From Mr Raymond Gann Sir: In the wake of your
military special issue (24 March), it is perhaps time to remind readers of the following: If the definition of a great European military power is the ability to defeat unaided another great European military power, then Britain has never made the cut in contrast with France and Germany/Prussia in the past 500 years. This fact obviously palls compared with the fear instilled by the feats of British arms into the hearts of the West Side Boys and the KLA.
The craven, non-martial Continental Europeans actually enjoy their current peace because unlike Britain they all have recent memories of armed conflict in their major centres of civilian population. This goes back even further: Paris and Berlin have each been occupied by foreign troops at least four times in the past 250 years. A bit further back and Germany was everyone's battlefield during the horrific depredations of the Thirty Years War. These are experiences totally foreign to Britain and certainly not conductive to collecting regimental silver.
The officer caste whose impending penury so deeply affects Niall Ferguson (The war against the nation') did not on the whole serve Britain well in the 20th century. In the two world wars Britain punched conspicuously below its imperial weight (the collapse of the Western front in 1940, the loss of Crete and the fall of Singapore, to name but three examples); otherwise these wars would not have been the close-run things they were.
So, yes, European military expenditure is reaching dangerously low levels and is a matter of concern, but to mourn the decline of militarism in Britain as Niall Ferguson does is both historically inaccurate (is this not the country which famously rejected a standing army?) and irresponsible.
Raymond Gann
Einbeck, Germany
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