'Pax,' cried Billy Bunter as we squashed him with another jammy bun

    I knew, of course, that the beads & flowers brigade
    would start jumping up & down before even considering
    what I had written.

    I did NOT suggest war represented the highest human
    activity nor that it was ALWAYS the best way of resolving
    conflicts between states. What I was drawing attention to
    was how deeply it had engaged the imaginations of the very
    greatest writers. Only in life threatening combat, sharing
    the dangers with comrades, was a man exposed to the kind
    of extreme experience that lent a knowledge of himself &
    a true grasp of the priorities - which he could acquire in
    no other way. Should we really feel bad for being interested?

    My own veteran friends all agreed war was royal hell - but,
    unlike Will's friends, very many looked on it as the most
    valued experience of their lives. I certainly cherish such
    distantly comparable times when risk & fear were exhilaratingly
    surmounted as among the very best of my own days.

    When Robbie writes: '.... Something of war, whatever adjectives
    you wish to use, is tied to us....', he's surely simply acknowledging
    one of the most basic elements in our nature. And how could
    anyone writing about that nature willingly forego entry to the theatre
    where these elements are most intensely enacted?

    On a different tack, while not suggesting war should ever be
    our first option, I equally dispute it should always be our last.
    Two ounces of war in 1935 - & probably just the threat of it -
    would have saved us twenty tons in 1945.
    '....The future was young people who understand that war
    solves nothing....,' writes Will.
    No, that isn't the future. That's the past. That's Chamberlain
    standing on Heston Aerodrome waving his piece of paper
    about peace in our time - to the cheers of the fretful crowd.
    It's Roosevelt promising 'over & over again' never to send
    his boys to foreign wars - while the Japanese laid about them
    in Nanking.

    Does he truly believe we should still have an Israel if she had
    waited for the outcome of the UN debating society or her yearly
    subscription from the Arab League?

    Scottie B.

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Received on Sun Aug 11 13:30:15 2002