“Arms and the Man,” says Shaw, “but in the name of human sanity don’t let’s have any singing about it. War is not a thing to make a song about; it’s a thing to make a stink about. And don’t talk to me about heroes. Heroes don’t win battles, they only win medals. Common sense wins battle.”
Shaw dared to attack the glamor of war and hero worship when it was most unfashionable to do so.
There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.
Flogging, sickeningly common in English barracks all through the most “glorious” periods of our military history, was not abolished here by any revolt of the English soldier against it: our soldiers would be flogging one another today as abjectly as ever but for the interference of humanitarians who hated the whole conception of military glory. We still hear of soldiers severely punished for posting up in the barrack stables a newspaper paragraph on the subject of an army grievance. Such absurd tyranny would, in a dockyard or a factory full of match girls, produce a strike; but it cows a whole regiment of soldiers. The fact is, armies as we know them are made possible, not by valour in the rank and file, but by the lack of it; not by the physical courage (we test the eyes and lungs of our recruits, never their courage), but by civic impotence and moral cowardice. I am afraid of a soldier, not because he is a brave man, but because he is so utterly unmanned by discipline that he will kill me if he is told, even when he knows that the order is given because I am trying to overthrow the oppression which he fears and hates. I respect a regiment for a mutiny more than for a hundred victories; and I confess to the heartiest contempt for the warlike civilian who pays poor men a pittance to induce them to submit to be used as pawns on a battlefield in time of war, be himself, meanwhile, sitting at home talking impudent nonsense about patriotism, heroism, devotion to duty, the inspiring sound of the British cheer, and so on.
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