Until last year

Until last year along came theFashoda crisis and quite early one morning Covess was discovered in spats and a pith helmet, working his way around Piccadilly trying to recruit volunteers to invade France. Therehad been some idea of commandeering a Cunard liner. By the time they caught him he’d sworn in several coster-mongers, two streetwalkers and a music-hall comedian. Stencil remembered painfully that they all had been singing Onward, Christian Soldiers in various key and tempi.

-Thomas Pynchon, in the novel V (p. 174, Bantam Windstone paperback edition, 1963)