Quartered Safe Out Here Read Free

cannot see that they have been conditioned by the past forty years into a new philosophic tradition, requiring new explanations; they fail to realise that there is a veil between them and the 1940s. They want to see the last war in
their
terms; they want it to conform to
their
notions. Well, it won't.
    To continue. Whatever damage the war inflicted on intelligence, honesty, etc., cannot be measured, letalone proved, even by a modern academic. I doubt if it had any special effect on anyone's intelligence or honesty; how you can inflict damage on complexity, ambiguity, and irony, is not clear to me or, I suggest, to anyone who prefers plain English to jargon. Obviously the war influenced people's thinking permanently, but to call such shaping of the mind “lasting damage” is fatuous. One might as well say that forty years of comparative peace have inflicted “lasting damage” on modern intelligence, and adduce modern theories about the 1940s as proof.
    But the last sentence of the quoted paragraph is the real beauty. I have a fairly wide acquaintance among my generation, embracing most of the British campaigns of the war, and I have yet to meet anyone who felt “frustration and disgust” about the way his experience was presented to the public. To speak of sanitisation, Norman Rockwell, and Disney in this context is to employ cheap emotional cliché it betrays the kind of blinkered mind which cannot appreciate that a Norman Rockwell idealisation (since his name has been dragged in) is not necessarily false for being an ideal, or for failing to satisfy a revisionist's misconception of the truth. If you want to believe that soldiers felt “frustration and disgust” you will no doubt find some to agree with you, if you try hard enough, but my own experience suggests that, in Britain at least, they would be a small minority. As to stupidity and sadism: yes, this soldier saw plenty of one and a little of the other, but never knew them to be represented as tactical brillianceor noble courage. No doubt convenient examples could be provided, but it would be extremely unwise to draw a general conclusion from them.
    The review goes on to say that “what, in time of war, was seen as necessary to uphold the morale of soldier and civilian alike has persisted for almost fifty years as a method of determining what should be accepted as reality”. So far as that has a meaning, it appears to be that misrepresentation of war was necessary at the time, and has continued until now, when presumably some omniscient revisionist has seen through the sham. Well, such a conclusion is false, and insulting. It fails to see that morale, far from being inspired by policy, comes from within, and is nourished by friends, family, and example. Government and media may reflect that—as Churchill did—but they cannot create it. Perhaps no one can understand that who was not alive and aware in Britain during the war, or experienced the Blitz, or was torpedoed, or confronted death and mortal peril at point-blank.
    There is, for some reason which I don't understand, a bitter desire in some to undermine what they call the “myths” of the Second World War. Most of the myths are true, but they don't want to believe that. It may be a natural reaction to having the war rammed down their throats by my generation; it may have its roots in subconscious envy; it may even spring from a reluctance to recognise that today's safety and comfort were bought fifty years ago by means which today's intelligentsia find unacceptable, and from which theywish to distance themselves. I cannot say—but I do know that the review I have quoted is typical in presenting a view which is false. It is also dangerous because it may be taken as true by the uninformed or thoughtless, since it fits fashionable prejudice. And that is how history is distorted. You cannot, you must not, judge the past by the present; you must try to see it in its own terms and values, if you are to have