I

ON casual acquaintance we admired and even liked the Japanese beetle. A tidy little scarab with a fine bronze and green iridescence, he was altogether the sort of insect a fantastic person would consider setting in a scarf pin. This thought, E. and I not being fantastic persons, we did not entertain, but we could understand the temptation to less balanced æsthetes than ourselves. Of course we never realized that it was the Japanese beetle, the beetle wherever he thrives, we were meeting. When later we met him in all his formidableness, I recalled a long-ago casual chat with a tall man who looked like Wotan in a black cutaway, and being told too late that I had babbled to President Eliot of Harvard. The beetle in his full formidableness we were not to encounter until we had returned to a soil that he had provisionally made his native heath.

It was this way. In front of the old, stone, Pennsylvania farmhouse of George II date which had become our home, began to grow up, surprisingly, a fine barrier of green hollyhocks. By the middle of June, 1933, they promised to be a parti-colored glory. It was June 17 when, out to enjoy the hollyhocks, E. discovered three or four Japanese beetles in each translucent cup, and the cups being eaten down rapidly to shapeless butts. She reported to me as I stood on the steps under the south dining-room door — the Georgian house being full of doors, we have to name them. So I was standing on the shale steps before the south dining-room door under a century-old grapevine trained widely over the purple shale wall. As I planned how to calm what seemed to me E.’s undue agitation over a beetle more or less, I looked upward and saw the sky through broad vine leaves that had suddenly become so much brown lace. A little examination of such leaves showed them studded with bronze moving spots — ten or a dozen to a leaf. Instead of soothing E.’s agitation, I now shared it, for, short of Hampton Court, our vine stalk was the biggest I knew.

What to do? There was a hurried council of war. We had heard of glass traps; we had even seen them greenly pendent in front yards, without grasping their meaning. In ten minutes the Dodge was five miles away before the nearest, hardware store. I made a frugal purchase of four traps and a can of rose scent in sawdust or the like. In twenty minutes more the four traps, a little water in the bottom of each quart jar, were dangling from green iron supporters set near the hollyhocks and the big grapevine, and not merely set, but drawing many beetles down the funnel and into the water. Our static defense had begun. If possible, they should not pass. But pass they did. The traps filled; there were as many beetles as ever in the hollyhocks, and the vine leaves continued to become lace.

But the filling of the traps brought æsthetic pleasures. In a fight to the death, it is advantageous to have a foe who dies not messily but beautifully. Since sooner or later E. and I were to see some barrelfuls of dead beetles, the fact that they were iridescently beautiful in collective death, as compared with cutworms or caterpillars, who in death are merely disgusting, — that the beetle, whether living or dead, so long as you respect the integrity of his carapace, is always beautiful, — lent a grace to all efforts looking toward their extermination. Also those about to die in the traps afforded a sinister splendor before their taking off. A quart of beetles boiling vigorously behind glass, a bronzy ebullition with greenish metallic reflections — this would be an arresting sight, in a bizarre fashion beautiful, even if one did not have the satisfaction of knowing that here were perhaps two thousand ruthless foes in articulo mortis.

As the jars filled, however, there were no fewer beetles on the grapevine and hollyhocks. A small-scale static defense was getting us nowhere. Meanwhile the beetle was finding new objectives — flowering peaches on the lawn, our lone quince bush, a dwarf horse-chestnut with the most delicate beauty of spiky white blossoms and of exquisite fragrance — all these were being cut to pieces by the eager mandibles of the beetle. By making much dust on the dirt roads I managed to buy four more traps, — the shops were now nearly sold out, — a small hand sprayer, and a lethal spray guaranteed to settle the beetle’s business.

II

Increasing the static defense about precious objects like the hollyhocks and the dwarf horse-chestnut seemed to do some good. The traps filled more rapidly; there were fewer beetles in the flowers and on the leaves. As for the lethal spray, it was a complete washout. By pumping it on a single beetle for a minute or two you induced a sort of intoxication. His hold on blossom or leaf became unsteady. He teetered and eventually tumbled. Whether he bit the dust or whether he recovered, as I much suspected, there was no knowing. While you were spraying one beetle lethally you could pick twenty by hand, squeeze the shell of each between thumb and forefinger until it gave, and drop what you could feel confidently was a ruined beetle.

And hand-picking and squeezing were not merely far more expeditious than lethal spraying, but they also yielded a grim pleasure akin to the proverbial gaudium certaminis. Besides, as my small military reading assured me, it was a correct defensive — an aggressive defensive. We were to find more effective offensive measures than picking and squeezing, but none more productive of morale. There is something about feeling the carapace give slightly between thumb and finger. It makes you feel efficiently entomocidal in a fashion that more wholesale methods of destruction never do. Accordingly I urge upon every really serious beetler, whatever his habitual procedure of attack may be, never to fail for a few minutes each day to practise picking and squeezing.

I could never get E. to practise it, despite my assurances that with discretion in pressure it was an entirely cleanly process; by taking thought you could bash in the case without starting the juice. I even demonstrated the correct technique repeatedly, but it made no practical or imaginative appeal. E. was soon to develop an aggressive technique of her own, of characteristic delicacy and entire effectiveness. The lethal apparatus was of a simple kind — a tin coffee can of about six inches calibre, with half an inch of kerosene in the bottom, and an ancestral silver tablespoon. Holding the can under an infested blossom or leaf, E. tapped sharply with the ancestral spoon, and at each tap half a dozen beetles bit or rather drank the kerosene. I adopted the can, but continued hand-picking. One often got a dozen at a grasp. Unlike E., who never liked to touch the foe, I liked the feel of him. The scratching of two dozen mandibles at my closed palm and fingers, mandibles that otherwise would have been tearing at tender leaf or petal — this gave great satisfaction, and again powerfully made for morale.

It was interesting to note the spread of morale to our domestic staff — P., our admirable houseman, and M., his wife, our most acceptable cook. Contractually the beetle was no obligation of P.’s. He had agreed to clip the lawn, to chop wood in moderation, and on occasion to drive the car, but any beetling on his part was entirely uncovenanted. Nevertheless he enlisted voluntarily for the duration, emptied, rebaited, and reset the traps, and in my absence hand-picked with vigor and success.

While M.’s duties did not permit her taking the field, she maintained an effective intelligence service from the kitchen windows, whence she could see embeetled flowers and leaves invisible to us on the ground. Also she did good work in maintaining and stiffening the home front, providing cooling drinks at opportune moments, and taking over certain domestic functions that in time of peace normally fell to the masters of the home.

Meanwhile the rigors of the campaign hardened E. and myself. On sunny days the beetle attacked between eleven and one. When we had dealt with that wave and mopped up, there would come a second attack between three and five. For about six weeks we beetled from three to four hours in the heat of the day. On the whole we broke more than even with them. Most of them did not pass; the hollyhocks, grapevine, and flowering shrubs suffered, but kept an only slightly impaired beauty. We lost our suburban pallor, grew brown and husky.

III

What is difficult in beetling is maintenance of morale; all statistical odds are so frightfully adverse. Some days we trapped or picked three galvanized buckets full, twelve gallons, of lifeless but beautiful foes. It is a mere guess that this was a hundred thousand beetles; the estimate is rather too low than too high. After such a day there were fewer beetles in evidence, but the assault had told on flowers and shrubs. We had lost a little.

I soon found that the only way to meet statistics is with counter statistics. I had learned that each female produces forty of her kind; hence, each individual twenty. This lore came to us along folk ways, and I do not guarantee its scientific accuracy. Still, like much dubious militant lore, it served its morale-making purpose. Every time I felt a carapace give between thumb and forefinger I made a point of repeating, ‘Twenty will not be born.’ This kept me from weakening on very hot days. When P. poured twelve gallons of beetles from the pails to the wheelbarrow, a swift calculation proved that two hundred and forty gallons — about four barrels — would not trouble us next year. It recalled a grim calculation made early in the World War — that the war of attrition could end in favor of the Allies only after some five million Germans should have been disabled or killed. In beetling, as in a world war, I reflected, one must think in a large way.

With these statistical considerations I tried to hearten E. To my dismay her reaction was skeptical and negative. Suppose the ratio of increase were one to twenty; in order to stand even, year by year, we must kill nineteen beetles out of twenty. That we were killing so many there was no reason to believe. Statistics proved a hopeless case. It would be best to forget them, and merely kill beetles unmathematically as we had been doing. Then there was nothing certain in the one-to-twenty ratio. It might be much greater; there were infant casualties in the beetle world. In short, since we were dealing with the incalculable, it were best not to calculate.

To me this illustrated the proverbial aversion of E.’s sex to those dialectical and logical processes which are the glory of mine. However, I said nothing of this sort, but turned from the microchaos of our beetle war to the macrochaos of 1917. How had we kept the home front and especially the womenfolk properly hating the Huns? Why, of course, chiefly by alleging atrocities. In any prolonged campaign, atrocities seem indispensable. Only so long can one fight a chivalric foe. I thought of alleging, as an atrocity, six beetles on the silk of an ear of Golden Bantam corn, remarking that the children of that ear — to wit, the kernels — must remain unpollinated and hence unborn. But I recalled in time an uncanny sense of fairness in E. The violation of the Golden Bantam corn was after all merely an attack on our food supply, a measure ever sanctioned by the laws of war, and, one might say, only recently reconsecrated by ourselves and our military associates in the case of Hohenzollern Germany. No, a suitable atrocity must be found elsewhere. We found it in five beetles mumbling one new-blown rose. From that moment E.’s hatred of the beetle was bitter, the ancestral tablespoon hit with a new viciousness, the heeltap of kerosene in the coffee can soon was merely a polish on hundreds of struggling and dying beetles. It should be said to E.’s credit that, after the rapine of the rose, she never weakened in word or deed toward our handsomely uniformed foe.

So she came very fit to our biggest fight, the Battle of the Golden Bantam Corn. So far our actions had been in the nature of casual sallies and counter attacks. The Battle of the Golden Bantam Corn was, in comparison, our Verdun. It should be premised that the Golden Bantam corn was the pride of our first vegetable garden — a vegetable garden started with the zeal of tardy conversion by gardeners of a ripe middle age. The assault began with deceptive moderation — two or three beetles on the corn silk, on each tassel, on some of the leaves. With more military insight than I had credited her with, E. insisted on instantly enlarging our static defense. With the farm we had bought two very rusty ten-gallon milk cans. These, under E.’s directions, became gigantic beetle traps protecting the east and west flanks of our four rows of Golden Bantam. A little to the north we set two ordinary onequart traps. All did great execution.

Came a morning when the Golden Bantam corn swarmed horribly with beetles, glistened from afar with them. Since they lay unhandily for the ancestral silver tablespoon, it was I who bore the brunt of the defense, stripping the invaders by handfuls and double handfuls from silk, tassels, and ears, filling E.’s coffee can in a few minutes, so that she effected a mortuary shuttle service between the standing corn and the tengallon traps. It turned out luckily that P. loved Golden Bantam corn. Had it not been for his valiant volunteer aid, it is doubtful if, during two-hour fights running over four days, I could have maintained the requisite aggressive defensive. On the fifth day was a respite. The beetles were few. They had not passed — at least not too many of them. The corn silk was heavily shorn, but it was still there and able to catch pollen. From our first vegetable garden would come no shame of blank ears.

IV

This virtually ended the campaign of early summer of 1933. While we had started too late and made mistakes, we could indulge the backward look without mortification. We had saved most of our flowers and crops. We had acquired an amazing robustness, for, apart from its specific utility, beetling is one of the finest outdoor exercises, as it is, if you don’t pinch too hard or spill the kerosene, one of the cleanest of outdoor sports. After the armistice, I took a racing cutter with a most leaky deck around the Cape; for nearly two days of cold rain, sat in the rain; ate in the rain; slept in the rain; and, despite a very ripe middle age, took no harm whatever. I credit my immunity from snuffles or worse to the six weeks of antecedent beetling. Yes, we reviewed the campaign with satisfaction, and I planned a bigger and better aggressive defensive for 1934. In the interest of fellow beetlers I give the details of it briefly.

In our first campaign we had been caught without a plan of any sort. For the second, some sort of Von Schlieffen plan, a grand surprise attack, seemed indicated. The new campaign was naturally based on a critical review of the old. We had plainly begun too late, after the set of the enemy toward flowers and shrubbery had been established. By putting out the traps early, could not the initial movement of the foe be directed thitherward, with the off chance that he would continue to prefer the scent of synthetic rose water to that of the rose itself? It seemed at least worth trying. Then, repeated observation had convinced me that the beetles moved about very little and never came from far. What we got was of our own local breeding. They came out of the ground, flew to the nearest flowers or shrubs, cohabited, returned to the sod, and bred the grub. I imagined the average beetle seldom moved more than a hundred feet or so. If this were the case, it would be enough to kill enough beetles in the area around the flowers and vegetables to keep the grubs down on a yearly diminishing basis. On these hypotheses was planned the memorable campaign of June-July, 1934.

On June 12, the first beetle was observed. We immediately drew a threedeep cordon sanitaire of ordinary glass traps, twelve of them, about the house lot, the outposts being at the edge of the neglected hayfield where weeds and briers certainly had attracted many beetles our way. For a few days the traps made a small but increasing kill, and, as the hollyhocks and even the dwarf horse-chestnut put out blossoms, there were always more beetles in the traps than on the plants — an auspicious reversal of last year’s situation. On June 17, punctually on the anniversary of their first onslaught, the beetles again appeared in force. It seems that everything with them is planmässig. Just a year to a day after they had attacked the Chinese forgetme-nots along our little dooryard brook they renewed the attack, and in the same clump. At this early stage a little direct action, hand-picking or spooning, kept them down. At times they came in numbers, but we rarely had to make the hour-long fights of the former campaign.

Within a fortnight of the beetle’s first appearance the traps were day by day yielding a tidy kill of six gallons a day, and six gallons multiplied by twenty is one hundred and twenty, or, according to my reckoning, which E. never accepted, about two barrels of beetles that would never be born. For two or three days they made threatening forays on the vegetable garden, but the epic Battle of the Golden Bantam Corn did not have to be refought. A few minutes’ hand-picking cleared the rows for many hours. In general I think we put into active defense not more than fifteen minutes where an hour had been too little the season before. The traps were maintaining the defense. Ordinarily P. had to empty them twice a day. Always there were more beetles in the traps than visible in the house lot.

Refinements of aggressive-defensive tactics I must not dwell upon boastfully. Each beetler must develop his own in action. We sprayed vulnerable plants or dusted them with lime. It helped, but not much. Noticing that there were always hundreds of beetles out of reach among the leaves of the young black walnuts, we shook these little trees vigorously from time to time. The air buzzed with a flight; many of the flyers ended in the traps. While I was satisfied that few beetles came to us from the back lot and the alders along the brook, I decided not to be bound slavishly by an hypothesis, however reasonable, and to kill beetles wherever and whenever the killing was good. This resulted in a series of combat patrols through the fields, the combat patrols being I. Wherever there were many, — it was generally in briers, alders, or smartweed, — I attacked without mercy. Generally the coffee can and hand-picking sufficed. On occasion a blowtorch did much execution. I can recommend it moderately. It is no more smelly than the alleged lethal spray, and it kills. When caught without military apparatus, I tore them by handfuls from the weeds and trod them underfoot. All this may or may not have saved mutilation of roses, hollyhocks, and so forth; there is no doubt that it enhanced my morale, as simplifying the aim of beetling, which is merely to kill as many beetles as possible before they breed, and to think resolutely in terms of twenty to one.

Next year will tell. I am not without hope of converting E. from militant rule of thumb to the statistical conception of beetling. Meanwhile we are tranquilly cultivating our respective autumnal gardens. As regards the beetle, we feel we are sitting pretty, but as we sit pretty we knock on wood.