1 00:00:00,180 --> 00:00:08,640 Just a brief stop on the moon. I have to confess, Miss, my favourite fossil walks over philosophy. 2 00:00:09,750 --> 00:00:15,720 But certainly I've thoroughly enjoyed reading everything that Christopher has written. 3 00:00:16,440 --> 00:00:24,180 He is a professor of international relations and at the School of Economics is well known for his books on philosophy and war. 4 00:00:24,210 --> 00:00:32,620 If you if you want both informative and thoughtful writing, I also have some degree of entertainment of barbarous philosophers. 5 00:00:32,640 --> 00:00:37,740 It's a wonderful book, got on the way with some of the fun of the issues that are that are raised. 6 00:00:38,550 --> 00:00:40,260 And of course, muscles and actions, 7 00:00:40,260 --> 00:00:48,630 but boring geeks and 21st century technology is changing the way we fight and think about working class thinking that was super forces. 8 00:00:49,320 --> 00:00:55,379 That's a first for you, 2030 and what we're all waiting for and we hope to be out by today. 9 00:00:55,380 --> 00:01:04,490 But in front of us, I think it's a little bit too late. Is his new book, The Volume on Fiction, called Men at War From Video to Catch 22. 10 00:01:04,500 --> 00:01:11,460 That's the American title, I think from the Iliad to Catch 22, where we've dispensed with fashion altogether. 11 00:01:11,760 --> 00:01:16,260 We have unfortunately, there's not much of the fashion that most of us have. 12 00:01:16,890 --> 00:01:28,530 I'm just speaking in terms of background of a former member, a member of the Council of Reading recent study that he's written for the Times, 13 00:01:28,920 --> 00:01:35,010 Wall Street Journal, European Union Times because of the military review, he lectures all over the world. 14 00:01:35,010 --> 00:01:39,810 But this is what I've said, and we've had a couple of interesting excursions together to Stockholm, 15 00:01:40,350 --> 00:01:44,790 Sweden, talk about things, my favourites to our advantage only ever. 16 00:01:44,790 --> 00:01:49,200 When I was listening to Chris telling me about his forthcoming book, The Way Back from an event, 17 00:01:50,010 --> 00:01:54,090 he's visiting fellow of institutes in Tokyo, Singapore, Bangkok and Oslo. 18 00:01:54,450 --> 00:01:57,960 I hope he ever else we haven't mentioned. But Christopher, thank you so much for coming. 19 00:01:58,320 --> 00:02:02,090 I'm looking forward to this because it's perhaps a little lighter. 20 00:02:02,100 --> 00:02:07,140 That was nice. Just a little bit of all the heavyweights on the subjects. But nevertheless, some important messages will come of this, too. 21 00:02:07,530 --> 00:02:14,099 Thank you for coming. I thank you very much for inviting me and thank you for coming out because it's not a subject 22 00:02:14,100 --> 00:02:18,989 that would necessarily recommend itself to people who spend a lot of time thinking about war, 23 00:02:18,990 --> 00:02:20,820 which is one of the reasons I decided to write the book. 24 00:02:21,480 --> 00:02:27,870 I had hoped to sell some copies by bringing it along today, but alas, it will appear hopefully before Christmas. 25 00:02:27,870 --> 00:02:33,389 Not exactly a stocking filler, but it weighs in at 120,000 words. 26 00:02:33,390 --> 00:02:36,870 So there's quite a lot in there to try to get my teeth into. 27 00:02:37,770 --> 00:02:42,720 I remember when I first came up for the London School of Economics, the person who influenced me, I suppose more than anyone else, 28 00:02:43,200 --> 00:02:49,079 was a colleague at Windsor who used to instruct his students when they were discussing this was in 29 00:02:49,080 --> 00:02:53,670 the Cold War period when they were discussing nuclear deterrence to go off and read a Greek tragedy. 30 00:02:55,590 --> 00:03:01,380 And he was very depressed that as the department became younger and younger in its profile, 31 00:03:01,830 --> 00:03:05,520 this is a generation of new PhD students coming off the assembly line. 32 00:03:05,880 --> 00:03:06,660 I was one of them. 33 00:03:07,950 --> 00:03:15,960 They would tell the students that literature and fiction was a complete waste of time and had no role in a social science environment. 34 00:03:16,920 --> 00:03:20,910 Apart from the philistinism of this remark, it's just absolutely wrong. 35 00:03:21,090 --> 00:03:28,559 And I'm glad to say that it's not just Philip Windsor. The Knights at Windsor who used to say that William Murray insists or used to insist 36 00:03:28,560 --> 00:03:32,550 when he was teaching PhD students that they go off and read a Greek tragedy as well. 37 00:03:33,390 --> 00:03:42,870 Is there's a lot that a Greek tragedy will tell you about the tragedy of nuclear deterrence, the tragedy of the human condition, in essence. 38 00:03:44,040 --> 00:03:48,690 But I'm not here to talk, fortunately, about that. I want to just tell you a little bit about the book, 39 00:03:48,930 --> 00:03:59,400 and then I want to nicely address the theme of the enduring conflict between history and fiction historians and writers of fiction. 40 00:04:00,500 --> 00:04:04,470 Conscious of the fact that you is in the back of the audience. 41 00:04:04,950 --> 00:04:10,530 If I can if I can keep going until 2:00, I'm safe because he has to leave it to. 42 00:04:10,980 --> 00:04:17,190 But I have a feeling I will run out of things to say before 2:00. And that's my misfortune, not yours. 43 00:04:18,630 --> 00:04:21,930 I was looking and I'm looking at the existential experience of war, 44 00:04:21,930 --> 00:04:26,999 which has been something that for me has been very important in my research in the last 30 years. 45 00:04:27,000 --> 00:04:34,200 And I do so through fiction in this book for two epic poems, of course the yet, but also an even more important epic poem. 46 00:04:34,200 --> 00:04:38,879 If you were a British colonial officer or a British soldier on the frontiers of empire in the 19th century, 47 00:04:38,880 --> 00:04:47,730 Virgil's Aeneid through two plays by Shakespeare, Henry Ford, one or two because of the character of Falstaff, 48 00:04:47,730 --> 00:04:53,850 one of the most greatest comic creations in literature through the novel, 49 00:04:54,120 --> 00:04:59,160 which begins in the 18th century, mostly novels, it has to be said, for a film, Dr. Strangelove. 50 00:05:00,230 --> 00:05:05,900 And through a short story by Don DeLillo called Human Moments in World War Three. 51 00:05:06,800 --> 00:05:11,930 And what I done in this book is to isolate five character types. 52 00:05:12,530 --> 00:05:17,270 They're not exactly Jungian archetypes, because that would be both unsettling and unfair to me. 53 00:05:17,840 --> 00:05:25,370 But they are character types warriors, heroes, villains, survivors and victims. 54 00:05:26,270 --> 00:05:31,909 And for me, these are the five existential types that war, in essence, producers. 55 00:05:31,910 --> 00:05:38,240 The Warriors, of course, include Achilles, someone once consider 148 different ways in which you can kill a man in the Iliad. 56 00:05:39,410 --> 00:05:43,010 Achilles engages in many of them, not all of them. 57 00:05:43,340 --> 00:05:46,550 Achilles spends most of his time killing, as you probably know. 58 00:05:46,850 --> 00:05:53,960 But we remember Achilles for that remarkable moment of reconciliation with the father of the man he has slain, Hector. 59 00:05:54,230 --> 00:05:58,580 When Priam comes to the camp in disguise. In disguise, because of Agamemnon, knew that he was Priam. 60 00:05:58,580 --> 00:06:05,720 He would have had him killed. Achilles, of course, shows him the laws of hospitality that we associate with a Greek of that age. 61 00:06:06,350 --> 00:06:10,219 And it's a very, very moving scene. We must, however, 62 00:06:10,220 --> 00:06:17,580 remember another part of that scene which nobody ever mentions the fact that the old man is going on and on lamenting the death of his son. 63 00:06:17,870 --> 00:06:23,299 That at one point Achilles has to bound out of the roof because he's about to put 64 00:06:23,300 --> 00:06:27,170 him to the sword and kill him if he can't stand the lamentations any longer. 65 00:06:27,800 --> 00:06:31,250 So Achilles is not quite the hero that he sometimes made out to be. 66 00:06:31,650 --> 00:06:34,670 He's not our kind of hero. It is certainly not our kind of warrior. 67 00:06:35,120 --> 00:06:36,710 He is very distant from us. 68 00:06:37,070 --> 00:06:46,820 But someone who is much nearer to us in time is of course, in this person is as virtual calls him in the Aeneid man who is piety as his duty. 69 00:06:47,000 --> 00:06:51,110 He's the first dutiful soldier he would never think of doing what Achilles does, 70 00:06:51,110 --> 00:06:57,130 which is go off and sulk in his tent because he's been shamed in the eyes of his comrades. 71 00:06:57,140 --> 00:07:01,880 That is unacceptable for a Roman warrior. You just get on with it. 72 00:07:02,390 --> 00:07:06,320 And his duty is to his gods. His duty is to the ancestors. 73 00:07:06,860 --> 00:07:10,520 His duty is to his friends behind beside whom he is fighting. 74 00:07:11,240 --> 00:07:18,350 And his ultimate duty is to the city he will found or from whose destiny will be found? 75 00:07:18,650 --> 00:07:22,040 The city of Rome. It's a destiny he would not have chosen. 76 00:07:22,790 --> 00:07:30,679 He's always accusing the gods of giving him a destiny that is not the one that he would have wanted for himself. 77 00:07:30,680 --> 00:07:33,860 He would have preferred to stay in Troy and die fighting by his friends. 78 00:07:34,520 --> 00:07:39,080 He was not allowed to do that because he had a mandate. It includes human rights. 79 00:07:40,550 --> 00:07:44,180 I was asked today at lunch why I didn't include war and peace. 80 00:07:44,660 --> 00:07:49,100 I don't wish to inflict cruel and unusual punishment on my readers. 81 00:07:49,490 --> 00:07:55,910 I mean, a thousand pages. I know the Booker Prize winner. The latest one has just won the Booker Prize with an 872 page book. 82 00:07:56,390 --> 00:08:01,130 But the fact is, I think I was also saying I've just finished a Moby-Dick for the first time in my life. 83 00:08:01,940 --> 00:08:07,940 That's a really good read. And I managed to do it in three days, but only by skipping all the passengers on whaling, which is one third of the book. 84 00:08:08,960 --> 00:08:14,900 I would advise you, if you really want a piece to skip the passages in history and Tolstoy's idea of the great man, 85 00:08:14,900 --> 00:08:16,520 or rather the absence of the great man in history. 86 00:08:16,730 --> 00:08:23,990 Go and read his novella, Hadji Murat, which is about a Chechen warlord, a very conflicted warrior, a real figure. 87 00:08:24,680 --> 00:08:27,169 And some of the book is based on real historical testimony, 88 00:08:27,170 --> 00:08:35,840 some letters and records from the time a figure who dies, a conflicted man because of conflicted loyalties. 89 00:08:36,170 --> 00:08:39,980 But he dies in battle. He dies as he wants to live. 90 00:08:40,610 --> 00:08:43,250 And Harold Bloom, the Sterling professor of literature at Yale, 91 00:08:43,730 --> 00:08:51,320 calls the death scene of Haji Miraz in that short by that name the most moving death scene in literature. 92 00:08:51,390 --> 00:08:58,550 Death scene of a warrior. It also includes for those of you who prefer the Navy lucky Jack Aubrey. 93 00:08:58,880 --> 00:09:01,880 I don't know whether any of you saw the Russell Crowe movie Master and Commander. 94 00:09:02,270 --> 00:09:06,229 That's Jack Aubrey. I chose him because he works on a weapons platform, a ship. 95 00:09:06,230 --> 00:09:12,370 He's a team player. These are worried, of course, but he has to be a warrior in the company of known warriors. 96 00:09:12,380 --> 00:09:15,650 He has to be a team leader and inspire the team. 97 00:09:17,240 --> 00:09:23,270 And finally, I chose Thoma, who is a young man in a space capsule orbiting the Earth as near to a drone pilot. 98 00:09:23,270 --> 00:09:28,080 I think it is it probably gets who is, of course, is in no particular danger. 99 00:09:28,100 --> 00:09:32,239 The American military insist on calling drone pilots warriors. 100 00:09:32,240 --> 00:09:35,780 They call them cubicle warriors, just as they insist on calling cyber hackers. 101 00:09:36,020 --> 00:09:41,750 Cyber warriors. I have a feeling for the very terminology is being debased and the currency is being devalued. 102 00:09:42,140 --> 00:09:44,120 But that may be my problem, not theirs. 103 00:09:44,510 --> 00:09:54,200 The fact is, it is a hollow person to the core, and that is the warning that DeLillo is trying to get across to as a short story written in 1983, 104 00:09:55,040 --> 00:09:58,490 when his commanding officer says to him, How do you feel about this mission? 105 00:09:58,850 --> 00:10:05,900 He says. I feel happy about it. The commanding officer says Happiness son is not one of the mission parameters. 106 00:10:06,740 --> 00:10:09,830 You're not allowed to have emotions in this kind of war. 107 00:10:10,040 --> 00:10:18,440 War is just an office routine. And don't forget it. I would have liked to have had a robot in the U.S. 108 00:10:18,500 --> 00:10:23,690 A robot? But there are, unfortunately, no military robots in the literature that are worth reading. 109 00:10:24,110 --> 00:10:30,120 There isn't weird tales if any of you read with tales. A robot called Jake One Jungle Action Killer. 110 00:10:30,140 --> 00:10:34,760 One is actually run by a sergeant with my name, Sergeant Coker. 111 00:10:35,420 --> 00:10:39,830 So I was very tempted to bring this in. But I'm not sure whether a robot is a hero. 112 00:10:40,460 --> 00:10:48,050 I'm not even sure whether a robot would be a warrior. I'm not sure by the time that we decided robots are warriors. 113 00:10:48,560 --> 00:10:55,580 Whether the very term will mean very much like the stage heroes, because heroes are very different from warriors. 114 00:10:55,970 --> 00:11:00,530 They are not people who hear the call. They do not have a vocation to do war. 115 00:11:00,950 --> 00:11:04,910 They come to war usually by accident. They find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. 116 00:11:05,930 --> 00:11:09,680 They come through for others. And that's, I think, what really makes them heroic. 117 00:11:10,190 --> 00:11:13,549 And the characters I chose are largely Democratic characters, 118 00:11:13,550 --> 00:11:18,750 because I think the warrior is very difficult for a democratic society to come to terms with. 119 00:11:18,750 --> 00:11:20,720 The hero is very easy to come to terms with. 120 00:11:21,350 --> 00:11:29,360 And I start with Henry Fleming, the young soldier in the Red Badge of Courage, the first Democratic novel, essentially, that we have. 121 00:11:29,870 --> 00:11:33,650 And I start with another one. A guy without a first name. His name is born. 122 00:11:33,920 --> 00:11:34,700 And her privates. 123 00:11:34,700 --> 00:11:43,249 We bought Frederick Manning, which for me is the greatest book to come out of the First World War and casts a very different image about the war. 124 00:11:43,250 --> 00:11:46,760 From reading the war poets and Bourne is a stoic. 125 00:11:46,850 --> 00:11:53,810 He stoical, he endures. That's his heroism. No particular passion, certainly not animated by patriotism, 126 00:11:54,440 --> 00:12:02,510 but simply by a solid sense of camaraderie that everyone is in it together and that one has to go the extra distance for others. 127 00:12:02,990 --> 00:12:10,970 A wonderful figure, I think, very similar to the author of the book Robert Jordan and for Whom the Bell Tolls, 128 00:12:11,720 --> 00:12:14,150 a young man who sacrifices himself at the very end. 129 00:12:14,170 --> 00:12:22,430 It's one of the great acts of self-sacrifice in literature who sacrifices himself, because this makes him an authentic human being is what he does. 130 00:12:23,150 --> 00:12:24,860 The people who ask silly questions like, 131 00:12:24,860 --> 00:12:32,360 Why did Luther put himself at risk by nailing the thesis on the gates of the arch of the Cathedral of Wittenberg? 132 00:12:32,600 --> 00:12:36,170 Luther actually tells us I can do no other. It's one of his great remarks. 133 00:12:37,070 --> 00:12:42,050 Equally stupid to ask why Scott decided to put himself at risk and indeed to die in the South Pole. 134 00:12:42,710 --> 00:12:46,360 This is the nature of the people. This is what they are. This is what they do. 135 00:12:46,370 --> 00:12:49,690 And when Robert Jordan dies and sacrifices himself, it's not an impulse. 136 00:12:49,700 --> 00:12:54,530 It's an impulsive act, but it's not a spontaneous act. It is actually the culmination of his life. 137 00:12:54,980 --> 00:12:58,370 It is what he wants to do because it makes his life meaningful. 138 00:12:59,810 --> 00:13:02,990 That, I think is a hero. Villains. 139 00:13:03,260 --> 00:13:06,410 When their stock figures of their generals who betray their men for their ambition, 140 00:13:07,130 --> 00:13:13,250 cowardly officers, inept officers, or just merely incompetent men in love with their own cover story? 141 00:13:13,820 --> 00:13:14,450 Plenty of them. 142 00:13:15,590 --> 00:13:21,169 That's the section I enjoyed most of all, because of course, villains are always the most fascinating figures and they always have the best lines. 143 00:13:21,170 --> 00:13:29,630 And I suppose my favourite villain in my book is General Cummings in Norman Mailer's one and only decent novel, and his first, The Naked and the Dead. 144 00:13:29,990 --> 00:13:39,230 What a wonderful figure. Cummings is not exactly a bad man, in fact, and very competent, but he's given to theorising too much about war, 145 00:13:39,920 --> 00:13:43,550 and he's given to these wonderful, grandiloquent, 20th century ideas. 146 00:13:43,850 --> 00:13:48,260 He betrays his men for ideas. He sees them as human material for the American century. 147 00:13:49,850 --> 00:13:52,910 He sees them as the collateral damage of manifest destiny. 148 00:13:54,380 --> 00:13:59,270 We don't follow these figures to all death anymore because we don't speak this language anymore. 149 00:13:59,930 --> 00:14:04,160 But people did speak this language in the mid-20th century and many believed it. 150 00:14:04,970 --> 00:14:08,330 And that is, I think, the reason he's in the book. 151 00:14:09,140 --> 00:14:14,940 Of course, I love putting Dr. Strangelove in. He only has 58 lines in the entire movie, but what wonderful lines they are, too. 152 00:14:14,960 --> 00:14:21,410 He's an amalgam of many people, Herman Kahn, who one person described as a thermonuclear Zero Mostel, 153 00:14:22,910 --> 00:14:28,580 an apocalyptic Santa Claus with love, a description of Herman Kahn, a man who claimed to have the highest IQ in American history. 154 00:14:29,990 --> 00:14:38,780 Not quite sure how that is measured, given the historical record, but then we are also measured also based on Edward Teller to some extent, 155 00:14:39,530 --> 00:14:44,899 and the guy whose name I forget, the famous mathematician in the late forties and early fifties. 156 00:14:44,900 --> 00:14:52,250 But it's gone from him as contemptuous of the American generals in the war room as the American generals are very mistrustful of him. 157 00:14:52,790 --> 00:14:56,930 A German, after all, with a strange German name. Strangelove is not his original name. 158 00:14:57,140 --> 00:15:02,770 And we remember that wonderful scene with the slide rule where. He's working out because they didn't really have computers in those days. 159 00:15:03,070 --> 00:15:09,880 How many people you can generate in the coal mines and get back to the GNP of your present GNP in 100 years time? 160 00:15:09,970 --> 00:15:13,770 Wonderful, wonderful lines. And his last line, I can walk mine here. 161 00:15:14,590 --> 00:15:20,170 He's actually cured of his paralysis at the end as the bombs start dropping on the world have bringing the world to an end. 162 00:15:21,790 --> 00:15:28,359 Less well known, I think the other villains of the peace, the hollow men will produce. 163 00:15:28,360 --> 00:15:36,310 It's hollow men. The one I mentioned is Colonel Thoreau, who's a character in a short novella by Joseph Conrad called The Duellists. 164 00:15:36,490 --> 00:15:39,010 Ridley Scott made a film with that title. 165 00:15:39,340 --> 00:15:48,460 Colonel Thoreau is a small man with a huge vanity, and he pursues his likes and dislikes throughout the Napoleonic Wars based on a real character. 166 00:15:48,640 --> 00:15:54,580 By the way, that's the problem with war. Small men in big situations. 167 00:15:55,390 --> 00:16:01,930 And Colonel Morlock, for those of you who know you're Herman Melville and the confidence man, he's literally only appears in four pages. 168 00:16:02,260 --> 00:16:08,620 But he's such a wonderful character. He's an Indian hater and what Melville calls the Indians leather stocking nemesis. 169 00:16:08,890 --> 00:16:15,670 There's a chapter on him called The Metaphysics of Indian Hating. He's a man who hates the Indians, who he's fighting. 170 00:16:16,210 --> 00:16:19,990 And I think the Frontier Wars, there are many more docs out there, 171 00:16:20,470 --> 00:16:24,730 whether you're talking about talent that is, or towelhead or gooks or whatever it is. 172 00:16:24,970 --> 00:16:32,590 War produces this kind of demonisation of the enemy, and the characters who demonise are frequently much more the enemy than yourself. 173 00:16:33,370 --> 00:16:40,569 There's a wonderful line in the book where he's offered the governorship of Wisconsin and he says he doesn't think he should 174 00:16:40,570 --> 00:16:47,770 take it because the people who vote for him wouldn't like him leaving the office in the evening to kill and scalp Indians. 175 00:16:48,520 --> 00:16:53,499 And actually, Mourdock's a real figure, and that is a real remark by the character on whom he was based, 176 00:16:53,500 --> 00:16:57,190 who was also offered the governorship and declined on the grounds that they'd reached a stage 177 00:16:57,190 --> 00:17:01,930 in American history where it became a government to leave in the evening to scalped Indians. 178 00:17:02,410 --> 00:17:05,050 There is a sculptor, Josh Holden, in Blood Meridian. 179 00:17:05,110 --> 00:17:12,940 Any of you who read the Sunday Times a couple of days ago had an interview with the three directors who tried to direct Blood Meridian. 180 00:17:13,330 --> 00:17:19,569 Cormac McCarthy's book, It is Completely Unacceptable, and one of them said Hollywood is not yet ready for that level of brutality. 181 00:17:19,570 --> 00:17:24,280 It's based on the real wars in Texas with Mexicans and with the Indians. 182 00:17:24,520 --> 00:17:31,450 Real records. Judge Holden is a real person. He's a paederast, a child killer, an Indian hater, and a sculpture of Mexicans. 183 00:17:31,870 --> 00:17:36,600 Because the Americans can't really tell the difference between Mexican scalps and Indian scalps. 184 00:17:36,610 --> 00:17:40,000 You get paid for 200 scalps time and they look the same. 185 00:17:40,420 --> 00:17:45,150 So who cares? It's easier to scalp Mexicans than Indians. It's a reminder of our primal nature. 186 00:17:45,190 --> 00:17:49,240 It is the reminder of how we go back to what we originally were. 187 00:17:50,170 --> 00:17:55,600 It's a reminder of how you may try to hedge in war with rules and conventions and social taboos. 188 00:17:56,020 --> 00:18:02,020 But you will always risk the point that consider this makes being reduced to the level of your circumstances. 189 00:18:02,800 --> 00:18:07,180 And it doesn't get worse than the Indian Wars on the Texan border in the 1850s. 190 00:18:08,620 --> 00:18:18,050 The Indians come out of this very badly as well. McCarthy is a man who has no time for the romance or romanticising that Indian culture. 191 00:18:18,070 --> 00:18:23,830 He's talking about the brutality of two different peoples fighting each other in the most brutal of landscapes, 192 00:18:24,250 --> 00:18:28,810 which is Texas, an almost lunar landscape at the time, bereft of human life. 193 00:18:29,800 --> 00:18:33,879 So that's the reason I mention these characters. 194 00:18:33,880 --> 00:18:37,210 And I'll just finally end with the other two survivors. 195 00:18:37,240 --> 00:18:41,649 War has its survivors. The most magnificent is undoubtedly John Falstaff. 196 00:18:41,650 --> 00:18:47,170 Jack Falstaff, who dies in his bed as he would have wanted. 197 00:18:48,160 --> 00:18:51,610 He's a warrior, definitely, but he doesn't like fighting battles. 198 00:18:52,390 --> 00:18:58,900 Is that wonderful scene in Henry the Fist, where the king exhorts his men into battle by saying, 199 00:18:58,900 --> 00:19:01,690 Gentlemen of that tonight will hold their manacles cheap, 200 00:19:02,200 --> 00:19:08,740 but they will not here on Sun Crispin's Day will not Jack Falstaff lost in dreadful stuff wants to do is die in battle. 201 00:19:09,370 --> 00:19:14,320 He wants to die in his bed. And that's what he did. Does is he a coward? 202 00:19:15,010 --> 00:19:20,110 I don't think so. Is he a cynic? Yes. When he's recruiting men, he recruits the feeble. 203 00:19:20,560 --> 00:19:27,970 But as you said, it's much better to put the evil at risk than it is the young and the healthy, because society needs the old and the healthy. 204 00:19:28,210 --> 00:19:34,390 It's very kind of 20th century attitude, really. The feeble will fill a pit as well as the strong, he says. 205 00:19:36,280 --> 00:19:39,730 And he's not a hypocrite because he doesn't like war. It's his trade. 206 00:19:40,030 --> 00:19:43,270 He's a knight. It's what a knight has to do. It doesn't love it. 207 00:19:43,600 --> 00:19:49,570 He's not in love with it. Unlike the King Henry the Fifth, his meal ticket to the future, what he thinks is being taken to the future. 208 00:19:50,260 --> 00:19:51,520 If you know your Henry the face, 209 00:19:51,520 --> 00:19:59,260 you know when the king goes in disguise on the eve of the battle of and cool and wants to listen to his men and tells them that the. 210 00:19:59,560 --> 00:20:05,080 His conscience is clear. Clearly is not clear. He's lying to himself as much as he's lying to them. 211 00:20:05,650 --> 00:20:10,600 Falstaff never lies to himself. He knows what he is. And that, I think, makes him such a remarkable character. 212 00:20:11,140 --> 00:20:14,140 Other survivors, obviously, Flashman. 213 00:20:14,770 --> 00:20:17,710 But as you know, he dies a field marshal in 1960. 214 00:20:18,520 --> 00:20:25,390 The man who is the greatest coward in the British army and one of the most decorated serves both sides in the American Civil War is a slaver on it. 215 00:20:25,420 --> 00:20:33,640 Just before the American Civil War. Has no time for the Patriots and the clubs in London urging people on to Afghanistan. 216 00:20:34,210 --> 00:20:38,110 Has no time for what he calls the preachers of red hot, still has no time for missionaries, 217 00:20:38,620 --> 00:20:42,639 would have very little time for humanitarians and NGO workers today if he found himself 218 00:20:42,640 --> 00:20:48,280 in Afghanistan and hates politicians like Tony Blair who have messianic messages, 219 00:20:49,000 --> 00:20:55,720 fighting evil, whatever it might be. This is why Flashman ultimately is not a villain and does not appear in the villain section. 220 00:20:56,140 --> 00:20:59,620 In fact, his author came to love him at the end. It's pretty villainous at the beginning. 221 00:21:00,220 --> 00:21:07,660 Those of you who had the misfortune to be given Tom Brown schoolboy schooldays as a Christmas gift as I was, that takes me Will. 222 00:21:07,870 --> 00:21:13,749 He's a horrible, pious little creep. It's nice to see Flashman beating him up occasionally. 223 00:21:13,750 --> 00:21:20,680 Occasionally runs across him. In the course of the of the books, Flashman would have hated the Afghan mission. 224 00:21:21,100 --> 00:21:29,020 What he like to today for Americans this catch 22 because Yossarian is of course the great survivor 225 00:21:29,620 --> 00:21:35,200 and his desertion at the end of the book is the most moral action in a book full of amoral, 226 00:21:35,740 --> 00:21:38,740 not necessarily immoral, but amoral characters. 227 00:21:39,250 --> 00:21:46,180 And because he's at war, not with the military and not with the officers, he is at war with the system. 228 00:21:46,630 --> 00:21:49,870 But war has become a system that grinds people down. 229 00:21:50,290 --> 00:21:57,010 The air war, of course, he's talking about [INAUDIBLE] through 37 missions during the Second World War as a bombardier. 230 00:21:57,220 --> 00:22:01,120 He loved it. This is not an anti-war book in any way. 231 00:22:02,200 --> 00:22:06,220 People made the mistake of reading. It was anti-war because it was the Vietnam War book. 232 00:22:06,310 --> 00:22:11,710 It's not about Vietnam at all, and it was certainly not anti-war and that he did it from his friend Kurt Vonnegut. 233 00:22:11,770 --> 00:22:14,470 They were neighbours. They lived together on the East Coast. 234 00:22:15,780 --> 00:22:21,159 [INAUDIBLE], he was very unlike Hemingway, who like to think of himself as the great warrior. 235 00:22:21,160 --> 00:22:24,670 Apparently Hemingway only saw battle once for one day. 236 00:22:25,090 --> 00:22:33,250 We're not even sure that that's actually true. He decorated himself with a lot of medals in the course of his lifetime. 237 00:22:34,120 --> 00:22:43,810 He was an SS warrior. He the abiding sin of the American novel was parts of the American novel is this obsession with manliness. 238 00:22:44,650 --> 00:22:50,440 And he made the great mistake of mistaking the warrior for someone who's trying to prove that manliness. 239 00:22:50,890 --> 00:22:55,390 This is not necessarily the case. It's a very 20th century interpretation of the warrior. 240 00:22:55,390 --> 00:23:02,080 Anyway, when Hemingway blew his brains out with an elephant gun, Norman Mailer said that proved finally his cowardice. 241 00:23:02,800 --> 00:23:07,750 Well, whether you want to take Hemingway, who dropped him drums, 242 00:23:08,260 --> 00:23:12,730 drums on about manliness all the time, or Mailer who drums on about manliness all the time. 243 00:23:13,390 --> 00:23:22,180 The fact is that Hitler was the real thing. And finally, victims and the victims include, obviously Paul Baumer in all quiet on the Western Front, 244 00:23:22,180 --> 00:23:29,890 which is the only anti-war book in my book, even if it's really technically anti-war, it wasn't read as an anti-war book. 245 00:23:30,520 --> 00:23:34,270 It sold so many copies when it came out because people thought it was an adventure 246 00:23:34,270 --> 00:23:39,129 story and they wanted to remind themselves of their first World War experience. 247 00:23:39,130 --> 00:23:44,950 But it includes perhaps the first traumatised victim in history, the play by Sophocles called Velocities, 248 00:23:45,880 --> 00:23:53,770 which I think is probably as near to describing trauma as anyone could get at that period of history without being able to diagnose it. 249 00:23:54,130 --> 00:23:59,140 And was a play that was used by the American Army in an exercise called Warrior Theatre 250 00:23:59,650 --> 00:24:04,300 to try to persuade veterans to come to terms with the trauma of war taking medication. 251 00:24:04,450 --> 00:24:08,440 The other play was Ajax, which is not about its long ties to Hero. They were quite wrong. 252 00:24:08,740 --> 00:24:15,190 The Philoctetes, I think possibly is. And Colonel Shaba, in a small novella in Balzac's great sprawling novel, 253 00:24:15,190 --> 00:24:20,860 the human comedy who's a guy who returns home to find that he has no home to return to. 254 00:24:21,430 --> 00:24:26,920 His wife doesn't recognise him deliberately because she's married someone else and taken his fortune with her. 255 00:24:27,160 --> 00:24:33,850 It's it's the story of people who come back to their country after war to find that the country is unrecognisable. 256 00:24:34,450 --> 00:24:39,880 But they've lost their family because they have changed themselves. And it's there in the short novella. 257 00:24:40,600 --> 00:24:42,640 So I hope you'll read the book now. 258 00:24:43,060 --> 00:24:53,860 With the clock ominously ticking towards 2:00 and Professor Strong's intervention, I shall get the history and and fiction. 259 00:24:54,010 --> 00:24:59,280 And may I just read a passage from Hemingway's book, Men at War, from which I take my title of my own. 260 00:24:59,350 --> 00:25:05,169 A book. It's a collection of of of writings on war that he produced. 261 00:25:05,170 --> 00:25:10,060 It's an anthology. A writer's job is to tell the truth. 262 00:25:10,930 --> 00:25:16,360 His standard of fidelity to the truth should be so high that his invention out 263 00:25:16,360 --> 00:25:21,070 of his experience should produce a truer account than anything factual can be. 264 00:25:22,120 --> 00:25:27,460 That's the point. Truer than the facts. The facts can be observed badly. 265 00:25:28,510 --> 00:25:34,180 But when a good writer is creating something, he has time and scope to make of it an absolute truth. 266 00:25:35,120 --> 00:25:42,970 Now, I think what writers are trying to do, fiction writers, is to show you the absolute truth of war. 267 00:25:43,510 --> 00:25:48,549 And what is the absolute truth of war? What he said it. He said war was the only definition he was willing to provide. 268 00:25:48,550 --> 00:25:51,700 It's the human thing. It's not a very elegant definition. 269 00:25:51,740 --> 00:25:56,110 He said it is not a very elegant Greek writer. You don't said it is for elegance. 270 00:25:56,110 --> 00:26:00,639 You would read Herodotus for elegance of style, but it's pretty direct. 271 00:26:00,640 --> 00:26:03,310 And he knew what he was talking about. It's the human thing. 272 00:26:05,680 --> 00:26:10,690 Hemingway begins his book with a quotation from classic This war is part of the intercourse of human beings. 273 00:26:12,910 --> 00:26:16,210 Hemingway like philosophers who called him The Einstein of Battles. 274 00:26:16,810 --> 00:26:20,170 Tolstoy hated Clausewitz and guided mercilessly. 275 00:26:20,410 --> 00:26:26,890 In a nice little passage on the eve of the Battle of Borodino, Clausewitz was interested in the existential demands of war. 276 00:26:29,270 --> 00:26:32,930 He was also, of course, personally interested in the existential appeal. 277 00:26:34,250 --> 00:26:41,540 He confessed to his wife on their wedding night that going into battle at the age of 13 meant more to him than the wedding night did. 278 00:26:42,500 --> 00:26:47,389 Very brave man or a very unimaginative one. 279 00:26:47,390 --> 00:26:48,440 I'm not quite sure which. 280 00:26:52,660 --> 00:26:58,960 He talks of the moral forces of war, such as courage and hatred, and many other moral forces which are the existential forces of war. 281 00:26:58,990 --> 00:27:02,590 In other words, he is interested in half of the equation. 282 00:27:03,580 --> 00:27:09,490 And that, I think, is what fiction writers can bring an insight into the other half of the equation. 283 00:27:10,510 --> 00:27:15,340 Can I just quote another passage from the book? 284 00:27:17,950 --> 00:27:20,980 It's passage by James Jones, the author of The Thin Red Line, 285 00:27:21,790 --> 00:27:27,130 and it depicts a soldier called Bell who finds himself in the middle of a vicious firefight in the Pacific Theatre. 286 00:27:28,360 --> 00:27:32,560 And this is what Bill thinks in a film or a novel. 287 00:27:32,800 --> 00:27:37,990 They would dramatise and build to the climax of the attack and would have a semblance of meaning and a semblance of emotion. 288 00:27:38,650 --> 00:27:44,140 But here there was no semblance of meaning. And the emotions were so many and so mixed up that they were indecipherable. 289 00:27:44,770 --> 00:27:48,610 They could not be untangled. Nothing had been decided. 290 00:27:48,610 --> 00:27:52,689 Nobody had learned anything. Art Bell decided. 291 00:27:52,690 --> 00:28:05,290 Creative art is [INAUDIBLE]. So you see the novelists come under attack as well for not being able to sum up the absolute truth. 292 00:28:06,370 --> 00:28:13,930 But I think the point about fiction, great fiction, is that it can show aspects of reality that we wouldn't see unless we read about them. 293 00:28:15,730 --> 00:28:22,480 It's not an escape from reality. It animates reality. And our fictional heroes are not larger than life. 294 00:28:22,480 --> 00:28:25,750 They are, as her group says, life's largeness. 295 00:28:26,560 --> 00:28:31,180 Which is why we seek them out when we adopt them, when we identify with them. 296 00:28:33,040 --> 00:28:36,310 So history or literature, it's not an either or. 297 00:28:36,580 --> 00:28:41,320 Of course. But I can see why historians have problems with literary writers. 298 00:28:41,530 --> 00:28:45,400 Here's Kurt Vonnegut about his book, Slaughterhouse-Five. 299 00:28:45,700 --> 00:28:49,750 Some of you may have read all this happened more or less. 300 00:28:49,900 --> 00:28:52,630 The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true. 301 00:28:53,650 --> 00:29:00,100 The first question you set about the book, which is autobiographical, is, Well, which bits are truth and which bits aren't true? 302 00:29:01,900 --> 00:29:09,370 Is Tim O'Brien, who for me wrote The Finest Work on Vietnam War The Things That Carried Life Vonnegut. 303 00:29:09,610 --> 00:29:12,640 It's based on his own experiences in Vietnam. He was there. 304 00:29:13,810 --> 00:29:18,460 The story, he says, is technically inaccurate because he's made a lot of it up. 305 00:29:19,390 --> 00:29:27,400 But it's absolutely truthful about the experience. It's truthful about the situation in which he and his men found themselves. 306 00:29:28,570 --> 00:29:30,590 Most passage I'll read you today, if I may. 307 00:29:30,610 --> 00:29:37,840 It's a slightly extended passage from my book because I wanted to get this across, and it's about O'Brien's work. 308 00:29:38,980 --> 00:29:42,580 He gives the reader a shockingly visceral sense of what it feels like to triumph 309 00:29:42,580 --> 00:29:47,140 through a booby trapped land carrying £20 of supplies and £14 of ammunition, 310 00:29:47,620 --> 00:29:53,770 along with radios, assault rifles and grenades. These were the things the men of Alpha Company would carry with them. 311 00:29:54,400 --> 00:30:01,200 But there was much else besides. One of the characters of the book carries seven ounces of premium dope, another a packet of condoms, 312 00:30:01,210 --> 00:30:08,530 a third a devout Baptist as an illustrated New Testament that had be presented by his father, who taught Sunday school in Oklahoma City. 313 00:30:09,340 --> 00:30:15,610 They had with them all they could, including silent, all the terrible colour of the things they carried. 314 00:30:16,210 --> 00:30:21,220 It's a quote from O'Brien. But there were other burdens, including the weight of their memories. 315 00:30:21,850 --> 00:30:28,330 Often they carried each other, the wounded or the weak. Friendship is one of the minor keys of grace in O'Brien's work. 316 00:30:28,360 --> 00:30:33,520 It's part of the emotional wiring of his characters, and they bore those memories all their lives. 317 00:30:34,450 --> 00:30:40,150 For the most part, they conduct themselves with dignity, but they're human prone to fear and sometimes panic. 318 00:30:40,900 --> 00:30:46,390 Others display a sort of wistful resignation. They might be afraid, but they're even more afraid to show it. 319 00:30:47,440 --> 00:30:54,130 But apart from the haunting poetry of it all, O'Brien is insistent that what he is recounting isn't the truth. 320 00:30:55,120 --> 00:31:00,850 And the last thing he can do as a writer is to draw a moral from the tale he tells. 321 00:31:01,720 --> 00:31:05,140 In many cases, he says, a true war story cannot be believed. 322 00:31:06,370 --> 00:31:16,780 Often the crazy stuff is true, and the normal stuff is not, because the normal stuff is invented to make the reader believe the craziness is credible. 323 00:31:17,950 --> 00:31:25,930 O'Brien insists that you cannot tell a true story because it's beyond telling, which is why he thinks literature is more instructed in history. 324 00:31:26,530 --> 00:31:32,650 In the same way that the late philosopher Richard Rorty believed that only literature, not philosophy, could teach the importance of compassion. 325 00:31:34,740 --> 00:31:39,240 I think what he's arguing is that historians must read morals into their story. 326 00:31:39,330 --> 00:31:42,480 They're telling stories like fiction writers. 327 00:31:43,620 --> 00:31:48,570 But the stories have to have a meaning, a theme, a purpose. 328 00:31:49,050 --> 00:31:55,290 You don't pick up a history book just to read about a meaningless experience. 329 00:31:58,320 --> 00:32:04,300 O'Brien is saying that the great writers cannot tell you a moral a true story. 330 00:32:04,320 --> 00:32:08,400 He says it's all about memory, and that depends on the people who are listening to it. 331 00:32:09,120 --> 00:32:15,600 The subtitle of his work is A Work of fiction, but it's also, I think, a work of fact amplified through fiction. 332 00:32:19,360 --> 00:32:23,080 Let me get back to Hemingway. Hemingway said that truth in war is very difficult to come by. 333 00:32:23,380 --> 00:32:28,440 When a man goes out to seek the truth, he often doesn't come back, he adds. 334 00:32:28,450 --> 00:32:38,350 If 12 men go out to seek the truth and to come back, the truth they will bring will be true, not the garbled hearsay that we passed as history. 335 00:32:39,790 --> 00:32:44,350 This is the this is the battle between fiction writers and historians. 336 00:32:44,800 --> 00:32:48,580 Who is bringing the truth? What kind of truth are they're bringing? 337 00:32:50,080 --> 00:32:53,560 Is ever capable of summing up the absolute truth of war? 338 00:32:53,920 --> 00:32:57,730 Because that would make you capable of summing up the absolute truth of the human condition, 339 00:32:58,600 --> 00:33:02,340 something which theologians and philosophers have been unable to somehow. 340 00:33:03,040 --> 00:33:07,059 Or those who claim that they know what the absolute truth of the human condition is, 341 00:33:07,060 --> 00:33:10,900 or some of the more dangerous people that we encounter in our lives. 342 00:33:12,550 --> 00:33:16,570 For me, it's not really a battle because both groups are doing totally different things. 343 00:33:17,710 --> 00:33:24,330 Take a historian who's writing about the 30 Years War. What's interesting is the very first battle of the White Mountain in 1620. 344 00:33:24,920 --> 00:33:31,990 The soldiers went into battle shouting Santa maria, and the Spanish soldiers, 14 years later, fought at the Battle of Northern England. 345 00:33:32,170 --> 00:33:33,700 Their cry was it either Espana? 346 00:33:34,690 --> 00:33:42,460 Between those 14 years, we had moved from a kind of age of religion into what was going to become an age of nation states. 347 00:33:42,760 --> 00:33:52,370 And the significance is only noticeable to a historian looking back, making the contrasts, the contrapuntal truth in this case. 348 00:33:52,390 --> 00:33:58,330 In this case, what fiction writers are doing is they're not interested in the causes of war, 349 00:33:58,330 --> 00:34:02,440 and they're not particularly interested in the significant struggle, significant civil war. 350 00:34:03,280 --> 00:34:10,960 What they're interested in is what was the significance of the war for the individual soldier at the time, for the Spanish soldiers that knowing them. 351 00:34:11,800 --> 00:34:17,200 How did they imagine their deaths? And is Hemingway right when he says about cowardice? 352 00:34:17,920 --> 00:34:24,370 But cowardice is the it's one of his most famous sayings, his definition of cowardice, the inability to suspend the imagination. 353 00:34:26,290 --> 00:34:31,750 Bravery, he says, is the courage to live in the present with no before and no after. 354 00:34:33,520 --> 00:34:39,310 That's just one definition of courage and one definition of cowardice from a great writer. 355 00:34:41,830 --> 00:34:47,830 Now, of course, there was a time when military historians were not interested in the existential experience of war at all. 356 00:34:47,920 --> 00:34:54,219 War was just a matter of the armies moving across battlefields led by generals, which sometimes had a biographical interest in the generals. 357 00:34:54,220 --> 00:34:59,110 That was it. Everything changed when John Keegan wrote The Face of Battle in 1976. 358 00:34:59,620 --> 00:35:04,329 And historians now are very interested in the experience of war at the micro level. 359 00:35:04,330 --> 00:35:08,050 But the problem is that, of course, the micro level is not the truth. 360 00:35:09,160 --> 00:35:19,840 It's only a truth issue for a particular person, and you can mistake an existential truth for the wider meaning of war. 361 00:35:20,890 --> 00:35:22,870 And that's the problem we have of World War One. 362 00:35:25,090 --> 00:35:29,620 When the British people remember World War One, they were remembering the existential truth for the war poets. 363 00:35:31,620 --> 00:35:37,030 If they wanted to read a private suite, they would find a very different truth for a person who believed in the war, 364 00:35:37,360 --> 00:35:41,410 as did most British soldiers right through the interwar period. 365 00:35:43,060 --> 00:35:46,750 The micro truth is not the truth, but the macro truth is not the truth either. 366 00:35:48,780 --> 00:35:57,490 And there is no absolute truth, unfortunately. Historians always say the problem with fiction writers is they're skimming the surface. 367 00:35:58,900 --> 00:36:03,100 Well, actually, I don't think they're skimming the surface. They're trying to get at the experience. 368 00:36:05,470 --> 00:36:08,500 Let me give you another passage. Sorry. I did say that I was going to read out. 369 00:36:08,650 --> 00:36:10,600 It's the last one I'm going to read out. 370 00:36:10,600 --> 00:36:14,950 It's a moving passage from Stephen Crane's novel, The Red Badge of Courage, and it deals with the death of a soldier. 371 00:36:15,310 --> 00:36:23,560 The only one it has a name, Jim Cochrane. Apart from Henry himself, the youth had watched Spellbound. 372 00:36:24,040 --> 00:36:28,150 His face had been twisted into an expression of every agony he'd imagined for his friend. 373 00:36:28,870 --> 00:36:32,890 In our springs, his feet and getting closer, gazed upon the place to make face. 374 00:36:33,640 --> 00:36:35,740 The mouth was open and the teeth showed in a laugh. 375 00:36:36,670 --> 00:36:41,980 As the flap of the blue jacket fell away from the body, he could see what the sight looked as, if it had been chewed by wolves. 376 00:36:43,030 --> 00:36:46,239 The youth turned with sudden, livid rage towards the battlefield. 377 00:36:46,240 --> 00:36:53,410 He shook his fist. He wanted and seen the balance to deliver a Philip pic [INAUDIBLE] dash. 378 00:36:54,490 --> 00:36:58,090 The red sun was posted in the sky like a way from Filipic. 379 00:36:58,090 --> 00:37:01,059 Of course, the speeches that the Muslims, the Great Rhetorician, 380 00:37:01,060 --> 00:37:06,130 gave against Philip of Macedon warning the Athenians that they were about to lose their freedom. 381 00:37:06,760 --> 00:37:13,210 Point about this is that he doesn't produce a Philip. He is reduced to silence, to silent rage. 382 00:37:14,200 --> 00:37:20,109 He can't find anything to say about war at this point except the word [INAUDIBLE], which might remain. 383 00:37:20,110 --> 00:37:20,620 Mind you, 384 00:37:20,620 --> 00:37:30,310 the most famous thing ever said about the American Civil War in the popular memory war is held by General Sherman after his march to Atlanta. 385 00:37:31,480 --> 00:37:36,960 The subtitle of the book is an episode. That's basically what the novelist does, 386 00:37:36,970 --> 00:37:43,990 or the short story writer shows you episodes of war from which you have to derive meaning yourself, you, the reader. 387 00:37:45,100 --> 00:37:50,290 And it's all, I think, very human. And it's all about people. 388 00:37:50,290 --> 00:37:56,470 Michael Herr, who wrote an excellent book called Dispatches, says War stories are nothing more than the stories about people. 389 00:37:58,140 --> 00:38:01,260 And that's why I based my book on characters. 390 00:38:02,760 --> 00:38:08,760 There's another reason why I thought characters were important. I go to my favourite writer on the novel, Milan Kundera. 391 00:38:09,120 --> 00:38:15,720 Short book, very short book called The Art of the Novel. But he says the reason why people read books essentially is not because of the plot. 392 00:38:16,170 --> 00:38:20,280 Those are the bad books, you know, the ones we buy in airports to read on the course of the flight. 393 00:38:20,640 --> 00:38:24,990 It's all about plot, which is great. Storytelling is about plot. 394 00:38:25,620 --> 00:38:29,370 It's not about the writing is very bad writing, for the most part, popular writers. 395 00:38:29,640 --> 00:38:36,840 It's about characters. What we really take away from the book or the characters that we have discovered and been introduced to. 396 00:38:37,710 --> 00:38:45,480 Why? Because every time we read about a fictional character, we identify with that character or distance ourselves from the character. 397 00:38:45,510 --> 00:38:48,900 We are asking ourselves implicitly, What would I do in these circumstances? 398 00:38:49,470 --> 00:38:52,530 Would I do what he did? Would I be more heroic? 399 00:38:53,100 --> 00:38:56,610 Would I be even more of a coward? Would I shun my duty? 400 00:38:57,930 --> 00:38:59,640 This is the important thing. 401 00:39:00,810 --> 00:39:07,770 And of course, the great thing about great literature is the characters never know themselves because we never know ourselves. 402 00:39:07,920 --> 00:39:10,920 We go through life without ever really knowing who we are. 403 00:39:11,100 --> 00:39:19,440 Life is about a quest for self-discovery. And war is the most unforgiving environment in which you discover yourself. 404 00:39:20,520 --> 00:39:27,240 There is no other environment as unforgiving. You can't lie to yourself and lie to other people as you can in civilian life. 405 00:39:28,050 --> 00:39:32,010 And you can't create this sort of bubble for yourself as you can in the university department. 406 00:39:32,070 --> 00:39:36,180 They should know I've been in one for 40 years. I can be whatever I want to be. 407 00:39:36,420 --> 00:39:40,080 Unfortunately, you're exposed in all your nakedness in front of other people. 408 00:39:41,820 --> 00:39:46,290 Or you or your hero. Are you a warrior or are you a hollow man? 409 00:39:47,340 --> 00:39:51,030 Was Joseph Conrad, who turned the court the law of the term Hollow Man, 410 00:39:51,810 --> 00:40:04,320 Eric Heller talks about seeing an American soldier driving his Jeep into a death camp Liberator Death Camp in Germany in 1944 or early 45, 411 00:40:04,320 --> 00:40:12,870 rather, with his radio blaring, listening to some jazz music saying that his soul was disassembled in the presence of God. 412 00:40:14,160 --> 00:40:19,230 He was not humbled by the circumstance. It passed him by completely hollow men. 413 00:40:19,530 --> 00:40:25,470 Though plenty of Hollywood people who go to the battlefields and come away completely unmoved by what they see. 414 00:40:26,550 --> 00:40:30,990 Are they to be? Are they fortunate or the unfortunate human beings? 415 00:40:32,010 --> 00:40:46,020 It's for you to judge. Kundera says that war is about humanity, and humanity is about what he calls the existential codes of life. 416 00:40:46,650 --> 00:40:49,730 And this is what I try to explain in the book. A code like betrayal. 417 00:40:49,740 --> 00:40:53,100 War involves betrayal, many different levels. 418 00:40:55,020 --> 00:41:00,720 You can be betrayed by your country. You can find that you're fighting for a cause, which is not quite the cause you've joined up to fight for. 419 00:41:01,440 --> 00:41:05,490 You can be betrayed by senior officers who are betraying you purely for their own ambition. 420 00:41:06,180 --> 00:41:09,000 You can be betrayed by yourself, by your own naivete, 421 00:41:09,390 --> 00:41:15,150 and you realise that you are partly at fault for the horrendous circumstances in which you find yourself. 422 00:41:15,540 --> 00:41:19,860 Betrayal is an existential code in life, and it's really an existential code in war. 423 00:41:20,460 --> 00:41:26,490 I look at courage, the young Henry Fleming who joins up because he's read Homer, because he wants to be a Homeric hero. 424 00:41:26,910 --> 00:41:32,700 He wants to write himself into the history books he realises on an anonymous battlefield like the American Civil War, 425 00:41:33,030 --> 00:41:37,290 where you can be killed very anonymously. It's very difficult to be a Homeric hero. 426 00:41:40,790 --> 00:41:47,299 I look at trauma, which for us perhaps is the most important existential code of war now, 427 00:41:47,300 --> 00:41:51,110 as it's the reason for the greatest incidence of hospitalisation of our forces. 428 00:41:51,470 --> 00:41:57,020 And we still debating what trauma actually is. Trauma has existed. 429 00:41:57,020 --> 00:42:06,530 You'll find it. And in the good soldier spec, Gustav Hasek's wonderful stories of this peasant whose never quite makes it to the battlefield. 430 00:42:08,690 --> 00:42:15,290 You see a bureaucracy which is trying to send an unwilling soldier because most soldiers have been on winning. 431 00:42:15,440 --> 00:42:19,370 They've been peasants and workforces who have not thought about causes. 432 00:42:19,640 --> 00:42:27,650 They've just been conscripted or forced to fight. They find a grim humour in all of this as the only way in which they can survive. 433 00:42:28,670 --> 00:42:32,090 And for them, the enemy is never shooting at them. Well, that's one enemy. 434 00:42:32,570 --> 00:42:38,780 It's the rear echelon officers who put them in the position to be shot at for reasons they don't know. 435 00:42:39,470 --> 00:42:44,510 It's not their fight most of the time. But peasants have been victims throughout history. 436 00:42:46,640 --> 00:42:52,250 So the other point that Contra says is that history is our humanity. 437 00:42:53,210 --> 00:42:58,190 That's what history is. It's nothing more than our changing humanity and our changing existential codes. 438 00:42:58,370 --> 00:43:02,480 So take honour for Achilles. 439 00:43:02,960 --> 00:43:09,980 Honour is not what it is for us. That Achilles honour is not what it is for some sort of a breach in stone. 440 00:43:09,980 --> 00:43:15,020 Dallas judge us upon his description of the Battle of Waterloo, 441 00:43:15,020 --> 00:43:20,390 which Tolstoy said told him everything he needed to know about war before he experienced it himself for the first time. 442 00:43:22,370 --> 00:43:30,080 Hemingway said that the description of Waterloo in Stone book is the best description of the battle that had been written before the 20th century. 443 00:43:30,410 --> 00:43:40,040 Three pages for this young dandy poet, Moody for Fabrizio Achilles would have had no time for him whatsoever. 444 00:43:40,820 --> 00:43:50,090 But he has a wonderful sense of honour. He can recognise himself in Achilles, but Achilles would not be able to recognise himself, unfortunately. 445 00:43:51,140 --> 00:43:55,370 And then, of course, as Kundra says, history is also about Caprice. 446 00:43:55,970 --> 00:44:01,250 It's about contingency. It doesn't have to have any meaning. You can fight a war. 447 00:44:01,350 --> 00:44:04,040 You can come back, but it really is meaningless. 448 00:44:05,090 --> 00:44:13,070 The example he cites is a short story, a small novella by Ed A called Jack the Fatalist, in which this young man, the hero of the tale, 449 00:44:13,490 --> 00:44:21,590 joins up simply to impress his girlfriend when the girl gets shot and the only battle he finds himself fighting gets shot in the knee. 450 00:44:22,100 --> 00:44:25,790 This is his kneecap and hobbles for the rest of his life. That's it. 451 00:44:27,170 --> 00:44:30,500 That is Jack's experience from battle and of war. 452 00:44:30,800 --> 00:44:35,960 Totally meaningless for everyone concerned. But that, unfortunately, is also history. 453 00:44:38,060 --> 00:44:43,760 Let me come to an end by quoting from Friedrich Nietzsche, who was the father of all good things. 454 00:44:43,760 --> 00:44:47,660 War is the father of good prose. Unfortunately, war is not the father of good prose. 455 00:44:48,110 --> 00:44:53,540 War is the father of very bad prose. And most of the books on war that you find, whether they're written by people who've served, 456 00:44:53,540 --> 00:44:59,870 which are frequently ghostwritten and not particularly well written, even by the ghost writers or by the popular writers. 457 00:45:00,620 --> 00:45:06,980 They're not great. But why do we need great writing to bring these characters alive? 458 00:45:10,650 --> 00:45:19,110 The characters we find in the popular books are stock figures that represent the kind of stock figures that we 459 00:45:19,110 --> 00:45:27,000 imagined you'd find in war the cowardly NCO or the bullying master sergeant or the not so heroic young officer. 460 00:45:29,340 --> 00:45:33,389 These are stock figures because there's no such thing as a not so heroic young officer. 461 00:45:33,390 --> 00:45:38,310 Heroism is usually the product of the hour. You don't join up to become a hero. 462 00:45:38,340 --> 00:45:42,480 Most people join up because they have to. They want to survive. 463 00:45:42,510 --> 00:45:46,110 They want to come back. That is the overriding need. 464 00:45:46,320 --> 00:45:48,570 But most soldiers I want to come back. 465 00:45:49,710 --> 00:45:57,060 If they are heroic, it is because it's the demand of the hour and a demand of the situation, which they rise too much to their own surprise. 466 00:45:59,430 --> 00:46:07,950 And the assets warriors. The think the people who do join up to be heroes find themselves failing in the situation to their real surprise, 467 00:46:08,400 --> 00:46:15,959 because they found out something about themselves they didn't know before. Real people are the kind of people who populate Tolstoy's stories. 468 00:46:15,960 --> 00:46:20,760 They're a mix of cowardice and courage, the heroic in times and on heroic at others. 469 00:46:24,250 --> 00:46:30,130 The important thing is that the characters should live not just on the page, but should live off the page. 470 00:46:31,620 --> 00:46:35,070 But they should not be one dimensional. They should not live in just the dimension of the book. 471 00:46:35,340 --> 00:46:44,309 They should live with us. After we close the book. Important thing is that they have survived because every generation has read into 472 00:46:44,310 --> 00:46:50,840 them and found something in them that resonates with them and the experience of war. 473 00:46:50,890 --> 00:46:56,760 That is why Soldier Story Home, where we still have translations last year we have two translations of. 474 00:46:57,270 --> 00:47:02,760 This year has been one. This is why soldiers in Afghanistan read Flashman. 475 00:47:03,780 --> 00:47:09,210 A Padre wrote to the Times Literary Supplement to say, What are my soldiers reading in Afghanistan? 476 00:47:09,600 --> 00:47:14,220 They are reading Homer. But what they really like reading is Flashman. 477 00:47:15,030 --> 00:47:21,479 And what they really like about Flashman is that he survives the nefarious illness of the politicians and the 478 00:47:21,480 --> 00:47:30,360 pundits and the public intellectuals and all the people who cheer on but don't take any dangers themselves. 479 00:47:32,730 --> 00:47:39,180 I think the silliest argument of all is that to be a great work of war, it has to be anti-war. 480 00:47:39,240 --> 00:47:43,140 Well, apart from the fact that it is very difficult for anyone to be anti-war before the 19th century, 481 00:47:44,790 --> 00:47:49,590 I think the great writers are conflicted about it. I don't think Homer particularly loved war. 482 00:47:50,020 --> 00:47:54,810 He's very scathing about it. He calls it atrocious. He calls. 483 00:47:55,020 --> 00:48:02,010 He talks about the savagery of men. He talks about areas the god of war being two faced and lying. 484 00:48:03,540 --> 00:48:07,830 And yes, he created an Achilles, the greatest warrior that anyone has ever created. 485 00:48:08,310 --> 00:48:17,610 A man that so many soldiers would love to be and fear they might become virtual was probably a pacifist. 486 00:48:17,970 --> 00:48:22,140 If it is possible to have a pacifist in the Roman Empire, and yet, despite himself, 487 00:48:22,140 --> 00:48:28,530 he created in the news the greatest Roman learned someone who was loved by 19th century Britain 488 00:48:28,920 --> 00:48:34,290 because he seemed to be the personification of the good Victorian soldier on the frontier. 489 00:48:34,800 --> 00:48:46,490 The Pax Romana. The Pax Britannica. Selfless, patriotic and always willing to sacrifice women, not sacrifice women, but sacrifice the love of women. 490 00:48:46,680 --> 00:48:51,959 Virtual manages to lose both his wife and his lover at the same time, all in the name of duty. 491 00:48:51,960 --> 00:48:56,850 And this was considered absolutely echt for a British soldier in the 19th century. 492 00:48:57,510 --> 00:49:06,990 Shakespeare was Shakespeare anti war or not? If you want the greatest travesty portrayal of Achilles, read Troilus and Cressida. 493 00:49:07,000 --> 00:49:14,190 He appears as an effeminate pole troop, but he did in some Greek works as well, by the way that we know of, but which have not survived. 494 00:49:14,610 --> 00:49:18,990 The Greeks were a bit conflicted about Achilles as well. They didn't take him at his own estimation of himself. 495 00:49:19,800 --> 00:49:27,240 I mean, this is the point. And Shakespeare, whether he was pro-war or anti war created for the greatest warriors, and in the literature of Coriolanus, 496 00:49:27,720 --> 00:49:36,060 Macbeth, Anthony and Othello, you don't get greater than that in terms of what they were as people. 497 00:49:37,080 --> 00:49:46,770 I think Harold Bloom says it very well. The great writers are subversive of all values in their eyes, and they don't take sides. 498 00:49:47,010 --> 00:49:53,400 They show us every side and they leave us to decide whether war is good or bad, 499 00:49:53,910 --> 00:50:00,270 whether a particular war is right or wrong, where the war has meaning or no meaning for those who fight it. 500 00:50:01,950 --> 00:50:05,580 And that leads me to the conclusion that we read literature for a reason. 501 00:50:06,510 --> 00:50:14,160 It's hardwired into us. We know that storytelling is hardwired into us because without storytelling, we couldn't cooperate with each other. 502 00:50:14,640 --> 00:50:19,440 And we also couldn't cooperate with each other against the enemies, whoever the enemies may be. 503 00:50:20,430 --> 00:50:28,740 We believe that language was hardwired into us so that we could evaluate people, so we could tell someone, This is a good guy. 504 00:50:29,340 --> 00:50:32,680 We can sign a contract with this fellow because he always honours his contracts. 505 00:50:33,570 --> 00:50:41,190 But this is a faithful husband to a great mother. This is why we have language so we can evaluate without evaluation. 506 00:50:41,550 --> 00:50:49,920 We would not be able to progress very far. Some of cognitive scientists like Keith Oakley and Passionate Muse book that came out last 507 00:50:49,920 --> 00:50:55,830 year say that we live in fictional worlds because it strengthens our belief in humanity. 508 00:50:57,090 --> 00:51:07,470 The characters we adopt, we admire that we identify with strength and our commitment and our belief in our own species. 509 00:51:08,430 --> 00:51:09,750 It's a survival mechanism. 510 00:51:11,430 --> 00:51:20,550 The report was produced earlier this year to show that in the computer games that people play now, those who play super heroes, 511 00:51:20,880 --> 00:51:27,510 kind of marvel comic characters are even more selfless in the game than those who play ordinary people. 512 00:51:28,020 --> 00:51:31,110 They're out to prove something. Out to show. 513 00:51:31,290 --> 00:51:36,900 But they are superior people because of their selflessness, their willingness to sacrifice themselves. 514 00:51:38,460 --> 00:51:45,840 I don't know how many of you have played the World of Warcraft, but in 2005, the program has introduced a new character called The Serpent. 515 00:51:47,220 --> 00:51:51,450 If you were bitten by the wing serpent, you would die of a horrible disease called corrupt blood. 516 00:51:54,160 --> 00:51:56,380 And then something happened that the programmers hadn't expected. 517 00:51:58,120 --> 00:52:02,410 But one thing happened, which is they hadn't expected that we're all very fallible human beings. 518 00:52:02,800 --> 00:52:07,720 When we get bitten by the serpent, we're not supposed to return home because we will then infect our families. 519 00:52:07,720 --> 00:52:17,760 We're supposed to be quarantined. But people did go back home. But then they found that some people were deliberately infecting themselves in 520 00:52:17,760 --> 00:52:22,170 order to teleport themselves to the enemy and kill the enemy as suicide bombers. 521 00:52:23,520 --> 00:52:28,349 And the Department of Homeland Security discovering this turned up because they were 522 00:52:28,350 --> 00:52:33,300 interested in what is the pathology of someone who wants to become a suicide bomber. 523 00:52:34,740 --> 00:52:40,290 And Americans can do this as well in certain circumstances in virtuality, not in the real world. 524 00:52:40,860 --> 00:52:45,780 But virtuality is becoming more and more the real world. And in virtuality, we have our avatars. 525 00:52:46,110 --> 00:52:49,110 We have people who are ourselves. What is the first avatar in history? 526 00:52:49,110 --> 00:52:51,030 It's Patroclus in the Iliad. 527 00:52:51,030 --> 00:52:59,700 When he puts on the armour of Achilles and goes into battle and the Trojans kill him thinking he is Achilles or he is Achilles. 528 00:52:59,700 --> 00:53:03,510 He's the avatar of Achilles. He's representing him on the battlefield. 529 00:53:04,020 --> 00:53:07,800 That's the first avatar in history long before we got into the world of computers. 530 00:53:09,300 --> 00:53:24,000 So where do I end with this? I would say that literature is absolutely essential to understanding part of the essence of war as the human thing, 531 00:53:25,080 --> 00:53:31,800 this very mystifying ritual part ritual, part reality that we engage in. 532 00:53:33,060 --> 00:53:36,720 I just conclude on this note. I, I reread a lot of these books. 533 00:53:38,670 --> 00:53:47,610 I hadn't met some of them for 20 or 30 years, and I discovered that they were not books I had read 30 years ago because I was a different person, 534 00:53:49,110 --> 00:53:52,380 but I was a different person in part because I read those books. 535 00:53:53,880 --> 00:53:57,240 And it's that dialectical relationship between reader and text, 536 00:53:57,690 --> 00:54:04,080 which is the most fascinating thing about literature and which go back to films which we were discussing, 537 00:54:05,550 --> 00:54:09,930 which I don't think a film can actually give you for all sorts of reasons. 538 00:54:10,380 --> 00:54:17,550 Film would tell you a story and a wonderful narrative, make it great characters like Dr. Strangelove. 539 00:54:18,480 --> 00:54:23,070 But I'm not sure that you can still fit the great texts.