Do you realize that the USA are entirely the creation of the accursed race, the French? They it was who sent a band of atheists and freemasons to subvert the loyal and pampered English colonists. They armed the rabble against our brave soldiers. They built the capitol at Washington, the Statue of Liberty in New York and the dreadful United Nations Headquarters. They introduced republican institutions, alcoholism, avarice, immodesty and all the dire features of that stricken land.
--Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966), writing to Nancy Mitford, 22 May 1957, from The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh (1996), ed. Charlotte Mosley
Fun scene above: The British surrender at Yorktown after being trapped by Washington's army and finding that the navy they saw arriving in the distance was not the British navy they were expecting, but the French navy under Admiral de Grasse. Cornwallis was so embarrassed at losing to the American rabble that he send his second-in-command, General O'Hara, to surrender, with orders to give up his sword to the aristocratic Frenchman, not the rebel American. But Admiral de Grasse refused to accept the sword, and ordered O'Hara to surrender it to George Washington. Washington also refused to accept it, so his second-in-command received it-- not at all the result Cornwallis wished. During the ceremony the British army band played "The World Turned Upside Down." An eyewitness reported on the British surrendering their arms: "I am a witness that they performed this duty in a very unofficer-like manner; and that many of the soldiers manifested a sullen temper, throwing their arms on the pile with violence, as if determined to render them useless."
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