Free Warm and Witty Side of Attila the Hun by Jeffrey Sackett Page A

world.”
    Real Quaylisms abound, as numerous websites attest. This writer's favorite comes from a speech he gave to a Thanksgiving festival in Virginia: "I suppose three things certainly come to my mind that we want to say thank you. The first would be our family. Your family, my family— which is composed of an immediate family of a wife and three children, a larger family with grandparents and aunts and uncles. We all have our family, whichever that may be." Sheer poetry.

DICTATORS AND DICTATORSHIPS
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    Benito Mussolini reveled in his well-documented virility and amorous predisposition. When a journalist asked him what the first thing he did in the morning, he replied, "I jump right out of bed. No matter how lovely the head beside me on the pillow."
    On another occasion, and with uncharacteristic modesty, Mussolini said, "A man in my position must be stupid at least once a day."
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    Adolf Hitler hated flying in airplanes. Benito Mussolini loved piloting them.
    This led to an awkward situation during one of Mussolini's early visits to Germany. Neither man knew the other very well, it being early in their relationship, so each was eager to impress the other. Hitler proudly showed Mussolini a new experimental sea plane that his new Luftwaffe was building, and Mussolini insisted upon flying it. Hitler reluctantly agreed, and the two dictators boarded the sea plane for a quick spin over the North Sea. The problem was that despite his enthusiasm for flying, Mussolini was not a very good pilot and was unfamiliar with the controls of the sea plane. These facts were made quickly apparent by the way the plane lurched, dipped, rose, and basically wobbled with a nervous Duce at the helm and a terrified Führer sitting beside him. Mussolini eventually managed to land the plane and taxi to the dock. When the two dictators emerged, both were acting quite self-consciously as if nothing were amiss, but both their faces were as white as sheets; and they then, deeply engaged in conversation and paying no attention to their surroundings, walked arm in arm to the end of the dock, kept going, and fell face first into the cold waters of the North Sea.
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    Despite his record of bloodshed and his fondness for terror, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin was also the unsophisticated product of a small provincial city. On one occasion he was in the apartment of Soviet foreign minister Maxim Litvinov when he noticed a "position book" on the table, i.e., a manual illustrating a variety of positions for sexual intercourse. After paging through it and examining the pictures, he turned to Litvinov and asked, "Tell me, Maxim Litvinov, do people really do this sort of thing?"
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    Stalin's elderly mother was equally rural, provincial, and unsophisticated, and more than a little obtuse. Stalin had already consolidated his power and his control of the Soviet state when he had his mother brought to the Kremlin from Tbilisi , Georgia , for a lengthy visit. She returned home sullenly content that her son seemed to be doing well, but for the life of her she could not figure out what he did for a living.
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    One must, as it has been said, give the devil his due. Corporal Adolf Hitler was a brave soldier in World War One, and he single-handedly captured seven enemy soldiers.
    During the Battle of the Somme, the murderous clash of Germans, English, and French that lasted from July to November, 1916, and left one and a half million men dead or wounded, Hitler served as a dispatch runner. Telecommunications in warfare were very limited in 1916, and if a message had to be sent from one part of the battlefield to another, it often had to be physically carried. This was the job of the dispatch runner, and Hitler did his duty with enthusiasm. It was a dangerous assignment—Hitler was shot at one point—but it was a vitally important one.
    On one occasion, surrounded by gun smoke, fog, and the darkness of early dawn, Corporal Hitler heard a babble