Death and Duty
But there is a• big difference between a few men being occasionally brutal and a whole unit being systematically bloodthirsty. It is this charge to which evidence like that in the Devons' journal will be held to lend weight. The Daily Herald quotes, not without relish, an extract from " C " Company's entry: " Our record to date—of which we are justly proud—reached 24 killed, 4 captured." One of the two things that sound bad about this is the low proportion of prisoners to killed; nevertheless, this proportion is higher than anything " C " Company would have got if they had been fighting the Japanese in the last war, and I think that we ought at least to know something about the Kikuyu's readiness to surrender (a thing the Japanese normally refused to do at all) before we start making sly references to the Devons' nickname, which is " The Bloody Eleventh." The other thing that sounds bad is the phrase " of which we are justly proud." This cliché, whose use would have been equally inevitable if " C " Company had destroyed a Panzer regiment or won the tug of war, will be taken, with others, as evidence of bloodlust. I don't think it is anything of the sort, and I don't see how, when soldiers are ordered to carry out hazardous and unpleasant duties, you can stop them from taking pride in having dis- charged them successfully. A friend of mine who recently spent some time in the Devons' regimental sector said that they were almost embarrassingly popular with the loyal Africans, whose line was " While these soldiers are here our children are safe. Please do not send them anywhere else." To put these matters in perspective is an exceptionally difficult task, and anyone who attempts it automatically incurs the suspicion of being (at best) an unfeeling brute. But I think it is unfair to ask soldiers to do a grim job and then zeproach them because some of the results sound grim.
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