War and Our World by John Keegan

Author:John Keegan [Keegan, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-77999-1
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-02-01T16:00:00+00:00

*Paul Ratchnevsky, Genghis Khan (Blackwell, 1991, p. 153).

CHAPTER FOUR

WAR AND THE INDIVIDUAL

‘EVERY MAN,’ SAID DOCTOR JOHNSON, ‘thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier or not having been at sea.’ His thought is often misquoted as ‘every man thinks better of himself for having been a soldier’. Either way, we know what he meant. It is the rare man who does not think better of himself for having served, in whatever capacity, and even if he had not faced gunfire. To have worn uniform, to have done drill, to have submitted to the discipline of a military community enlarges, particularly in retrospect, and more amply as time passes, a man’s opinion of himself.

That is particularly so in Britain, where the ethos of the squadron, the ship’s company and, above all, the small regimental community is strong. The reunions of those who fought in the Second World War have attracted larger numbers even as the war has grown more distant. The fiftieth anniversaries of the D-Day invasion that liberated Europe, and of the culminating peace of 1945, brought record turnouts. They also brought the cheers of the multitude and the private congratulations of family and friends. Old soldiers and sailors and airmen were indeed caused to think better of themselves, often by members of a generation which has no memory of the war at all.

So far, in previous lectures, I have explored the origins of war, and the changing role of the state in its prosecution. Yet the role of individuals in warfare, and the impact of war upon them, deserve greater attention and it is to them that I turn in this fourth lecture. There are special reasons for the high standing in which veterans are held in Britain. They are the men and women who first averted defeat – how close did defeat loom in 1940 – and then brought total victory over a monstrous tyranny. It was a victory, moreover, not won at the wicked cost in lives of the First World War. The losses were grievous enough, nearly four hundred thousand deaths in battle, but fewer by nearly half than those of 1914–18.

The grief of the bereaved, moreover, was alleviated by the value of the sacrifice. ‘They did not die in vain’ is, for once, a form of words not empty of meaning, while the extraordinarily gracious way the British have found of commemorating each individual who died, in the mysteriously beautiful war cemeteries maintained around the globe, is in itself a comfort to the nations’ widows and orphans. The Russians, who lost ten million in battle, have no such comfort. The reunions of their veterans are still haunted by men and women seeking any scrap of news of sons or husbands who disappeared without trace at Stalingrad or Kursk fifty years ago. The lot of the Germans of the war generation, however little sympathy they deserve, is worse by far. Stalin ordered the systematic destruction of every German war grave on Soviet soil, where

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.