Hors de Combat
Pardon My French
Years ago, while doing a bit of research at the Royal Military College of Canada, I ran across a broken vending machine. Lest the cadets at this officially bi-lingual academy sacrifice their hard-won loonies to a distributeur automatique that had lost the gift of distribution, I made a little sign that read hors de combat and taped it on the offending device.
If, on the day in question, I had been running short on whimsy, I would have used the phrase hors de service. However, as I was searching, systematically, the back numbers of the yet-to-be digitized Militär-Wochenblatt for some of the earlier works of Ernst Jünger, I had to find my fun where I could.
Alas, my warning fell on deaf ears, or, to be more precise, blind eyes. Thus, as I popped out of the library for a breath of air, I saw cadets attempt, without success, to trade their coins for the chocolate bars that would get them through an afternoon of le calcul.
‘What we have here’, I said to myself, ‘is a failure to communicate.’
