The Sub-Prefect Should Have Held His Tongue, and Other Essays

"I can only conclude that science has enormously extended the sphere of our responsibilities, while our consciences have remained the same size," says Butler at one point, aptly summing up some of the main themes covered in this book. Butler's various essays on pre-WWII and wartime Croatia (and other parts of the former Yugoslavia) were the main reason I bought this book. In several pieces written during the 1950s, Butler provided some of the first intelligent commentary (i.e. not propaganda) on the Nazi-supported Ustasha regime in wartime Croatia and the rather dubious role of Archbishop (later Cardinal) Stepinac, Croatia's Roman Catholic primate at the time. But the essays in this book deal with a much wider array of topics, from Irish culture and nationalism, through the Holocaust to literary criticism. Butler is most intriguing and thought-provoking when he speculates on the morals (or lack thereof) of modern man. Thus, in one of the book's most powerful essays, "The Children of Drancy," he writes about the deportation of over 4,000 Jewish children from France to the Nazi Germany (where they were sent to the gas chambers). He notes the enormity of just this one crime, which involved the collaboration of so many people (from politicians to the lowliest railroad technicians and clerks) and a highly-sophisticated, quintessentially modern and industrial division of labor, and how it has been almost completely forgotten - unike, say, Herod's slaughter of the innocents 2000 years ago.