Though it’s been more than a week since its declaration of war, Mather House’s saber rattling has thus far failed to draw up-river rival Kirkland House into open battle.

The gauntlet was thrown down during Primal Scream, as four Matherites stood outside Matthews Hall wearing only jackets with their House’s banner hanging from the dorm and the Soviet national anthem playing in the background.

A hard copy of the declaration was also door-dropped in Kirkland and Mather, containing a list of demands issued by Mather’s newly formed “Department of War.”

Included in the ultimatum were calls for Kirkland’s “immediate and total withdrawal” from the DeWolfe apartments, their inclusion of Mather residents in Kirkland’s annual Incest Fest and the return of Mather’s former dining hall manager—a “Hero of the Revolution”—who now works in Kirkland.

Predicting a quick victory, Mather also required that Kirkland hang a portrait of a Mather resident in its Junior Common Room—although they have yet to name the Matherite whose picture will serve as a “permanent reminder of the folly of [Kirkland’s] war mongering.”

“We think a hero will present himself in the course of the action,” Mather Co-Czar (House Committee Co-chair) Zachary A. Corker ’04 said.

At the top of Mather’s ultimatum, though, is the return of the Adams House gong, which “intelligence operatives” from the “glorious tower” say was stolen by Kirkland.

Like England protecting neutral Belgium, Mather leaders decried the “brutal insensitivity” of the alleged theft.

“Is it not just like [Kirkland] to send shock troops into defenseless Adams in a cowardly lightning war?” read the declaration.

It is this act of “aggression” by the “Kirkland brute” that was the root cause of war, according to Darren S. Morris ’05, the secretary of Mather’s House Committee (HoCo).

“Mather declared war because they stole the gong,” Morris said. “It is in Kirkland’s character to do something like this.”

The Mather high command further claims that Kirkland residents sent the gong to the Russian monastery currently seeking the return of the Lowell House bells to Moscow.

Kirkland, however, has thus far been unimpressed by Mather’s bellicose rumblings.

“It’s been a non-issue in Kirkland,” Chair of the Kirkland HoCo Adam Kalamchi ’04 said. “It’s been amusing, but 99 percent of the thinking about this rivalry has been done by Mather.”

According to Mather’s policy makers, however, the rivalry goes much deeper than their House’s recent proclamation—with bad blood running between the two river dorms for some time.