ABSTRACT
Christopher Lane places Saki's redemptive militarism' in the context of similar arguments by proto-fascists such as D. H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound that were meant to counteract a perceived feminization of British culture. It becomes a synecdoche for the dilemma of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century British imperialism, which still projected a fantasy of mastery in which the role of the soldier and the role of the dandy increasingly clashed. Saki dismantles the Empire because it has lost its legitimacy with the loss of the racial, moral and physical superiority of the English. Saki's solution to foreign threat and domestic malaise in this context of anxious imperialism is a kind of redemptive militarism. The Scout movement, alongside other paramilitary and military organizations, embodied Edwardian anxiety about physical decline, loss of racial energy and the mounting challenge from European rivals' precisely the reasons why, according to Saki's When William Came, Britain is defeated and easily colonized.
