Emphatically--This Way or That

When I was first taught about Constantine’s dream in yesterday’s blog, the inscription had no particular emphasis. When I learned the history behind it, suddenly there was a significant change in the way I understood the words Constantine saw. It might be fun to pass along a couple of more familiar historical quotations with the new emphases I’ve learned.
“I shall return!!” brings to mind the image of a vainglorious, arrogant and even defiant general who disobeyed presidents and got us into a major war with China. But that’s not the way MacArthur said it back in 1942. (We both like to imagine and snicker at heroic words.)
He had been effectively exiled to the Philippines and had spent most of the 1930s warning that the islands were dangerously undefended. When the Japanese attack came, he wisely took his tiny forces to a narrow peninsula—Bataan—where they held out for months.
Finally, out of ammunition, out of food and supplies, he was forced to call for surrender. He fully intended to surrender with his men and endure captivity with them. At the last moment, Roosevelt contacted him personally and ordered him to escape from the Philippines.
He refused—until FDR promised that a vast American fleet and military force awaited him in Australia and that he would soon be on his way back to liberate the islands. He, his staff, his wife and young son took off in a lone DC-3, with no weapons, no escort, through enemy airspace.
He left everything he owned behind. After hours of tense flying through Japanese space, he finally arrived in Australia, gaunt from months of short rations, exhausted after nearly 24 hours on the way; he learned that Roosevelt had lied. There was no fleet at Australia; they were expecting a Japanese invasion themselves.
He knew that rumors would spread that he had deserted his men—that he had loaded his plane with personal effects and run. Stunned at the reality of his situation, desperately tired, he faced reporters. An idiot type (the kind who asks you, after you’ve watched your entire family die in a fire, “how do you feel about that?”) of a reporter asked him what he was going to do now.
He answered with a bitter murmur, “I came through and I shall return.” The press turned it into a bombastic statement of godlike defiance. It surely wasn’t.
Then there’s the wonderful story of John Paul. He trained to be an officer in the British Navy; his hot temper and emotional instability led him to murder a crewman. He escaped to the colonies. When the Revolution broke out in 1775, he was nearly the only man the Americans had who was trained as a naval officer (and he had real talent for fighting—with the enemy and his superiors).
They sent him to France. He was to raid British shipping in the Channel. When John Paul (he had added the name Jones to duck the murder rap) came to inspect his force, he was horrified. His own ship was ancient (repainted and renamed the “Bonhomme Richard”), unseaworthy.
Its cannons looked unsafe to fire. The commander of his French escort ships was a true nut case. Jones set sail nonetheless. As soon as he got into the Channel, he found himself up against the newest and most dangerous ship in the British Navy. BOOM! He fired a broadside; half of his guns simply blew up. He was unarmed.
BOOM! The British ship replied. All the seams on the Good Man Richard tore open and it began to sink. His French escort vessels fired one broadside into Jones and fled. The volleys kept coming from the English ship. A shot tore away his flag so that it fluttered to the deck—normally a sign of surrender.
Feeling pity for the helpless wreck in front of him, noticing that Jones’s flag was gone, the British captain called out, “Have you struck (surrendered)?” Feeling intense frustration (and none too stable to start with), Jones screamed back in stilted 18th Century English, (Think Miss Piggy from the Muppets on a bad day), “Surrender? Surrender? I haven’t even had a chance to start fighting yet!!”
He ordered his crew to throw out grappling hooks and pull their dying vessel next to the British warship. They swarmed over the English frigate with a mania born of desperation. They took it—as the Bonhomme Richard sank.
Jones sailed the “Serapis” back to France, refitted it and used it to do as much as any other unit in that war to win our Independence. He drove British insurance rates on Channel shipping out of sight until all the bankers and merchants in London demanded peace.
But his cry of “I have not yet begun to fight” was never as heroic as we like to imagine it.