Esperanto Marching Orders

What's Esperanto for
"crime against humanity"?

The story is probably apocryphal, or to put it more bluntly, fiction. The item below, which appeared in the Point Pleasant Register of Point Pleasant, West Virginia on February 2, 1910, makes reference to King Leopold II of Belgium, who had died the year before. A bit of research shows no indication that the anecdote was current when the king was alive. Posthumous tales, particularly amusing anecdotes, aren’t typically reliable history.

Other signs are the general vagueness of it all. The time in which the the story is set is “once,” which is close to “once upon a time.” Those involved are “the leading generals.” Just who were Leopold’s leading generals? And while it’s probable that in countries with two official languages there might be some issues with military service, it’s not as if Belgium was the first of such countries. I think the typical answer is to group units by native tongue.

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