with
Germain. It is a significant point that in America, where
Burgoyne was an enemy and an invader, he was admired
and praised. The climate there is no doubt more favorable to
intellectual vivacity.
I have described Burgoyne’s temperament as rather histri-
onic; and the reader will have observed that the Burgoyne of
the Devil’s Disciple is a man who plays his part in life, and
makes all its points, in the manner of a born high comedian.
If he had been killed at Saratoga, with all his comedies un-
written, and his plan for turning As You Like It into a Beggar’s
Opera unconceived, I should still have painted the same pic-
ture of him on the strength of his reply to the articles of
capitulation proposed to him by his American conqueror
General Gates. Here they are:
PROPOSITION.
1. General Burgoyne’s army being reduced by repeated de-
feats, by desertion, sickness, etc., their provisions exhausted,
their military horses, tents and baggage taken or destroyed,
their retreat cut off, and their camp invested, they can only
be allowed to surrender as prisoners of war.
ANSWER.
1. Lieut.-General Burgoyne’s army, however reduced, will
never admit that their retreat is cut off while they have arms
in their hands.
PROPOSITION.
2. The officers and soldiers may keep the baggage belonging
to them. The generals of the United States never permit in-
dividuals to be pillaged.
ANSWER.
2. Noted.
PROPOSITION.
3. The troops under his Excellency General Burgoyne will
be conducted by the most convenient route to New England,
marching by easy marches, and sufficiently provided for by
the way.

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ANSWER.
3. Agreed.
PROPOSITION.
4. The officers will be admitted on parole and will be treated
with the liberality customary in such cases, so long as they,
by proper behaviour, continue to deserve it; but those who
are apprehended having broke their parole, as some British
officers have done, must expect to be close confined.
ANSWER.
4. There being no officer in this army, under, or capable of
being under, the description of breaking parole, this article
needs no answer.
PROPOSITION.
5. All public stores, artillery, arms, ammunition, carriages,
horses, etc.,etc., must be delivered to commissaries appointed
to receive them.
ANSWER.
5. All public stores may be delivered, arms excepted.
PROPOSITION.
6. These terms being agreed to and signed, the troops under
his Excellency’s, General Burgoyne’s command, may be drawn
up in their encampments, where they will be ordered to
ground their arms, and may thereupon be marched to the
river-side on their way to Bennington.
ANSWER.
6. This article is inadmissible in any extremity. Sooner than
this army will consent to ground their arms in their encamp-
ments, they will rush on the enemy determined to take no
quarter.
And, later on, “If General Gates does not mean to recede
from the 6th article, the treaty ends at once: the army will to
a man proceed to any act of desperation sooner than submit
to that article.”
Here you have the man at his Burgoynest. Need I add that
he had his own way; and that when the actual ceremony of
surrender came, he would have played poor General Gates
off the stage, had not that commander risen to the occasion
by handing him back his sword.
In connection with the reference to Indians with scalping
knives, who, with the troops hired from Germany, made up

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The Devil’s Disciple
about half Burgoyne’s force, I may mention that Burgoyne
offered two of them a reward to guide a Miss McCrea, be-
trothed to one of the English officers, into the English lines.
The two braves quarrelled about the reward; and the more
sensitive of them, as a protest against the unfairness of the
other, tomahawked the young lady. The usual retaliations
were proposed under the popular titles of justice and so forth;
but as the tribe of the slayer would certainly have followed
suit by a massacre of whites on the Canadian frontier,
Burgoyne was compelled to forgive the crime, to the intense
disgust of indignant Christendom.