LETTERS Mutinous Contemptibles
From Mr Julian Putkowski Sir: I must object to John Hughes-Wilson's splenetic denunciation of the ulterior motives of virtually everyone who attended the 'Unquiet Graves' conference (`The new contemptibles', 3 June). In my essentially lib- eral (not 'Marxist') critique of the military justification for killing what staff officers referred to as 'worthless men', Hughes-Wil- son wrongly reports me as saying 'it was eth- nic cleansing by the ruling class . . . the deliberate killing of the lower orders . . . just like Kosovo!' I actually said, 'I wish to stress that I do not regard them [i.e. officers] all as being evil or bad men. Many of them sen- tenced soldiers to death in the genuine belief that they were getting rid of weak men — it's the same sort of expression that you might find in Kosovo, when they're engaging in "ethnic cleansing" — but in the first world war that expression was not used.'
As for Hughes-Wilson's surmise about why 'respectable academics' shuffled their feet and physically distanced themselves from the platform, I was told that it was because some compassionless individual in the front row had farted.
Julian J. Putkowski
Millfields Road, London E5
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