How to Be Kind (eBook)

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SOLDIER, SOLDIER

In the eighteenth century, it must often have seemed as if a degree of lunacy was a necessary prerequisite for success as a military commander. Certainly King George II thought so: told by some of his courtiers that General Wolfe, who had captured the Canadian city of Quebec from the French, was clearly mad, he is said to have retorted, ‘Mad, is he? Well, I hope he will bite some of my other generals.’

But that apparent madness could result in exuberant displays of leadership and occasional blistering, reckless bravery and determination. It was an age of aristocratic panache, of extravagant gestures, of brash self-confidence, and of gentlemanly imperturbability under fire.

Perhaps those days are gone: soldiers, after all, no longer march off to war in the bright red uniforms that once made them such a tempting target for enemy riflemen; they no longer fight in smartly drawn-up square formations, firing off regular volleys of musket shot. But the military character has always valued courage, discipline and the readiness to sacrifice oneself for the wider good.

The idea of politeness and savoir faire in battle, when groups of men are straining every sinew in an effort to kill each other, may seem grotesque. But many of these stories demonstrate how aristocrats and commanders and ordinary footsoldiers, sailors and airmen alike, throughout history, have shown their true colours and their essential humanity under almost unimaginable pressure.

Some of them may seem barely sane; some show astonishing courage and self-sacrifice; some speak of sensitivity, even gentleness. But they are all stories about the way people can respond to the challenges of war and the danger of imminent death with grace, dignity and courtesy.

After you …

The Battle of Fontenoy was fought on 11 May 1745, in present-day Belgium, as part of the War of the Austrian Succession. It may be largely forgotten today that it was a French victory over a combined Anglo-Dutch-Hanoverian force, but it is remembered for a bizarre exchange between two rival commanders.

Lord Charles Hay, commanding a detachment of the 1st Foot Guards (now the Grenadier Guards), marched his men to within musket shot of the French Maison du Roi, an elite regiment of the royal guards of King Louis XV. Since muskets – although they inflicted terrible injuries – were notoriously inaccurate, that meant they were barely thirty paces from the enemy.

Riding out in front of his troops, Lord Charles raised a silver hip flask towards the French in a mocking toast. ‘Messeiurs les Gardes Françaises, s’il vous plaît tirez le premier!’ he called out (‘Gentlemen of the French Guard, please fire first!’). One sergeant, staring at the levelled muskets of the French, is reported to have said: ‘For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful!’ But the French commander, the Comte d’Auteroche, was equal to Lord Charles’ sangfroid.

‘Gentlemen, we never fire first. Fire yourselves,’ he replied dismissively, in perfect English. For a moment, it looked as though the battle might be postponed indefinitely, in a crazy ritual of ‘After you – no, after you’. It is not certain who did actually fire first, although one account suggests, maybe unconvincingly, that the French loosed off a volley before the English had ‘done laughing’ at their sergeant’s prayer for divine assistance. What is certain is that Lord Charles’ guards subsequently fixed bayonets in a businesslike charge of the French lines which dislodged them from their position.

By the time the battle finished, at around two o’ clock – just in time for a little late lunch for the aristocratic commanders – a total of some 15,000 soldiers had been killed. But whatever the precise truth of the story, the very fact it was so popular and repeated so often demonstrates what a gentlemanly business warfare was believed to be in the eighteenth century.

Facing the conquerors

King Christian X of Denmark was known for his habit of taking a morning ride without bodyguards through the streets of Copenhagen, during which his subjects were free to approach him.

These rides continued even after the Nazi occupation of the country, and the elderly King Christian mounted his own silent protest against the occupiers by publicly ignoring them. A long and fulsome telegram from Adolf Hitler congratulating him on his seventy-second birthday in 1942 received the dismissive reply: ‘Meinen besten Dank, Chr. Rex’ (‘My thanks, King Christian’) – a slight that led to the recall of the German ambassador from Copenhagen and the expulsion of the Danish ambassador from Germany.

There were even stories that the king had responded to a German threat to force Danish Jews to wear a yellow star on their clothing by volunteering to wear one himself. There were no Danish Jews and gentiles in Copenhagen – only Danes.

Although the king’s popularity angered senior German officers, they knew that any mistreatment of him might cause widespread trouble among the people.

In another well-documented incident, word was brought to King Christian that the swastika was flying over Christiansborg, the home of the Danish Rigsdag, or parliament. He immediately ordered that it should be taken down and replaced with the Danish flag.

This was done, but within hours, the German commandant had ordered that the swastika, the mark of German domination and Danish defeat, should be hoisted again on the palace flagpole.

King Christian telephoned him, and told him that if this were done, then a Danish soldier would be ordered to remove it again. In that case, said the commandant, the soldier would be shot by the German guards. ‘I think not,’ King Christian said. ‘I will be that soldier.’

The swastika never flew above the Rigsdag.

Courteous, considerate & kind

The most dreadful of wars often start, at least, with a commitment to human decency, restraint and honourable behaviour. The horrific reality of trench warfare was still in the future when Lord Kitchener, Britain’s Secretary of State for War, sent this message individually to each of the soldiers leaving for France in the British Expeditionary Force in August 1914: ‘You are ordered abroad as a soldier of the king to help our French comrades against the invasion of a common enemy. You have to perform a task which will need your courage, your energy, your patience.’ It said:

Nearly ninety years later, in another war on another continent – almost in another world – Lieutenant Colonel Tim Collins used very different language to convey much the same message to around 800 men of the Royal Irish Regiment as they waited to cross the border in the allied invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Speaking off the cuff, without notes, he urged them to respect the Iraqi people:

Our sons as well

Among the thousands of tributes all over Britain to the dead of two world wars are one or two that stand out because they extend their grief to former enemies. At Wareham in Dorset, the bodies of German soldiers, sailors and airmen of the Second World War – some of them washed ashore and others those of prisoners from nearby prisoner-of-war camps – lie in graves that are mingled among those of the British dead.

And in a village churchyard in Suffolk can be found a memorial to the crew of a zeppelin airship that crashed nearby during the Second World War. A few minutes before the crash, the crew could have been dropping bombs on the people beneath – but after burying them, the villagers...