Remembrance day salutes man’s ancient instincts

War has a fatal attraction for men, says James Delingpole. Those who fall in combat are indeed the best and the bravest — and we shall certainly need their like again Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, and I’m sorry to repeat such a hoary cliché, but the reason it’s so hoary is it’s true. There’s barely a chap I know who doesn’t wonder how he’d fare if forced to undergo the ultimate male test — combat. And the ones who claim not to wonder such things I find frankly a bit weird. Are they not in denial of almost everything it means to be a man?

A boy’s childhood is — even now, in an era when we’re supposed to have evolved from all that militaristic nonsense — a preparation for war. Some of it’s plain obvious, like the way boys love to fight one another with sticks, and shoot each other from behind corners going ‘peeeooing peeeooing’ (or, better still, ‘trrrrrrrrrrrrr’ if they can roll their ‘rs’ and do machine guns) with their pointed fingers.

Some of it is more subtle like hide and seek — a classic concealment and evasion exercise which teaches you the importance of staying stock still and holding your nerve even when the seeker’s so close you think he absolutely must have seen you. Notice too how men and boys behave during friendly games of football. The only time they applaud during the match is when someone is injured and, having writhed on the ground for a decent interval, the victim picks himself up and elects to play manfully on. This sly social conditioning of our boys to put their team’s interests before their own, to be ready if necessary to make the ultimate sacrifice, did not die with G.A. Henty or W.E. Johns. It’s there with us still, from the playing fields of Eton to the scurfy, fenced tarmac of your local housing estate.

War is exciting — every boy knows that. As Churchill said: ‘There is nothing more exhil arating than to be shot at without result.’ The thing you’re not supposed to admit is that you’re also quite interested in finding out what it might be like to kill another human being. War is one of the only occasions when, instead of being imprisoned, you’re actually applauded for the deed.

Most soldiers who’ve done it claim not to have enjoyed it. A wartime veteran of 47 RM Commando once told me: ‘You don’t hate the enemy. He’s at the sharp end like you and you respect him for it. The reason you’re trying to kill him is to stop him killing you first. That’s what’s going through your head all the time: “Where’s that fire coming from?” Right. Better put a stop to that.’ Killing, it is said, comes naturally only to a very few — cold-blooded types like the Danish knife-specialist Anders Lassen VC and roistering Irishman Paddy Mayne, both of the wartime SAS: near-psychopaths who tend to be shunned by society during peace, but whom you don’t half want by your side in a battle. Most soldiers have an in-built antipathy to killing which only rigorous training can override.

Such at least was the claim of BrigadierGeneral S.L.A. Marshall’s influential 1947 book Men Against Fire, which made the startling assertion that when confronted by an enemy soldier only 15 to 20 per cent of US riflemen chose to shoot at him. Even if it’s true — he never did manage to produce any raw data — this squeamishness is something most infantrymen have since overcome. Certainly, when you read Sgt Dan Mills’s compulsive and gripping Sniper One — about the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment in Iraq during the battle for Al-Amarah — the impression you get is not of men weeping into their cups every time they’re regretfully forced to take out another insurgent. Rather — whatever Col Tim Collins may have once said in that famous pre-battle speech — acquiring the ‘Mark of Cain’ is something a squaddie covets as much as he does losing his virginity. And probably enjoys even more.

Does this mean then, that contrary to received wisdom, war is actually a hugely entertaining business which should be encouraged to keep our young menfolk happy? Well, no, obviously not, though I did have trouble explaining this to my eight-yearold daughter, who likes nothing better than accompanying Daddy on his frequent trips to the Imperial War Museum, and chatting eagerly to veterans selling poppies. ‘Teach us to hate war and love peace,’ goes a prayer at our church’s children’s service. ‘That’s not true, is it, Daddy? War is good,’ whispered Poppy. ‘No, darling. But sometimes it’s necessary and always it’s interesting.’ We are, I think, in collective denial about these self-evident truths. We devote acres of newspaper space to angry mothers who wish to berate the Prime Minister for entering into the supposedly needless war which resulted in the death of her son; we wring our hands over every new casualty. But there’s a reason why we send our boys into combat and why some of them die. It’s because out there in the big, wide nasty world, there are — and always will be — bad men opposed to our principles and against our way of life. You can quibble about tactics and you can quibble about strategy but the time will keep coming where peaceful negotiation just isn’t enough. The enemy know, as per Lenin’s dictum, that their task is to keep pushing in their bayonets so long as they can feel mush. The day we decide our principles and way of life are no longer worth dying for is the day the enemy has won.

As for the ‘interesting’ part — well that, too, ought to be obvious given the massive popularity of books like Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong and Patrick Bishop’s 3 Para, of films like Saving Private Ryan, video games like Call of Duty, not to mention pretty much the whole output of the History Channel.

War is hell, that’s a given. But it’s also the realm where human experience is at its most heightened. Love is more precious and intense because at any moment it could be snatched away. Death — the thing that preoccupies and fascinates us mortals perhaps above all else — becomes more prevalent, terrifying and random.

This is why so many writers are drawn to it. The great Russian author and war correspondent Vasily Grossman noticed, as did his idol Tolstoy, that you can see more strange things on the battlefield in the space of five minutes than you’d see in a lifetime of peace. For the novelist — as I’ve found with my own modest efforts at military fiction — it’s a gift. In war books, you can make anything happen because in war absolutely everything does, from craven cowardice to the most superhuman courage, from mercy to cruelty and wanton slaughter, from outrageous bad luck to astonishingly flukey good luck.

It was for some of these reasons that the war poet Keith Douglas was so keen to see the front while working as an office bod in Alexandria. He hitched a lift to his unit — the Sherwood Rangers, a county yeomanry regiment officered by Nottinghamshire hunting blades — and soon found himself commanding a tank in the thick of El Alamein. What struck him — as it strikes all soldiers — is the bizarre randomness of battle. One minute you can be caught in the bloodiest, most intense fighting; the next you can find yourself so far removed from it as scarcely to be able to conceive it’s happening. Douglas saw what he needed to see and got a very good book — Alamein to Zem Zem — and several fine poems out of it. The price he paid (and he foresaw it in one of his later poems) was to be killed for it, by a shell splinter, in Normandy.

War will always have this fatal attraction for a young man. Thucydides knew as much when he wrote, of the Peloponnesian Wars, ‘There were, at that time, great numbers of men who had never been in a war and were consequently far from unwilling to join in this one.’ Note the tone of wise, faintly amused resignation: this is what men are like and have been since time immemorial.

Sometimes when I mention this at talks, there will be a cross snort from the audience — often from a woman old enough to remember the second world war. And I don’t blame her at all. In war it’s always the women who suffer most: abandoned by their fathers and husbands; sacrificing their beloved sons (whose last word, as they die, is almost always ‘mother’); and usually denied those things that make war so much more bearable for their menfolk: the camaraderie, the excitement; the anaesthetic scent of cordite.

A lovely old couple I know both saw wartime service, one as a nurse and one as a signaller on a minesweeper which on D-Day managed to get itself stuck on a sandbank just off Omaha beach, affording my friend a terrifying ringside seat at the slaughter. For Ray, as a young man convinced he was immortal, the experience was at once unreal and fas cinating. For poor Iris, D-Day was the most traumatic event of her life. Aged 17, never having seen a man naked before, her job was to meet the wounded men in Portsmouth straight from the beach-head, cut the clothes from their rank-smelling, bloody bodies, and send them to the relevant department — one way for the limbless, another for the sucking chest wounds. It’s the women who always have to mop up once the boys are done with their silly, incomprehensible fun and games.

And men do enjoy war, a lot of them. Probably a lot more of them than will readily admit it.

Even those survivors who have suffered terribly will tell you that they’d still go through the whole experience again because of the camaraderie they enjoyed in their unit. The British soldier — like most soldiers in fact — isn’t really fighting for King or Queen and country. He’s doing it above all for his mates and he’ll happily lay his life on the line for them because he knows they’ll do exactly the same for him. Altruism of this intensity is something we almost never experience in peacetime. Of all the things I envy in old soldiers, this is the thing I envy most.

It’s what most old soldiers will have in their minds this Remembrance Sunday when they mouth those words ‘They shall not grow old as we grow old.’ When they tell you that the best and bravest of their number were the ones that didn’t make it home, it’s not just survivor’s guilt that’s speaking here. In every wartime unit, a relatively small number of men undertook a disproportionately high level of the risk-taking and fighting. They were the young officers who would never ask their men to do anything they wouldn’t do themselves; the battle-hardened NCOs who knew that what for them would be dangerous would, for a green newcomer, be suicide; the ones who would insist on breaking the soldier’s adamantine rule, ‘Never volunteer!’ On Sunday, when we revere these magnificent men, as revere them we should, let us not delude ourselves that the wars in which they fought — and continue to fight — are strange historical aberrations that we will soon grow out of as we grow more civilised. Schubert did not stop the Holocaust. Acid House did not stop Srebrenica.

Today our armed forces are enjoying a surge of applications from young men (young women too) eager not just to serve their country and fight its enemies but to find out, as their mates have done, what it’s really like at the sharp end. Some of them won’t come back. Some will leave limbs behind. Almost all will suffer some sort of trauma. If you were an idiot, you might argue that this isn’t so bad because these people invited their own fate. I wouldn’t because I think human nature in all its complexity is something we should love and cherish, not reject and despise. And whether we like it or not, there is no occasion on which the best parts of human nature — courage, love, determination, sacrifice, duty, selflessness — shine quite so brightly as they do in time of war.