Cakewalk, where did the expression come from? 'It was supposed to be a cakewalk' a soldier might complain, feeling a simple mission wasn't. But the word is not from war.

The soldier’s complaint is the modern meaning. The word is older, and it is not military.

A cakewalk was a dance. Enslaved African Americans in the antebellum South created it. They did not import it from Africa as a finished form. They took the European grand promenade they saw in the big house — the Grand March, the minuet, the stiff carriage of formal wear — and turned it into a high-stepping, backward-leaning, inventively comic parody. Couples dressed in borrowed or handed-down finery. They added shuffles, kicks and African-derived movement. The couple judged most elegant or most inventive won a decorated cake. That prize is why we still say someone “takes the cake.”

Exact dates and places are lost. Oral histories collected from formerly enslaved people describe Sunday “prize walks” in the quarters. Owners often watched and even judged. Many missed the joke. The ragtime musician Shepard Edmonds, whose parents had been enslaved, put it plainly: they “did a take-off on the high manners of the white folks… but their masters… missed the point.”

After emancipation the dance moved into Black community gatherings, then onto the minstrel stage. White performers in blackface inverted the satire into caricature. African American professionals later reclaimed it. Bert Williams and George Walker (with Aida Overton Walker) made it a theatrical specialty and took it to Broadway. Championship contests filled Madison Square Garden in the 1890s. The dance reached Europe; Paris had a brief “folie du cake-walk.” John Philip Sousa’s band carried cakewalk numbers abroad. The music — 2/4 march bass under a syncopated strut — fed directly into ragtime. Kerry Mills’s “At a Georgia Camp Meeting,” Abe Holzmann’s “Smoky Mokes,” Scott Joplin’s “Swipesy Cakewalk,” and Debussy’s joking “Golliwogg’s Cake-Walk” all sit on that line.

The idiom “it was a cakewalk” did not arise because the dance was simple. The strut demanded skill and stamina. What spectators saw was ease. That impression of effortless elegance is what the phrase kept. “Piece of cake” is a later cousin of the same prize-and-leisure association.

The craze faded after about 1905 as the one-step, tango and foxtrot arrived. Fragments survived in later vernacular dance. The circular “cakewalk” still played at school fairs is a distant, sanitized game that has almost nothing to do with the original promenade.

The history is layered: enslaved people mocking their owners, white minstrels mocking those dancers, Black professionals reclaiming the form, white composers and socialites adopting it in turn. One historian’s summary still holds: Blacks imitating whites who were imitating Blacks who were imitating whites.

That is where the expression comes from. Not from a battlefield that looked easy. From a dance that looked easy while it was doing something else.

Administrative Justice can be weak

The three cases sit in different wars and different offences, but they share the same machinery: a commander needs an example, a court is assembled under pressure, and politics decides who dies and who is remembered.

Harry “Breaker” Morant and Peter Handcock — Boer War, 1902

Harry Harbord Morant (born Edwin Henry Murrant, 9 December 1864, Bridgwater) was an English-born Australian drover, horseman and Bulletin balladist. He enlisted for South Africa, then took a commission in the Bushveldt Carbineers, an irregular unit hunting Boer guerrillas in the northern Transvaal. After Captain Percy Hunt was killed (and, Morant believed, mutilated), Morant and Lieutenant Peter Handcock shot unarmed prisoners: Floris Visser; a group of eight Boers who came in to surrender; three more later. A German missionary, Rev. Daniel Heese, was also killed; they were acquitted of that charge. They admitted the prisoner killings. Defence counsel Major J. F. Thomas argued “no prisoners” orders from above, including Kitchener; the court was not satisfied those orders were proved.

Trials ran January–February 1902. The court recommended mercy for Morant on provocation, good service and inexperience. Kitchener confirmed death for Morant and Handcock, commuted George Witton’s sentence to life (Witton was released in 1904 after a large Australian petition). They were shot at Pretoria at dawn on 27 February 1902, about 18 hours after sentence, by Cameron Highlanders. Morant refused a blindfold. Last words, as remembered: “Shoot straight, you bastards! Don’t make a mess of it!” Australia was not consulted. Kitchener’s later telegram to the Governor-General said twelve murders were proved and Morant originated them. Pardons have been refused; Australian Attorney-General Nicola Roxon in 2012 said they did kill unarmed prisoners. Folk memory, and the 1980 film, still treat them as scapegoats for a dirty counter-guerrilla war. Guilt of the shootings is not seriously in dispute; the live argument is whether the trial was fair, whether “take no prisoners” was informal policy, and whether Kitchener needed a public example as peace talks approached.

Private Thomas James Highgate — Western Front, 8 September 1914

Highgate, 19, Shoreham farm labourer’s son, 1st Battalion Royal West Kent Regiment, was the first British soldier executed for desertion on the Western Front, 35 days into the war. After Mons and the retreat, on 5–6 September he left the line saying he needed to ease himself. Hours later a gamekeeper found him in civilian clothes near Tournan. He was reported as saying he had had enough and wanted out. Court-martial the same day: no defending officer, no witnesses from his company (they were scattered), previous pre-war absence on his sheet. He said he meant to rejoin and could not explain the civilian clothes. Smith-Dorrien wanted him shot “as publicly as possible.” Informed at 06:22 on 8 September, shot at 07:07 in front of Dorsets and Cheshires. No known grave; La Ferté-sous-Jouarre Memorial. Group pardon 2006 with the other Shot at Dawn men. Process was the lightest of the three: hours, not weeks; deterrence first, proof second. Line officers had just watched the BEF reel backwards; one teenager in civilian kit became the example.

Private Eddie Slovik — Western Front, 31 January 1945

Edward Donald Slovik, 24, Detroit, petty criminal, drafted 1944 into the 28th Infantry Division as a replacement. After coming under fire he left twice, then handed in a signed confession that he would desert again rather than fight. Offered a deal: return to the line and the charge drops. He refused. Court-martial 11 November 1944: nine officers, under two hours, unanimous death. Forty-nine U.S. soldiers received death for desertion in WWII; 48 sentences were commuted. Eisenhower confirmed Slovik’s during the Battle of the Bulge. Shot at 10:04 on 31 January 1945 at Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines by twelve men of his own regiment (eleven live rounds). He told them they were not shooting him for desertion — thousands had done that — but because he was an ex-con and they needed an example. He is the only U.S. soldier executed for desertion since the Civil War. Process was the heaviest of the three: counsel, reviews, theatre commander, written confession. The politics was timing and message, not speed.

What the three cases share

Decimation is the old form of the same idea: if a unit fails, kill some of it so the rest fight. Highgate and Slovik were not random lots; they were chosen because their files made the example easy. Morant was not a deserter. He was an officer who killed prisoners in a guerrilla war and then claimed superior orders. That is a different crime. Treating all three as the same “administrative injustice” flattens the distinction your draft already notes: bad officers send men to die; other officers shoot men who have already surrendered.

Politics is not an add-on. It is the point of a public execution. Kitchener needed German and Boer opinion managed as the war ended. Smith-Dorrien needed the retreat not to become a rout. Eisenhower needed the Ardennes not to dissolve into straggling. In each case the line managers — Hunt’s death and the Carbineers’ culture; the collapse after Mons; a replacement pipeline feeding a smashed division — created the mess. The courts then picked a man the file would carry.

The danger of treating desertion as a medical or political inconvenience in a total war is real. So is the danger of a court that exists to ratify a sentence already decided upstairs. Highgate’s hearing was too light to be justice. Slovik’s was heavy enough to look like justice and still produced the one death among forty-nine. Morant’s was long enough to look thorough, then finished in eighteen hours so there could be no appeal to Australia or to Kitchener in person.

That is administrative justice under fire: not Rome’s one-in-ten lottery, but a selection of the man whose death will preach. The sermon is discipline. The congregation is the army still in the line. Whether the preacher is honest is a separate question from whether the army can afford to look weak.

Faith Fiction and the Failure of News

Faith fiction often tells more truth than a modern newspaper. That is not a slogan. It is a diagnosis.

What is sold as news is usually opinion with a byline and a lighting package. The product is not a record of what happened. It is a mood, a faction, and a set of permitted conclusions. Even outlets that market themselves as a correction — Fox among them — train their audiences to mistake loyalty for verification. They betray listeners the same way the rest of the pack does: by deciding first what the story must mean, then arranging the facts to fit. For that reason alone, Daily Wire is not to be trusted as a newsroom. Trust is not the same thing as usefulness. A house can be wrong about the day’s politics and still make something that is actually made.

The Pendragon Cycle: Rise of the Merlin is that sort of thing. Season 1 is a tremendous offering. It does not pretend to be a bulletin from Westminster or Washington. It walks into cultural mythology and Christian populism and treats both as serious. It adapts mainly Stephen R. Lawhead’s Taliesin and Merlin. Arthur is not born. The last image is the door into him. Merlin has risen. Aurelius is High King. Uther is the wounded spare. Ygerna is in play. Morgian is not finished. The sword is in the stone. That is not “content.” That is a story that knows where it is going.

The Chosen is doing related work across seven seasons and spinoffs: putting flesh on people the culture had turned into stained glass. Not all faith fiction is biblical, and it does not have to be. Individual faith should be answerable to Scripture. Cultural offerings can diverge. A bard cycle set in the wreck of Roman Britain is allowed to use Atlantis, Hill Folk, and a Fisher King without becoming a sermon outline. What it must not do is sneer at the possibility that the old stories were about something real.

Archaeology keeps complicating the sneer. Biblical faith standards have more historical grain than the lecture circuit admits. We sort of know who Job was, in the sense that the figure sits in a world that was not invented last Tuesday. There are claims about mummies and patriarchs — Moses, Joseph — that, if ever confirmed, would not make the Bible a field manual. They would make it what serious readers already knew it was: a witness, not a trench report. If those identifications fail, the Bible is still not a newspaper. An imperfect source of archaeology is not the same thing as a lie.

Faith is not science. Truth is not news media. Science measures what it can touch. Faith names what a people will die for and what they will not become. News media, as presently practised, does neither. It sells the feeling of being informed to people who are being managed.

That is why a seven-episode Arthurian season on a platform you do not have to baptise can still matter more than a week of panels. Pendragon is not reporting the Saxon Shore. It is asking whether a broken island can be held together by anything stronger than a warlord’s fear. The Chosen is not excavating Galilee. It is asking whether the men in the text were men. Those are older questions than the chyron.

A culture that cannot tell a myth without apology will not tell the news without a handler. Better a sword in the stone than another hour of someone explaining what you are allowed to notice.