Thirty-Eight Minutes

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a ship's gun, a clock ticking very loudly)
Zanzibar. The twenty-seventh of August, eighteen ninety-six. Nine o'clock.

[Verse 1]
The Sultan dies and a cousin takes the palace without asking Britain,
and Britain, which has a treaty saying it must be asked, objects,
and issues an ultimatum expiring at nine in the morning,
and the new Sultan barricades himself in with a wooden palace,
a royal yacht, some artillery from the seventeenth century,
and around three thousand people, most of them civilians and servants.

[Chorus]
NINE OH TWO: the shelling starts! NINE OH FIVE: the palace is burning!
NINE THIRTY-EIGHT: it's over! THIRTY-EIGHT MINUTES!
The shortest war in recorded history, start to finish,
shorter than a lunch break, shorter than this album's second side!
Thirty-eight minutes. Five hundred dead. One British sailor injured.
That ratio is the entire nineteenth century in one number.

[Verse 2]
The yacht was sunk in the first few minutes. The palace came down.
The flag was shot from its pole, and by convention that ended it.
The Sultan escaped out the back and made it to the consulate.
Britain installed the man it wanted and sent Zanzibar the bill
for the shells — they billed them for the shells that were fired at them —
and that is not a joke I have added. That is a line item.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
And people tell this one for the brevity, for the trivia,
the pub-quiz answer, the shortest war, thirty-eight minutes,
and the number that never gets said in the same breath is five hundred,
who were in a wooden building that was shelled from the sea
by three cruisers, at close range, over a succession of the shortest minutes
anybody in that palace ever lived through.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(the clock stops)
Thirty-eight minutes.
Ask what else fits in thirty-eight minutes.