Читать книгу Warriors: Extraordinary Tales from the Battlefield - Max Hastings, Sir Max Hastings, Max Hastings - Страница 7

THIS IS AN old-fashioned book, or at least a book about old-fashioned conflicts, because it concerns people rather than ‘platforms’, that unlovable contemporary synonym for tanks, ships, planes. It addresses the experience of some remarkable characters who made their marks upon the wars of the past two centuries. Like the rest of us, they were variously good, bad, ugly, charming and disagreeable. This study will be of no interest to such modern warlords as US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, because it addresses aspects of conflict they do not comprehend, creatures of flesh and blood rather than systems of steel and electronics.

In civil life, people with a penchant for fighting are deemed at best an embarrassment, at worst a menace. Warriors are unfashionable people in democratic societies during periods of peace, as Kipling frequently remarked. Nelson liked to quote the seventeenth-century poet and pamphleteer Thomas Jordan’s epigram:

Our God and sailor we adore,

In time of danger, not before;

The danger past, both are alike requited,

God is forgotten, and the sailor slighted.

Yet all nations need warriors to pursue their national interests in conflict, to create disciplined violence within the harness of uniform. In times of war, fighting men are suddenly cherished and become celebrities – or at least did so until very recently. Few of those who experience battle emerge as heroes. Most, even if they have volunteered for military service, discover amid mortal peril that they prefer to act in a fashion likely to enable them to see home again, rather than to perform the sort of feats which win medals. This does not mean they are cowards. The majority do their duty conscientiously. They are reluctant, however, to take those strides beyond duty which mark out the men who win battles for their countries.

One of my favourite stories of the Second World War concerns a sergeant-major of the Green Howards, Stan Hollis. On D-Day, 6 June 1944, and in the battles that followed, three times Hollis attacked German positions which were holding up his battalion’s advance. He charged them alone, with sten gun and grenades, and killed or took prisoner the defenders. Many years later, his commanding officer reflected in my hearing upon the sergeant-major who, miraculously, lived to receive a Victoria Cross and keep a Yorkshire pub in his old age. The colonel said: ‘I think Hollis was the only man I met between 1939 and 1945 who felt that winning the war was his personal responsibility. Everybody else, when they heard there was a bloody awful job on, used to mutter: “Please God some other poor sod can be found to do it!”’

Every army, in order to prevail on the battlefield, needs a certain number of people like Sergeant-Major Hollis, capable of courage, initiative or leadership beyond the norm. What is the norm? It has changed through the course of history, dramatically so since the mid-twentieth century, with the advance of what passes for civilisation. Western democracies have not become more merciful towards enemies. Indeed, they use ever more terrible weapons to encompass their destruction. Western warriors, however, have become progressively more sensitive to risk and hardship, in a fashion which reflects sentiment in the societies from which they are drawn. A Greek or Roman soldier was required to engage in hours of close-quarter combat with edged weapons which hacked through flesh, muscle, bone and entrails. Modern firearms inflict equally terrible wounds, but by a much less intimate process. ‘Was this fighting?’ mused a First World War fighter pilot, V.M. Yeates. ‘There was no anger, no red lust, no struggle, no straining muscles and sobbing breath; only the slight movement of levers and rattle of machine-guns.’

The absence of physical exertion in the business of killing, which Yeates remarked as a novelty in 1918, has become more emphatic, indeed almost universal, for twenty-first-century warriors of the Western democracies, saving only some combat infantrymen. In the past, a soldier’s belief in the nobility of his calling stemmed in part from his acceptance of the risk of losing his own life while taking those of others. It would be wrong to overstate the degree of chivalry involved, for of course every warrior aspired to kill his enemy while he himself survived. But the acceptance of possible death – of a multitude of deaths on one’s own side, win or lose – was part of the contract, in a fashion that has vanished today. Low-intensity engagement with guerrillas continues to inflict painful losses on Western armies. If matters go to plan in such heavyweight operations as the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq or the bombing of Kosovo, however, military objectives are achieved at negligible cost to the technological master power. Losses are substantial among the vanquished primitives, but questions are asked in Congress or the House of Commons if there are significant casualties among the victors. Any assumption of parity of human risk is long gone. We have returned to the rules of engagement which prevailed in nineteenth-century colonial conflicts: ‘We have got the Maxim gun and they have not’; or, in a twenty-first-century context, ‘We possess body armour impervious to small arms and tanks invulnerable to low-technology weapons.’

In the battles of Bonaparte’s era, an infantryman was expected, as a matter of course, to stand firm at his place in the square, line or column, loading and aiming his musket usually without the protection of trench or earthwork, while the enemy delivered volley fire against himself and his comrades from a range of thirty or forty yards. There was seldom any tactical provision for an individual to evade danger. When Wellington ordered his infantry to lie down during enemy bombardments, this was perceived as a controversial, possibly pernicious, innovation. For an individual combatant to earn from his peers the reputation of a brave man, he was obliged to exceed a norm which modern soldiers would consider intolerable. And since the wars of Bonaparte persisted for the best part of twenty years, many veterans were called upon to display a willingness to defy the terrors of the battlefield thirty, forty, fifty times in separate engagements.

The American Civil War required from combatants the same submission to massed fire as Bonaparte’s and Wellington’s soldiers experienced, the ordeals of Gettysburg and the Wilderness being rendered more terrible by improvements in weapon technology in the intervening fifty years. Although the clash of the states was much shorter in duration than the European wars earlier in the nineteenth century, it exacted by far the highest casualties of any conflict in the history of the United States, albeit many of them by disease.

The end of the nineteenth century marked the passing of a warrior ethic which had prevailed since earliest history, whereby war was deemed a proper source of amusement for the leisured classes, as well as of employment for the impoverished ones. As a war correspondent, the young Winston Churchill sounded a last hurrah for the gentleman adventurer in a characteristically exuberant despatch from Buller’s South African army in February 1900:

The soldier, who fares simply, sleeps soundly and rises with the morning star, wakes in an elation of body and spirit without an effort and with scarcely a yawn. There is no more delicious moment in the day than this, while we light the fire and, while the kettle boils, watch the dark shadow of the hills take form, perspective and finally colour, knowing that there is another whole day begun, bright with chance and interest, and free from all cares. All cares are banished – for who can be worried about the little matters of humdrum life when he may be dead before the night? Such a one was with us yesterday – see, there is a spare mug for coffee in the mess – but now gone for ever. And so it may be with us tomorrow. What does it matter that this or that is misunderstood or perverted; that So-and-so is envious and spiteful; that heavy difficulties obstruct the larger schemes of life, clogging nimble aspiration with the mud of matters of fact? Here life itself, life at its best and healthiest, awaits the caprice of a bullet. Let us see the development of the day. All else may stand over, perhaps for ever. Existence is never so sweet as when it is at hazard. The bright butterfly flutters in the sunshine, the expression of the philosophy of Omar Khayyam, without the potations.

A relatively small number of people enjoyed the conflicts of the twentieth century as much as Churchill had revelled in his adventures with, for instance, the Malakand Field Force on India’s North-West Frontier in 1897. World wars inflicted such horrors upon mankind that it became unacceptable for even the most enthusiastic warrior to avow them as entertainments, even if professional soldiers, sailors and airmen still welcomed the opportunities which they offered for swift advancement. A career officer whose progress from lieutenant to colonel might take twenty years of peacetime service could achieve the same leap in a couple of campaigns, given luck and ability. However, the majority of participants were unwilling civilians, conscripted into uniform to endure experiences they found uncongenial, even if they accepted a duty to endure them. Few citizen soldiers wrote home from North Africa or the Pacific with Churchill’s exuberant delight.

The most dramatic foreshortening of Western democratic man’s assumed quotient of courage, his expected tolerance of the circumstances of conflict, took place between the two world wars. In the 1914-18 encounter, infantrymen of all the combatant powers were required to accept a level of sacrifice Bonaparte’s or Grant’s soldiers would have acknowledged with respect. A generation later, in 1939-45, a consensus evolved among Anglo-American commanders that it was impossible again to make such demands upon their men. The manner in which campaigns were conducted, especially in north-west Europe, reflected an Allied preference for firepower rather than human endeavour, a tolerance of ‘combat fatigue’ or ‘battle exhaustion’ as a recognised medical condition, and a reluctance to persist with any course of action that entailed heavy loss.

However ghastly were some individual Western Allied experiences of the Second World War, only in the Japanese, Russian and German armies were demands routinely made upon the soldier comparable with those of earlier centuries. It might be observed that ‘fanatical’ enemy behaviour which roused the dismay, even revulsion, of 1939-45 American and British soldiers was no more than had been asked as a commonplace of their own forebears: a willingness to carry out orders likely to precipitate their own deaths. After 1918, the soldiers of the Western democracies in the Second World War were deemed to have grown more ‘civilised’, a cause of lamentation among their commanders. Senior American and British officers such as Patton, Brooke and Alexander, not to mention Winston Churchill, bewailed the fact that the men whom they led possessed less capacity for suffering than their fathers who bore arms in the Kaiser’s war. The norm had changed.

Yet in every society on earth, the most durable convention from ancient times until very recently was that which held physical courage to be the highest human attribute. For thousands of years, in societies dominated by the warrior ethic, this quality was valued more highly than intellectual achievement or moral worth. A.E.W. Mason’s classic adventure story The Four Feathers (1902), set in 1898, concerns a sensitive young army officer who resigns his commission because he prefers to stay in England enjoying country life with an adored fiancée, rather than accompany his regiment up the Nile to slaughter Dervishes. His girl joins brother officers in offering him a white feather for his ‘cowardice’. He is obliged to perform extraordinary feats of derring-do in order to recover her esteem. The story has always seemed to me flawed, because it requires the hero eventually to marry this foolish creature, who surely proved her unfitness as a partner for life by placing so high a premium upon brawn over brains, preferring to see her loved one immolate himself on a battlefield rather than indulge his poetic nature.

But The Four Feathers vividly reflected the values of its period. One consequence of mankind’s exaggerated regard for ‘pluck’ is that some remarkably stupid men, their only virtue a willingness to expose their own persons to risk, have been granted positions of responsibility on the battlefield, where their follies have cost lives. Bonaparte often over-promoted officers of high courage and small intelligence, whose headlong assaults upon the enemy cost the imperial army gratuitous slaughter. General Sir Harold Alexander’s gallantry, patrician manners and dashing appearance made him Winston Churchill’s favourite general. ‘Alex’ looked the ideal of a warrior. The prime minister was content to overlook the hero’s notorious laziness and lack of intellect.

A less exalted officer who showed himself ‘brave as a lion’, to quote a comrade, leading a battalion in north-west Europe in 1944-45 had to be relieved of a brigade command in Korea in 1951. His subordinates formally protested to the divisional commander when this committed warrior, adorned with two DSOs, proposed to launch his men in a frontal assault upon the Chinese. He failed to comprehend the new terms of limited war. The American writer Ambrose Bierce a century ago advised the ambitious professional soldier: ‘Always try to get yourself killed.’ Many of those who display a willingness to pursue this objective are, however, fools by the normal yardsticks of humanity. Courage is a desirable asset in a commander, but is usually fatal to the interests of his soldiers unless accompanied by some intellectual powers. British cavalry and its senior officers were flawed through most of their history, up to and including the Second World War, by an obsessive compulsion to charge. No warrior should be promoted to higher command merely because he is brave. A skilled and eager fighter is best rewarded by decorations rather than promotion. He should be retained in a role in which he can make himself useful in personal combat, rather than advanced beyond the merits of the rather limited gift – even for a soldier – of being good at killing people.

Yet it is hard to exaggerate the influence that displays of battlefield prowess have always exercised upon others, especially adolescents who are least equipped to perceive the worth of other virtues. As a schoolboy I read a book written in the 1920s, entitled Stirring Deeds of the Great War. Works of this nature were published in great numbers from Victorian times until, say, the 1960s. They depicted war as an extension of school sports, a grander and more splendid House Final, in which young men possessed of the right stuff could win their colours on a national pitch. They were designed to inspire new generations of Englishmen and Americans to emulate the feats of their forefathers, and often they succeeded. The illustrations in Stirring Deeds left a lasting impression upon the impressionable. I remember one captioned ‘Lieutenant Smyth’s terrible journey with the bombs’. It depicted a young officer lugging a box of grenades across no man’s land amid a storm of shot and shell, an episode following which he was awarded a Victoria Cross. In those days, the public perception of heroism was almost entirely related to feats of military prowess. Until at least the 1960s, warriors who had displayed conspicuous courage in one or other of the twentieth century’s notable bouts with the Germans were treated with high respect, even if their cheques bounced.

It may be argued that portrayals of war as ‘the great game’ prostituted courage for dubious nationalistic purposes, and so they did. Yet over the past thirty years or so, the word ‘hero’, surely one of the most precious in the language, has become debased in a different way. Public admiration once reserved for warriors has been transferred to sports stars and celebrities, many of negligible attainment. Martial courage has become far less esteemed in Western societies. In part, happily, this is because the need for it in wars of national survival has vanished. Less happily, however, it is because some people in the twenty-first century recoil from any celebration of military achievement.

In the tranquil times in which we are fortunate enough to live – with or without Al Q’aeda, our ancestors would consider our era uniquely privileged – there is a public yearning to make life safe. A corollary of this is a diminution of enthusiasm for those who embrace risk. Most of the people whose stories feature in this book would find our society’s quest for an existence without peril incomprehensible, unmanly, absurd. They would be amazed by the childlike and increasingly widespread belief that if governments do their business properly, even a soldier in war can be protected from harm.

It is welcome that popular perceptions of courage no longer embrace only, or even chiefly, achievement in battle. But it seems dismaying that the media, and thus the public, today blur the distinction between a victim, who suffers terrible experiences, and a hero. To any thoughtful person, a hero must be someone who consciously consents to risk or sacrifice his or her life for a higher purpose. The media, for instance, will describe a pilot who safely lands a crippled plane laden with passengers as ‘a hero’. A party trapped for hours in a cable car who return to terra firma without betraying visible moral collapse may well be dubbed heroic. In truth, of course, these people are merely passive victims of misfortune. If they behave well, they are doing so to save their own skins, and only incidentally those of other people. Anyone who has served in a theatre of war, even in a non-combatant capacity and even in as perfunctory an affair – from the Allied viewpoint – as the 2003 invasion of Iraq, is likely to be described in any subsequent media report of a divorce, car crash or fatality as a ‘war hero’. This is a travesty. Such a word as ‘hero’ deserves to be cherished as carefully as any other endangered species. Physical bravery is found more often than the spiritual variety. Moral courage is rare, and perhaps more common among women than among men. A willingness to defy peril comes remarkably easily to some young people. For millennia, this trait was systematically nurtured in them through ‘risk’ sports, with the implicit or explicit purpose of fitting them for war. Foxhunting, for instance, which requires high courage from a ‘thruster’, created the ethos of Wellington’s army much more than did the playing fields of Eton. Such a young man as Harry Smith of the Rifle Brigade joined the British Peninsular army having already tested his own courage over a thousand fences in the hunting field. This did not make him a better or more intelligent person, but it sent him to serve Wellington as a demonstrably brave one. It is no coincidence that today, when we no longer feel threatened by foreign enemies who must be confronted in battle, English socialists are spitefully committed to banning English foxhunting. The sport reflects a culture which they despise. The virtues which hunting has fostered for centuries seem to them redundant as well as barbaric.

The warrior deserving of the highest praise is he who demonstrates fortitude alone, without the stimulus of comradeship. C.S. Forester wrote a wry little novel entitled Brown on Resolution (1929). It tells the story of a British sailor in the First World War, sole unwounded survivor of a cruiser sunk in the Pacific by a German raider. Brown escapes from captivity with a rifle onto an uninhabited volcanic island, Resolution, where the German ship has put in for repairs. This stolid young man, schooled all his life to a simple concept of duty, knows that the consequence of his actions must be death, but accepts his fate unquestioningly. By harassing the warship from the shore, the lone sailor delays its departure just long enough for a British squadron to engage and sink it with all hands. Brown himself is left mortally wounded, dying alone on his barren rock. For our purposes the key element in Forester’s story is that no one afterwards knows what Brown did, or what his lonely sacrifice achieved. This is a cautionary tale for warriors. The highest form of courage is that of a man who surrenders his life for others without hope of recognition. There have been innumerable such instances throughout history, which by their nature are unknown to us.

By contrast many acts of heroism, some recorded in this book, have been committed in the active hope of advancement or glory. Eager warriors, aspiring heroes, ‘gong chasers’, are generally disliked and mistrusted by those of more commonplace disposition who are obliged to serve with them. Many soldiers display a baleful attitude towards officers who are perceived to be excessively aggressive. ‘It’s all right for him if he wants to win a VC or a Congressional Medal,’ they mutter, ‘but what about us?’ The leaders most readily admired are those who seem committed to do their duty, and also to bring every possible man home alive. The rank and file recoil from officers who seem indifferent to the ‘butcher’s bill’ for their actions. The British colonel most respected by his men in the Falklands campaign, for instance, was by no means the most celebrated. Instead, he was an officer who gained his combat objectives by meticulous planning and diversionary fire, followed up by a dashing flank assault, which achieved success with minimal casualties.

Many celebrated warriors are detested by their comrades. I grew up to idolise Wing-Commander Guy Gibson, who led the 1943 RAF dam-breaking raid on the Ruhr. When researching the bomber offensive for a book, it was a shock for me to discover how much Gibson was disliked by some of those who served under him. ‘He was the sort of little bugger who was always jumping out from behind a hut and telling you your buttons were undone,’ said a gunner in 1978, his resentment undimmed by the passage of thirty-five years. The courage of Lieutenant-Colonel Herbert Jones, commanding 2 Para at Goose Green in the Falklands in May 1982, undoubtedly merited the posthumous Victoria Cross which he received. But more than a few of his comrades in the British army argued that his action in charging personally at the Argentine positions was the negation of the role of a battalion commander, and reflected the fact that he had lost control of the battle. ‘H’ Jones was a fiercely emotional man, fired by a heroic vision which he yearned to fulfil. Many soldiers prefer to be led against the enemy by cooler and more cautious spirits.

A cynic might suggest that some eager warriors are exhibitionists of an extreme kind. A cynic would be right. This does not diminish warriors’ claims upon our regard, but may make us a trifle more sceptical about their motives. Adventure has always been a selfish business,’ author and traveller Peter Fleming once observed. ‘The desire to benefit the community is never [adventurers’] principal motive…They do it because they want to. It suits them; it is their cup of tea.’ The same can be said of eager warriors. A relative of an officer who was responsible for an exceptionally brave action in North Africa in the Second World War once related a story which the family hero possessed enough self-knowledge to tell against himself. Soon after the North African battle took place, the young man went to his colonel and complained that while several fellow officers had received Military Crosses, he himself had got nothing. He felt hard done by. The colonel did not reveal to his young lieutenant that he had been recommended for a Victoria Cross, which was gazetted shortly afterwards. This anecdote emphasises the fact that some men commit brave acts not spontaneously, but in conscious pursuit of recognition.

All armies seek to create an ethos in which such ambitions prosper. Only where at least a handful of soldiers possess either an exceptional sense of duty – like Sergeant-Major Hollis – or an extravagant hunger for fame – like the VC winner mentioned above – can the cause of their nation in arms flourish. A small minority of natural warriors is almost invariably fighting alongside a majority of other soldiers who threaten their army’s prospects of operational success by their eagerness to preserve their own lives. Macaulay’s Horatius demanded:

How can man die better than facing fearful odds,

For the ashes of his fathers and the temples of his gods?

From a Western commander’s viewpoint, however, a distressingly small number of men share this sanguine view. There is an element of hypocrisy about the manner in which democracies deplore ‘fanatical’ or ‘suicidal’ behaviour in battle by foes such as the wartime Japanese and Germans, and even the modern terrorist. Western armies have awarded their highest decorations, often posthumously, in recognition of behaviour in action which was more likely than not to result in the death of the warrior concerned. It is because it is so difficult to persuade sensible Western soldiers to perform acts likely to cause their own deaths that democratic societies become alarmed when they perceive hostile races capable of more aggressive behaviour than their own. This observation is not intended to applaud fanaticism, merely to recognise our double standard. A modern Islamic suicide bomber might assert that his actions would have won warm Western applause if performed sixty years ago against the Nazi oppressors of Europe. A host of Allied medal citations in two world wars included the approving words: ‘with absolute disregard for his own safety’.

The currency in which a notable warrior has been rewarded in modern times is, of course, an intrinsically worthless disc or cross of metal, which society has successfully promoted as desirable. The United States and Britain have customarily awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor and the Victoria Cross – both mid-nineteenth-century creations – for single acts of bravery, episodes which lasted only a matter of minutes. Remarkably few of these supreme national tokens have been given for displays of courage sustained over months or years, such as were demanded as a commonplace from soldiers of earlier centuries. Indeed, the first VC was awarded for an act many people would consider a mere impulsive gesture of self-preservation: during the Crimean War a British sailor picked up a live shell which landed on the deck of his ship, and threw it overboard. In a rash moment, Congress once awarded its Medal of Honor to every member of a Civil War regiment, until wiser counsels prevailed and this largesse was retracted.

A friend who served as an infantry officer in Italy in the Second World War once observed to me that when one is twenty years old, the prospect of a ‘gong’ can incite some men to remarkable exertions. The possibility of recognition through medals has prompted many warriors to try harder, and thus caused battles to be won. The warrior’s cliché is correct, that ‘the only one who knows what a medal is worth is the man who won it’. All veterans perceive a distinction between a ‘good’ Silver Star or DSO or Croix de Guerre – gained for courage and leadership – and the other kind which ‘comes up with the rations’, not infrequently as a gesture to a career officer with influential connections. The courage of General George Patton was undisputed, but posterity is entitled to recoil from the shamelessness with which in both world wars he solicited medals from friends in high places – and received them. Likewise, I recall the rancour of an RAF veteran as he described his 1943 squadron commander. Many aircrew considered this officer a coward. He relaxed sufficiently one night in the mess to avow without embarrassment: ‘I am a career airman. I intend to survive the war.’ So he did, taking considerable care of his own safety. But the fellowship of the RAF hierarchy ensured that he got his ‘gong’ when he relinquished his squadron. Few people whom the wing-commander met in later life can have possessed any notion how relatively easily his DSO was earned. In the eyes of a new generation ignorant of the nuances of the warrior culture, the mere fact of an officer’s operational service admitted him to the ranks of ‘war heroes’.

One of the more notable follies committed during the premiership of John Major was his 1994 ‘reform’ of military decorations. Historically, only the Victoria Cross was open to all ranks. Commissioned officers and private soldiers were otherwise eligible for separate awards. Major’s new approach reflected a drowning politician’s quest for populist favour by introducing so-called ‘classless’ medals. His policy ignored the reality recognised by every fighting soldier: qualities demanded of officers and men on the battlefield are equally precious, but different in kind. Many British rankers who held the Distinguished Conduct Medal or Military Medal, abolished in the Major reforms, were dismayed. Here was a civilian politician who had never borne arms, trampling clumsily upon the recognition of battlefield achievement, and thoroughly upsetting those ‘at the sharp end’.

Many decorations are awarded for spectacular acts of courage. But others are issued cynically, because commanders deem it morally necessary to console a vanquished army, or to inspire men to try harder by giving awards for feats which are, in truth, no more than many of their comrades perform. For instance, some wartime heavy bomber pilots were decorated – several posthumously – for efforts to keep crippled aircraft aloft at the risk of their own lives, enabling the rest of their crews to bale out. This was a relatively commonplace manifestation of courage, but it was rewarded with decorations, to encourage emulation.

Official recognition of warriors’ deeds is often arbitrary, not least because it requires the survival of credible witnesses, almost invariably officers, to submit citations. Here we are back to Brown on Resolution. Every army in modern times has operated a more or less crude rationing system in apportioning decorations between units. This creates injustices both of omission and commission, well understood by fighting men. Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, who famously despised soldiers and sailors, once scornfully rehearsed to me the extravagant list of ‘gongs’ awarded after the Royal Navy’s bloody 1918 raid on the German submarine base at Zeebrugge, to make survivors feel better. If warriors cannot always be successful, their commanders find it expedient at least to convince them that some of their number have been brave enough to sustain collective honour.

What makes some warriors perform exceptional deeds? Charles Wilson, Churchill’s personal doctor during his premiership, served in France as an army doctor in the First World War, and afterwards wrote The Anatomy of Courage. Wilson, who became Lord Moran, rejected the view that courage is simply a quality possessed by some men and not by others. Nor, he argued, is it a constant, like income; rather, it is a capital sum of which each man possesses a variable amount. In all cases, such capital is eventually exhausted. There seems considerable evidence to support Moran’s thesis. In World War II, it was accepted that most fighting units advanced from amateur status in their first actions to much greater professionalism after some battle experience; thereafter, however, among the Western Allies at least, the aggressiveness and usefulness of a given formation declined, as it became not ‘battle-hardened’ – an absurd cliché - but tired and wary of risk. A veteran of Normandy once observed to me: ‘You fight a damn sight better when you don’t know where it hurts.’ In other words, the less battle-experienced soldier, the novice, sometimes performs feats from which a veteran would flinch.

The tales recounted in this book are designed to reflect a variety of manifestations of leadership, courage, heroic folly and the warrior ethic. Some are romantic, others painfully melancholy. Some of those portrayed were notably successful in their undertakings. Others were not. I am fascinated by warriors, but try to perceive their triumphs and tragedies without illusion. A touch of scepticism does these remarkable men – and two women – no disservice, nor does an acknowledgement that few were people with whom one would care to share a desert island. My subjects represent a range of nationalities, but are chiefly Anglo-Saxon, for this is my own culture. Three rose to lead large forces, most did not. This is a study of fighters, not commanders.

When I began writing, I intended to include figures as far back in history as the periods of Leonidas, Hannibal, Saladin. Yet sifting the evidence about such people, I came to believe that it was too doubtful and fragmentary to form a basis for convincing character studies. The distinguished historian of the Hundred Years War Jonathan Sumption notes that Walter Mannay, one of the foremost among King Edward Ill’s knights, paid Froissart cash for a fulsome testimonial in his Chronicles. The historical evidence about the stand of the Spartans at Thermopylae may be summarised thus: Leonidas probably existed, and probably died in a battle there. That is all, and not enough for the book which I wanted to write.

My own stories are confined, therefore, to modern times, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They concern characters about whom we know enough to construct credible and, I hope, entertaining portraits. The selection is whimsical. The range of personalities is designed to illustrate different aspects of the experience of war on land, at sea and in the air over the past two centuries. Several are national icons, while others have lost their lustre, and fallen into an obscurity from which 1 hope this book will help to rescue them. Some may seem unsympathetic, and some were failures. The characters and fates of warriors are as diverse as those of people who follow any other calling.

Most of these tales concern soldiers, but I have included one remarkable sailor, and two airmen who seem archetypes of the twentieth-century warrior. My collection – which of course is only a modest assay of a seam overflowing with riches – also favours those who left behind autobiographies, diaries or other writings, that provide insights into their thoughts as well as their deeds. The balance is thus unjustly loaded towards officers at the expense of those whom they commanded, and towards the articulate at the expense of the illiterate, not all of the latter members of the Brigade of Guards. Aficionados of naval history may justly complain that seamen are under-represented, but this is a portrait of human behaviour rather than a historical narrative balanced between the three dimensions of modern warfare.

If successful warriors have often been vain and uncultured men, their nations in hours of need have had cause to be profoundly grateful for their virtues, even if they have sometimes been injured by their excesses. Today, we recognise that other forms of courage are as worthy of respect as that which is shown on the battlefield. But this should not cause us to steal from the legends of former times their due as pillars of history. How far have we come, how sadly has Britain changed, when the Mayor of London proposes the removal from their plinths in Trafalgar Square of statues of British military commanders! He declares that prowess in war, especially colonial war, is no longer a fitting object for admiration. True, it is a strange quirk of fate that causes bronze images of two of the less admirable military leaders in British history, Earl Haig and the Duke of Cambridge, to dominate Whitehall. Yet it seems grotesque to seek to erase from our consciousness, in a shamelessly Stalinist spirit, a great military heritage.

This book is designed to amuse as much as to inform. I hope it will divert readers with its tales of the gallant and the picaresque. For all his social limitations and professional follies, the warrior is willing to risk everything on the field of battle, and sometimes to lose it, for purposes sometimes selfish or mistaken, but often noble.

MAX HASTINGS

Hungerford, England and Il Pinquan, Kenya

November 2004