Hector Hugh Munro, who wrote under the pseudonym Saki, is a distinctive voice in English literature. He is often compared with O. Henry for the surprise endings of his stories, but, despite their shared taste for irony, he has none of O. Henry’s sentimentality. Saki’s stories have a tone of acid sophistication which has influenced several twentieth-century humorists, from P. G. Wodehouse to Dorothy Parker, but which has never been entirely imitated.

Saki’s crisp, urbane style of writing is peculiarly effective at highlighting the absurd. The deadly quarrel between Ulrich and Georg is deflated by the calm precision of the author’s description. As the story progresses, the two men come to share the author’s point of view and wonder why they hated each other so fiercely. However, there is still a note of criticism in the way they are portrayed, which continues to distance them from the author’s perspective. This is best represented by the dialogue Saki gives to Georg when he decides to become Ulrich’s friend:

How the whole region would stare and gabble if we rode into the market square together. No one living can remember seeing a Znaeym and a von Gradwitz talking to one another in friendship. And what peace there would be among the forester folk if we ended our feud to-night. And if we choose to make peace among our people there is none other to interfere, no interlopers from outside. . . . You would come and keep the Sylvester night beneath my roof, and I would come and feast on some high day at your castle. . . . I never thought to have wanted to do other than hate you all my life, but I think I have changed my mind about things too, this last half-hour. And you offered me your wine flask. . . . Ulrich von Gradwitz, I will be your friend.

This excerpt is from the longest piece of direct speech in the story, and it is no accident that Saki gives it to the character of lower social standing. By the time this story was written in the 1910s, it had long been a trope of English literature and culture that the British upper classes regarded both foreigners and their own countrymen lower down the social scale as overly emotional. This was already such a stereotype in 1872 that the French novelist Jules Verne made Phileas Fogg, the English hero of Around the World in Eighty Days, a model of understated stoicism. When contrasted with the coolness of the narrative voice, Georg’s sudden rush of emotion here is intended to sound embarrassing and excessive.

There is also a certain social pretension in Georg‘s placing the two families on the same level—and even putting his own name first—in the eyes of “the whole region.” Georg never forgets his sense of his own importance. He suggests that it is only their quarrel which has prevented the region in which they live from enjoying perfect peace. He also assumes that friendship with Ulrich means immediate intimacy. As soon as Ulrich offers his friendship, Georg invites himself to Ulrich’s castle and suggests that they spend one of the most important holidays of the year—Sylvester night, or New Year’s Eve—together. Although the omniscient narrator holds himself aloof from both men, the more plebeian character arguably comes across as slightly more ridiculous, as well as less magnanimous.

At this stage in the story, therefore, the two men have come to agree with the narrator’s implied view that their feud is futile and absurd, but they both remain too self-absorbed and self-important to share his perspective completely. As they wait to be rescued, each still hopes that his men will be first on the scene so that he can make a grand gesture of magnanimity, demonstrating that he is as good as his word. They are still focused on themselves, still curiously naïve. Despite feuding over this little piece of land for their entire lives, they seem to know little about it or the dangers it contains.

When Ulrich and Georg first meet, they are both armed and angry. Saki’s narrator points out that this solitary encounter is the opportunity for which both men have been waiting:

But a man who has been brought up under the code of a restraining civilisation cannot easily nerve himself to shoot down his neighbour in cold blood and without word spoken, except for an offence against his hearth and honour.

This “restraining civilisation” which prevents Ulrich and Georg from firing at one another is contrasted a moment later with “Nature’s own violence,” which injures and imprisons the two men under a tree with a ruthlessness of which neither of them is capable. Although the two men undergo real emotional change over the course of the narrative, they remain unchanged in one crucial sense: they are too civilized to survive the onslaughts of Nature, which in Saki’s view, as in Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” is “red in tooth and claw.” Much of the narrative has focused on the vanity of small differences. The two men think they are in complete contrast to one another, when in fact their thoughts and actions are very much alike. They have obsessed about these small differences precisely because their claims to the land do not connect them to it in any meaningful way. The storm, the fallen tree, and the wolves are all symbols of the unforgiving environment which they ignore until they are finally forced to acknowledge it at the end of the story.

This brief masterpiece is an excellent representation of the principal stylistic and technical elements of Saki’s achievement. Above all, the economy of the story’s construction—the swift drafting of the background, with its elements of local color and drama; the limited cast of characters; the neat, subtle introduction and arrangement of the plot details necessary to the surprise conclusion—is typically masterful and, indeed, necessary to the success of the story because readers must not have time to doubt the realism of the situation, in either its physical or psychological aspects.

The quiet, calm voice of the omniscient narrator seems initially to comfort the reader with a sense of control over the events that it narrates, yet as the disquieting details accumulate—the restlessness of the forest creatures, the “accident” of the tree’s falling at just the right moment, the “success” of the men’s calls for help, the alarming hysteria of Ulrich’s laughter—the lack of modulation in the tones of the narrator becomes one of the principal devices by which the suspense is developed and sustained. The end of the story reveals Saki’s powerful control in the fact that the surprise is held back until the very last word—a word that, in retrospect, explains and justifies all the details and arrangements made in the careful crafting of the story as a whole.

World War I

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, tensions among European powers began to escalate. Imperialist nations were vying for territories in Asia and Africa, ethnic groups were seeking autonomy, and countries were striving to build more formidable military forces. Additionally, a network of alliances had formed in the region, where nations pledged to support each other in conflicts.

In 1914, a Serbian nationalist assassinated the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, igniting the spark that led to World War I. As tensions rose between Austria-Hungary and Serbia, Germany (an ally of Austria-Hungary) declared war on Russia (an ally of Serbia). Germany further expanded the conflict by declaring war on France and invading Belgium to reach France, violating an 1839 neutrality agreement. Great Britain declared war on Germany the same day. Other nations quickly joined the conflict, dividing Europe into the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire) and the Allied forces (Britain, France, Russia, Italy, and numerous other nations).

The western front of the war extended across eastern France, while the eastern front saw battles deep into Russian territory. Fighting also occurred in present-day Turkey and the North Sea. By 1916, the war on the western front and at sea had reached a stalemate. However, in early 1917, Germany decided to engage in unrestricted submarine warfare and sent a secret telegram to Mexico proposing an alliance against the United States. In April 1917, the United States entered the war on the side of the Allies.

In 1918, Russia signed a separate peace treaty with the Central Powers, leading many to believe the war would drag on for years. Germany withdrew its troops from the eastern front and launched an offensive against Allied lines in France, coming within thirty-seven miles of Paris. However, the arrival of thousands of American troops each month helped to hold them back. The Allies launched a counteroffensive in July 1918. Simultaneously, the Central Powers began to collapse. Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire surrendered, and a revolution in Austria-Hungary ended the Hapsburg Empire. Austria and Hungary formed separate governments and ceased fighting. The German government collapsed in November 1918. On November 11, 1918, an armistice was signed, bringing World War I to an end.

The War in France

The western front of the war extended through eastern France. In September 1914, the Allies halted the initial German advance. During the First Battle of the Marne, French troops initiated a counterattack. Following this battle, both the French and German forces prepared to defend their positions. They adopted a strategy called trench warfare, where each side fought from the safety of deep ditches. Two extensive trench systems spanned 400 miles along the western front. The area between the opposing trenches, known as no-man’s-land, ranged in width from approximately 200 to 1,000 yards. Progress was minimal for both sides. In the Battle of the Somme, which lasted from July to November 1915, the Allies managed to push the Germans back only a few miles. Another prolonged battle at Verdun lasted ten months. Nearly one million soldiers perished in these two battles alone.

By the time American forces arrived in Europe in 1917, German troops occupied parts of France and Belgium. American units joined the Allies on the western front and played a crucial role in preventing the German forces from capturing Paris. The Second Battle of the Marne, fought in the summer of 1918, became the war's turning point. Allied forces began pushing the Germans out of France. By the time the armistice was signed in November 1918, Germany held only a small fraction of French territory.

British Society

British society experienced significant transformations during the 1910s and 1920s. The gap between the rich and the poor became less pronounced. Fewer households had servants, poorer individuals accessed the same goods as the wealthy, and the middle class gained more political influence. Many homes were equipped with modern conveniences like electricity and plumbing. By the end of the decade, class distinctions had diminished in importance for social interactions, including marriages.

World War I also brought about substantial changes. Millions of women entered the workforce, securing jobs in government and private offices as well as factories. These increased economic opportunities advanced women's emancipation, and by 1918, the Franchise Act granted all women over the age of twenty-eight the right to vote.

Although Saki’s design is clearly to draw as much suspense and surprise into as narrow a compass as possible, the story itself nevertheless presents abstract themes of justice in the human world and of the human relationship to the natural world.

The most obvious of these themes involves the dissection and final denial of the vendetta mentality that motivates these two figures. The early history of the conflict shows how accidental the hatred between these two men actually is. They inherit a conflict that is not rightly theirs, and it distorts their relationship not only to each other but also—as the reference to the surprise in the marketplace shows—to the community in which they live. Furthermore, the parties of huntsmen and retainers (who never actually appear in the story) represent further ramifications of injustice, wherein the dependents are also caught up in the hatred between the principals, much as the Montagues and Capulets are trapped in the conflict that leads to the death of Romeo and Juliet. The physical blow that levels both men thus paradoxically symbolizes the sudden consciousness of the distortions that the vendetta has caused: their common plight makes Ulrich and Georg recognize, apparently for the first time, how much they have in common, and thus how much more reasonable friendship would be. Having once seen the world from this new perspective, the two are quick to correct the fundamental distortion of their relationship, and the apparent ease with which hatred and distrust dissolve indicates how insubstantial their former condition was.

The appearance of the wolves, the unexpected “interlopers” of the story’s title, points out the fundamental irony of the tale as a whole and thus touches on the second great theme that the story presents. From this perspective, the story may be said to belong to the school of literary naturalism, in which fundamental natural processes are shown working themselves out in the human world, regardless of human designs or wishes. The essential mistake that Ulrich and Georg make is their assumption that this narrow stretch of almost worthless woodland is somehow theirs to possess in any real sense. They, like their fathers and grandfathers before them, have assumed that legal rights, established in human courts and supported by human institutions, actually establish true dominion over the world of nature.

The fable-like elements of this story show how mistaken such an assumption is. At virtually every turn, the plans of the human characters are thwarted or altered by the different design of the natural world: The best opportunity for settling their vendetta, when no interlopers are present, is cut off by the wind and the falling tree; after their reconciliation, their plans for the future are erased by the advent of the unexpected interlopers. Finally, the wolves themselves symbolize the utter indifference of nature to “important” human disputes and resolutions. The surprise conclusion thus reveals and summarizes this primary theme of literary naturalism with sharply dramatic and terrifying indirection, suggesting in its irony that nature may not be indifferent so much as malicious toward the proud designs of humankind.

Point of View

‘‘The Interlopers’’ is narrated from a third-person omniscient perspective, allowing the narrator to understand and reveal all aspects of the story. This viewpoint enables the narrator to provide background on the disputed land, describe how Georg and Ulrich's similar personalities have escalated their feud to a deadly level, and outline the moral principles guiding the adversaries. The narrative presents each man's interpretation of the events. By accessing both characters' thoughts and emotions, the reader realizes that Georg and Ulrich are more alike than different, which underscores their shared, pointless conflict and the equally pointless demise awaiting them.

Dialogue

The dialogue in “The Interlopers” is pivotal as it conveys the men's readiness to move beyond their feud. Ulrich initiates the conversation about wanting to “bury the old quarrel,” using a concise speech to express his desire to leave the past behind. Georg responds by explaining why he concurs with Ulrich’s sentiment. The dialogue also highlights a fundamental connection between the two men, who have experienced so much together yet have never agreed.

Ending

The story's conclusion isn't explicit; instead, it hints at what is to come. Ulrich is the first to see what approaches, and when Georg inquires, Ulrich's reply, “Wolves!” ends the story. This word, combined with Ulrich’s “idiotic chattering laugh of a man unstrung with hideous fear,” makes it clear to the reader that a horrific death awaits the two men. Saki doesn't need to spell out the ending; the dreadful implication is sufficiently horrifying.

Personification

Saki gives human characteristics to elements of the natural world. Nature is depicted as a violent beast retaliating against the men for intruding on her domain. She physically strikes them down, using a tree as a weapon. In this depiction, nature mirrors the men. The wind and trees are also portrayed as living entities; the “wind breathes,” and “the trees can’t even stand upright.”

1910s: Following the conclusion of World War I, forty-two countries, excluding the United States, join the League of Nations. This organization, officially established in 1920, aims to help maintain global peace.

Today: As of 2001, the United Nations boasts 189 member states worldwide. Formed in 1945, the UN replaced the League of Nations with the goal of maintaining international peace and security while deterring acts of aggression.

1910s: By the mid-1910s, numerous countries across the globe are engaged in World War I.

Today: Various regional conflicts persist in different parts of the world, such as the ongoing disputes between Israelis and Palestinians in the Middle East and the tensions between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. Over the years, the United Nations and several countries, especially the United States, have been actively involved in peace negotiations.

1910s: On the brink of World War I, the Austro-Hungarian Empire encompasses a vast area in Central Europe. The empire's defeat in the war leads to its dissolution into the independent republics of Austria and Hungary, as well as the formation of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia from its former territories.

Today: The collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s and the subsequent fall of communism in Eastern and Central Europe have led to the creation of new countries and international boundaries. The former Czechoslovakia has split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, while the former Yugoslavia has fragmented into six nations: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Serbia, and Macedonia.

Sources

Forbes, Alexander Malcolm, “Saki,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 162: British Short-Fiction Writers, edited by John H. Rogers, Gale Research, 1996, pp. 240–50.

Frost, Adam, “A Hundred Years of Saki,” in Contemporary Review, December 1999, Vol. 275, p. 302.

Review of The Toys of Peace, in New York Times Book Review, July 6, 1919, p. 358.

Review of The Toys of Peace, in Spectator, March 22, 1919, p. 380.

Further Reading

Langguth, A. J., Saki: A Life of Hector Hugh Munro, Simon & Schuster, 1981. This biography by Langguth features six previously unpublished short stories by Saki.

Williamson, Samuel R., Jr., Austria-Hungary and the Origins of the First World War, St. Martin’s Press, 1991.
Through an analysis of Hapsburg decisions from 1912 to 1914, Williamson contends that Austria-Hungary, rather than Germany, took the initial military actions that led to World War I.