Just a brief stop on the moon. I have to confess, Miss, my favourite fossil walks over philosophy.
But certainly I've thoroughly enjoyed reading everything that Christopher has written.
He is a professor of international relations and at the School of Economics is well known for his books on philosophy and war.
If you if you want both informative and thoughtful writing, I also have some degree of entertainment of barbarous philosophers.
It's a wonderful book, got on the way with some of the fun of the issues that are that are raised.
And of course, muscles and actions,
but boring geeks and 21st century technology is changing the way we fight and think about working class thinking that was super forces.
That's a first for you, 2030 and what we're all waiting for and we hope to be out by today.
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.
That's the American title, I think from the Iliad to Catch 22, where we've dispensed with fashion altogether.
We have unfortunately, there's not much of the fashion that most of us have.
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,
Wall Street Journal, European Union Times because of the military review, he lectures all over the world.
But this is what I've said, and we've had a couple of interesting excursions together to Stockholm,
Sweden, talk about things, my favourites to our advantage only ever.
When I was listening to Chris telling me about his forthcoming book, The Way Back from an event,
he's visiting fellow of institutes in Tokyo, Singapore, Bangkok and Oslo.
I hope he ever else we haven't mentioned. But Christopher, thank you so much for coming.
I'm looking forward to this because it's perhaps a little lighter.
That was nice. Just a little bit of all the heavyweights on the subjects. But nevertheless, some important messages will come of this, too.
Thank you for coming. I thank you very much for inviting me and thank you for coming out because it's not a subject
that would necessarily recommend itself to people who spend a lot of time thinking about war,
which is one of the reasons I decided to write the book.
I had hoped to sell some copies by bringing it along today, but alas, it will appear hopefully before Christmas.
Not exactly a stocking filler, but it weighs in at 120,000 words.
So there's quite a lot in there to try to get my teeth into.
I remember when I first came up for the London School of Economics, the person who influenced me, I suppose more than anyone else,
was a colleague at Windsor who used to instruct his students when they were discussing this was in
the Cold War period when they were discussing nuclear deterrence to go off and read a Greek tragedy.
And he was very depressed that as the department became younger and younger in its profile,
this is a generation of new PhD students coming off the assembly line.
I was one of them.
They would tell the students that literature and fiction was a complete waste of time and had no role in a social science environment.
Apart from the philistinism of this remark, it's just absolutely wrong.
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
when he was teaching PhD students that they go off and read a Greek tragedy as well.
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.
But I'm not here to talk, fortunately, about that. I want to just tell you a little bit about the book,
and then I want to nicely address the theme of the enduring conflict between history and fiction historians and writers of fiction.
Conscious of the fact that you is in the back of the audience.
If I can if I can keep going until 2:00, I'm safe because he has to leave it to.
But I have a feeling I will run out of things to say before 2:00. And that's my misfortune, not yours.
I was looking and I'm looking at the existential experience of war,
which has been something that for me has been very important in my research in the last 30 years.
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.
If you were a British colonial officer or a British soldier on the frontiers of empire in the 19th century,
Virgil's Aeneid through two plays by Shakespeare, Henry Ford, one or two because of the character of Falstaff,
one of the most greatest comic creations in literature through the novel,
which begins in the 18th century, mostly novels, it has to be said, for a film, Dr. Strangelove.
And through a short story by Don DeLillo called Human Moments in World War Three.
And what I done in this book is to isolate five character types.
They're not exactly Jungian archetypes, because that would be both unsettling and unfair to me.
But they are character types warriors, heroes, villains, survivors and victims.
And for me, these are the five existential types that war, in essence, producers.
The Warriors, of course, include Achilles, someone once consider 148 different ways in which you can kill a man in the Iliad.
Achilles engages in many of them, not all of them.
Achilles spends most of his time killing, as you probably know.
But we remember Achilles for that remarkable moment of reconciliation with the father of the man he has slain, Hector.
When Priam comes to the camp in disguise. In disguise, because of Agamemnon, knew that he was Priam.
He would have had him killed. Achilles, of course, shows him the laws of hospitality that we associate with a Greek of that age.
And it's a very, very moving scene. We must, however,
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.
That at one point Achilles has to bound out of the roof because he's about to put
him to the sword and kill him if he can't stand the lamentations any longer.
So Achilles is not quite the hero that he sometimes made out to be.
He's not our kind of hero. It is certainly not our kind of warrior.
He is very distant from us.
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.
He's the first dutiful soldier he would never think of doing what Achilles does,
which is go off and sulk in his tent because he's been shamed in the eyes of his comrades.
That is unacceptable for a Roman warrior. You just get on with it.
And his duty is to his gods. His duty is to the ancestors.
His duty is to his friends behind beside whom he is fighting.
And his ultimate duty is to the city he will found or from whose destiny will be found?
The city of Rome. It's a destiny he would not have chosen.
He's always accusing the gods of giving him a destiny that is not the one that he would have wanted for himself.
He would have preferred to stay in Troy and die fighting by his friends.
He was not allowed to do that because he had a mandate. It includes human rights.
I was asked today at lunch why I didn't include war and peace.
I don't wish to inflict cruel and unusual punishment on my readers.
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.
But the fact is, I think I was also saying I've just finished a Moby-Dick for the first time in my life.
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.
I would advise you, if you really want a piece to skip the passages in history and Tolstoy's idea of the great man,
or rather the absence of the great man in history.
Go and read his novella, Hadji Murat, which is about a Chechen warlord, a very conflicted warrior, a real figure.
And some of the book is based on real historical testimony,
some letters and records from the time a figure who dies, a conflicted man because of conflicted loyalties.
But he dies in battle. He dies as he wants to live.
And Harold Bloom, the Sterling professor of literature at Yale,
calls the death scene of Haji Miraz in that short by that name the most moving death scene in literature.
Death scene of a warrior. It also includes for those of you who prefer the Navy lucky Jack Aubrey.
I don't know whether any of you saw the Russell Crowe movie Master and Commander.
That's Jack Aubrey. I chose him because he works on a weapons platform, a ship.
He's a team player. These are worried, of course, but he has to be a warrior in the company of known warriors.
He has to be a team leader and inspire the team.
And finally, I chose Thoma, who is a young man in a space capsule orbiting the Earth as near to a drone pilot.
I think it is it probably gets who is, of course, is in no particular danger.
The American military insist on calling drone pilots warriors.
They call them cubicle warriors, just as they insist on calling cyber hackers.
Cyber warriors. I have a feeling for the very terminology is being debased and the currency is being devalued.
But that may be my problem, not theirs.
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,
when his commanding officer says to him, How do you feel about this mission?
He says. I feel happy about it. The commanding officer says Happiness son is not one of the mission parameters.
You're not allowed to have emotions in this kind of war.
War is just an office routine. And don't forget it. I would have liked to have had a robot in the U.S.
A robot? But there are, unfortunately, no military robots in the literature that are worth reading.
There isn't weird tales if any of you read with tales. A robot called Jake One Jungle Action Killer.
One is actually run by a sergeant with my name, Sergeant Coker.
So I was very tempted to bring this in. But I'm not sure whether a robot is a hero.
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.
Whether the very term will mean very much like the stage heroes, because heroes are very different from warriors.
They are not people who hear the call. They do not have a vocation to do war.
They come to war usually by accident. They find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time.
They come through for others. And that's, I think, what really makes them heroic.
And the characters I chose are largely Democratic characters,
because I think the warrior is very difficult for a democratic society to come to terms with.
The hero is very easy to come to terms with.
And I start with Henry Fleming, the young soldier in the Red Badge of Courage, the first Democratic novel, essentially, that we have.
And I start with another one. A guy without a first name. His name is born.
And her privates.
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.
From reading the war poets and Bourne is a stoic.
He stoical, he endures. That's his heroism. No particular passion, certainly not animated by patriotism,
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.
A wonderful figure, I think, very similar to the author of the book Robert Jordan and for Whom the Bell Tolls,
a young man who sacrifices himself at the very end.
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.
The people who ask silly questions like,
Why did Luther put himself at risk by nailing the thesis on the gates of the arch of the Cathedral of Wittenberg?
Luther actually tells us I can do no other. It's one of his great remarks.
Equally stupid to ask why Scott decided to put himself at risk and indeed to die in the South Pole.
This is the nature of the people. This is what they are. This is what they do.
And when Robert Jordan dies and sacrifices himself, it's not an impulse.
It's an impulsive act, but it's not a spontaneous act. It is actually the culmination of his life.
It is what he wants to do because it makes his life meaningful.
That, I think is a hero. Villains.
When their stock figures of their generals who betray their men for their ambition,
cowardly officers, inept officers, or just merely incompetent men in love with their own cover story?
Plenty of them.
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.
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.
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,
and he's given to these wonderful, grandiloquent, 20th century ideas.
He betrays his men for ideas. He sees them as human material for the American century.
He sees them as the collateral damage of manifest destiny.
We don't follow these figures to all death anymore because we don't speak this language anymore.
But people did speak this language in the mid-20th century and many believed it.
And that is, I think, the reason he's in the book.
Of course, I love putting Dr. Strangelove in. He only has 58 lines in the entire movie, but what wonderful lines they are, too.
He's an amalgam of many people, Herman Kahn, who one person described as a thermonuclear Zero Mostel,
an apocalyptic Santa Claus with love, a description of Herman Kahn, a man who claimed to have the highest IQ in American history.
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,
and the guy whose name I forget, the famous mathematician in the late forties and early fifties.
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.
A German, after all, with a strange German name. Strangelove is not his original name.
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.
How many people you can generate in the coal mines and get back to the GNP of your present GNP in 100 years time?
Wonderful, wonderful lines. And his last line, I can walk mine here.
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.
Less well known, I think the other villains of the peace, the hollow men will produce.
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.
Ridley Scott made a film with that title.
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.
By the way, that's the problem with war. Small men in big situations.
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.
But he's such a wonderful character. He's an Indian hater and what Melville calls the Indians leather stocking nemesis.
There's a chapter on him called The Metaphysics of Indian Hating. He's a man who hates the Indians, who he's fighting.
And I think the Frontier Wars, there are many more docs out there,
whether you're talking about talent that is, or towelhead or gooks or whatever it is.
War produces this kind of demonisation of the enemy, and the characters who demonise are frequently much more the enemy than yourself.
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
take it because the people who vote for him wouldn't like him leaving the office in the evening to kill and scalp Indians.
And actually, Mourdock's a real figure, and that is a real remark by the character on whom he was based,
who was also offered the governorship and declined on the grounds that they'd reached a stage
in American history where it became a government to leave in the evening to scalped Indians.
There is a sculptor, Josh Holden, in Blood Meridian.
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.
Cormac McCarthy's book, It is Completely Unacceptable, and one of them said Hollywood is not yet ready for that level of brutality.
It's based on the real wars in Texas with Mexicans and with the Indians.
Real records. Judge Holden is a real person. He's a paederast, a child killer, an Indian hater, and a sculpture of Mexicans.
Because the Americans can't really tell the difference between Mexican scalps and Indian scalps.
You get paid for 200 scalps time and they look the same.
So who cares? It's easier to scalp Mexicans than Indians. It's a reminder of our primal nature.
It is the reminder of how we go back to what we originally were.
It's a reminder of how you may try to hedge in war with rules and conventions and social taboos.
But you will always risk the point that consider this makes being reduced to the level of your circumstances.
And it doesn't get worse than the Indian Wars on the Texan border in the 1850s.
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.
He's talking about the brutality of two different peoples fighting each other in the most brutal of landscapes,
which is Texas, an almost lunar landscape at the time, bereft of human life.
So that's the reason I mention these characters.
And I'll just finally end with the other two survivors.
War has its survivors. The most magnificent is undoubtedly John Falstaff.
Jack Falstaff, who dies in his bed as he would have wanted.
He's a warrior, definitely, but he doesn't like fighting battles.
Is that wonderful scene in Henry the Fist, where the king exhorts his men into battle by saying,
Gentlemen of that tonight will hold their manacles cheap,
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.
He wants to die in his bed. And that's what he did. Does is he a coward?
I don't think so. Is he a cynic? Yes. When he's recruiting men, he recruits the feeble.
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.
It's very kind of 20th century attitude, really. The feeble will fill a pit as well as the strong, he says.
And he's not a hypocrite because he doesn't like war. It's his trade.
He's a knight. It's what a knight has to do. It doesn't love it.
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.
If you know your Henry the face,
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.
His conscience is clear. Clearly is not clear. He's lying to himself as much as he's lying to them.
Falstaff never lies to himself. He knows what he is. And that, I think, makes him such a remarkable character.
Other survivors, obviously, Flashman.
But as you know, he dies a field marshal in 1960.
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.
Just before the American Civil War. Has no time for the Patriots and the clubs in London urging people on to Afghanistan.
Has no time for what he calls the preachers of red hot, still has no time for missionaries,
would have very little time for humanitarians and NGO workers today if he found himself
in Afghanistan and hates politicians like Tony Blair who have messianic messages,
fighting evil, whatever it might be. This is why Flashman ultimately is not a villain and does not appear in the villain section.
In fact, his author came to love him at the end. It's pretty villainous at the beginning.
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.
He's a horrible, pious little creep. It's nice to see Flashman beating him up occasionally.
Occasionally runs across him. In the course of the of the books, Flashman would have hated the Afghan mission.
What he like to today for Americans this catch 22 because Yossarian is of course the great survivor
and his desertion at the end of the book is the most moral action in a book full of amoral,
not necessarily immoral, but amoral characters.
And because he's at war, not with the military and not with the officers, he is at war with the system.
But war has become a system that grinds people down.
The air war, of course, he's talking about [INAUDIBLE] through 37 missions during the Second World War as a bombardier.
He loved it. This is not an anti-war book in any way.
People made the mistake of reading. It was anti-war because it was the Vietnam War book.
It's not about Vietnam at all, and it was certainly not anti-war and that he did it from his friend Kurt Vonnegut.
They were neighbours. They lived together on the East Coast.
[INAUDIBLE], he was very unlike Hemingway, who like to think of himself as the great warrior.
Apparently Hemingway only saw battle once for one day.
We're not even sure that that's actually true. He decorated himself with a lot of medals in the course of his lifetime.
He was an SS warrior. He the abiding sin of the American novel was parts of the American novel is this obsession with manliness.
And he made the great mistake of mistaking the warrior for someone who's trying to prove that manliness.
This is not necessarily the case. It's a very 20th century interpretation of the warrior.
Anyway, when Hemingway blew his brains out with an elephant gun, Norman Mailer said that proved finally his cowardice.
Well, whether you want to take Hemingway, who dropped him drums,
drums on about manliness all the time, or Mailer who drums on about manliness all the time.
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,
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.
It sold so many copies when it came out because people thought it was an adventure
story and they wanted to remind themselves of their first World War experience.
But it includes perhaps the first traumatised victim in history, the play by Sophocles called Velocities,
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.
And was a play that was used by the American Army in an exercise called Warrior Theatre
to try to persuade veterans to come to terms with the trauma of war taking medication.
The other play was Ajax, which is not about its long ties to Hero. They were quite wrong.
The Philoctetes, I think possibly is. And Colonel Shaba, in a small novella in Balzac's great sprawling novel,
the human comedy who's a guy who returns home to find that he has no home to return to.
His wife doesn't recognise him deliberately because she's married someone else and taken his fortune with her.
It's it's the story of people who come back to their country after war to find that the country is unrecognisable.
But they've lost their family because they have changed themselves. And it's there in the short novella.
So I hope you'll read the book now.
With the clock ominously ticking towards 2:00 and Professor Strong's intervention, I shall get the history and and fiction.
And may I just read a passage from Hemingway's book, Men at War, from which I take my title of my own.
A book. It's a collection of of of writings on war that he produced.
It's an anthology. A writer's job is to tell the truth.
His standard of fidelity to the truth should be so high that his invention out
of his experience should produce a truer account than anything factual can be.
That's the point. Truer than the facts. The facts can be observed badly.
But when a good writer is creating something, he has time and scope to make of it an absolute truth.
Now, I think what writers are trying to do, fiction writers, is to show you the absolute truth of war.
And what is the absolute truth of war? What he said it. He said war was the only definition he was willing to provide.
It's the human thing. It's not a very elegant definition.
He said it is not a very elegant Greek writer. You don't said it is for elegance.
You would read Herodotus for elegance of style, but it's pretty direct.
And he knew what he was talking about. It's the human thing.
Hemingway begins his book with a quotation from classic This war is part of the intercourse of human beings.
Hemingway like philosophers who called him The Einstein of Battles.
Tolstoy hated Clausewitz and guided mercilessly.
In a nice little passage on the eve of the Battle of Borodino, Clausewitz was interested in the existential demands of war.
He was also, of course, personally interested in the existential appeal.
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.
Very brave man or a very unimaginative one.
I'm not quite sure which.
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.
In other words, he is interested in half of the equation.
And that, I think, is what fiction writers can bring an insight into the other half of the equation.
Can I just quote another passage from the book?
It's passage by James Jones, the author of The Thin Red Line,
and it depicts a soldier called Bell who finds himself in the middle of a vicious firefight in the Pacific Theatre.
And this is what Bill thinks in a film or a novel.
They would dramatise and build to the climax of the attack and would have a semblance of meaning and a semblance of emotion.
But here there was no semblance of meaning. And the emotions were so many and so mixed up that they were indecipherable.
They could not be untangled. Nothing had been decided.
Nobody had learned anything. Art Bell decided.
Creative art is [INAUDIBLE]. So you see the novelists come under attack as well for not being able to sum up the absolute truth.
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.
It's not an escape from reality. It animates reality. And our fictional heroes are not larger than life.
They are, as her group says, life's largeness.
Which is why we seek them out when we adopt them, when we identify with them.
So history or literature, it's not an either or.
Of course. But I can see why historians have problems with literary writers.
Here's Kurt Vonnegut about his book, Slaughterhouse-Five.
Some of you may have read all this happened more or less.
The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.
The first question you set about the book, which is autobiographical, is, Well, which bits are truth and which bits aren't true?
Is Tim O'Brien, who for me wrote The Finest Work on Vietnam War The Things That Carried Life Vonnegut.
It's based on his own experiences in Vietnam. He was there.
The story, he says, is technically inaccurate because he's made a lot of it up.
But it's absolutely truthful about the experience. It's truthful about the situation in which he and his men found themselves.
Most passage I'll read you today, if I may.
It's a slightly extended passage from my book because I wanted to get this across, and it's about O'Brien's work.
He gives the reader a shockingly visceral sense of what it feels like to triumph
through a booby trapped land carrying £20 of supplies and £14 of ammunition,
along with radios, assault rifles and grenades. These were the things the men of Alpha Company would carry with them.
But there was much else besides. One of the characters of the book carries seven ounces of premium dope, another a packet of condoms,
a third a devout Baptist as an illustrated New Testament that had be presented by his father, who taught Sunday school in Oklahoma City.
They had with them all they could, including silent, all the terrible colour of the things they carried.
It's a quote from O'Brien. But there were other burdens, including the weight of their memories.
Often they carried each other, the wounded or the weak. Friendship is one of the minor keys of grace in O'Brien's work.
It's part of the emotional wiring of his characters, and they bore those memories all their lives.
For the most part, they conduct themselves with dignity, but they're human prone to fear and sometimes panic.
Others display a sort of wistful resignation. They might be afraid, but they're even more afraid to show it.
But apart from the haunting poetry of it all, O'Brien is insistent that what he is recounting isn't the truth.
And the last thing he can do as a writer is to draw a moral from the tale he tells.
In many cases, he says, a true war story cannot be believed.
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.
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.
In the same way that the late philosopher Richard Rorty believed that only literature, not philosophy, could teach the importance of compassion.
I think what he's arguing is that historians must read morals into their story.
They're telling stories like fiction writers.
But the stories have to have a meaning, a theme, a purpose.
You don't pick up a history book just to read about a meaningless experience.
O'Brien is saying that the great writers cannot tell you a moral a true story.
He says it's all about memory, and that depends on the people who are listening to it.
The subtitle of his work is A Work of fiction, but it's also, I think, a work of fact amplified through fiction.
Let me get back to Hemingway. Hemingway said that truth in war is very difficult to come by.
When a man goes out to seek the truth, he often doesn't come back, he adds.
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.
This is the this is the battle between fiction writers and historians.
Who is bringing the truth? What kind of truth are they're bringing?
Is ever capable of summing up the absolute truth of war?
Because that would make you capable of summing up the absolute truth of the human condition,
something which theologians and philosophers have been unable to somehow.
Or those who claim that they know what the absolute truth of the human condition is,
or some of the more dangerous people that we encounter in our lives.
For me, it's not really a battle because both groups are doing totally different things.
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.
The soldiers went into battle shouting Santa maria, and the Spanish soldiers, 14 years later, fought at the Battle of Northern England.
Their cry was it either Espana?
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.
And the significance is only noticeable to a historian looking back, making the contrasts, the contrapuntal truth in this case.
In this case, what fiction writers are doing is they're not interested in the causes of war,
and they're not particularly interested in the significant struggle, significant civil war.
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.
How did they imagine their deaths? And is Hemingway right when he says about cowardice?
But cowardice is the it's one of his most famous sayings, his definition of cowardice, the inability to suspend the imagination.
Bravery, he says, is the courage to live in the present with no before and no after.
That's just one definition of courage and one definition of cowardice from a great writer.
Now, of course, there was a time when military historians were not interested in the existential experience of war at all.
War was just a matter of the armies moving across battlefields led by generals, which sometimes had a biographical interest in the generals.
That was it. Everything changed when John Keegan wrote The Face of Battle in 1976.
And historians now are very interested in the experience of war at the micro level.
But the problem is that, of course, the micro level is not the truth.
It's only a truth issue for a particular person, and you can mistake an existential truth for the wider meaning of war.
And that's the problem we have of World War One.
When the British people remember World War One, they were remembering the existential truth for the war poets.
If they wanted to read a private suite, they would find a very different truth for a person who believed in the war,
as did most British soldiers right through the interwar period.
The micro truth is not the truth, but the macro truth is not the truth either.
And there is no absolute truth, unfortunately. Historians always say the problem with fiction writers is they're skimming the surface.
Well, actually, I don't think they're skimming the surface. They're trying to get at the experience.
Let me give you another passage. Sorry. I did say that I was going to read out.
It's the last one I'm going to read out.
It's a moving passage from Stephen Crane's novel, The Red Badge of Courage, and it deals with the death of a soldier.
The only one it has a name, Jim Cochrane. Apart from Henry himself, the youth had watched Spellbound.
His face had been twisted into an expression of every agony he'd imagined for his friend.
In our springs, his feet and getting closer, gazed upon the place to make face.
The mouth was open and the teeth showed in a laugh.
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.
The youth turned with sudden, livid rage towards the battlefield.
He shook his fist. He wanted and seen the balance to deliver a Philip pic [INAUDIBLE] dash.
The red sun was posted in the sky like a way from Filipic.
Of course, the speeches that the Muslims, the Great Rhetorician,
gave against Philip of Macedon warning the Athenians that they were about to lose their freedom.
Point about this is that he doesn't produce a Philip. He is reduced to silence, to silent rage.
He can't find anything to say about war at this point except the word [INAUDIBLE], which might remain.
Mind you,
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.
The subtitle of the book is an episode. That's basically what the novelist does,
or the short story writer shows you episodes of war from which you have to derive meaning yourself, you, the reader.
And it's all, I think, very human. And it's all about people.
Michael Herr, who wrote an excellent book called Dispatches, says War stories are nothing more than the stories about people.
And that's why I based my book on characters.
There's another reason why I thought characters were important. I go to my favourite writer on the novel, Milan Kundera.
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.
Those are the bad books, you know, the ones we buy in airports to read on the course of the flight.
It's all about plot, which is great. Storytelling is about plot.
It's not about the writing is very bad writing, for the most part, popular writers.
It's about characters. What we really take away from the book or the characters that we have discovered and been introduced to.
Why? Because every time we read about a fictional character, we identify with that character or distance ourselves from the character.
We are asking ourselves implicitly, What would I do in these circumstances?
Would I do what he did? Would I be more heroic?
Would I be even more of a coward? Would I shun my duty?
This is the important thing.
And of course, the great thing about great literature is the characters never know themselves because we never know ourselves.
We go through life without ever really knowing who we are.
Life is about a quest for self-discovery. And war is the most unforgiving environment in which you discover yourself.
There is no other environment as unforgiving. You can't lie to yourself and lie to other people as you can in civilian life.
And you can't create this sort of bubble for yourself as you can in the university department.
They should know I've been in one for 40 years. I can be whatever I want to be.
Unfortunately, you're exposed in all your nakedness in front of other people.
Or you or your hero. Are you a warrior or are you a hollow man?
Was Joseph Conrad, who turned the court the law of the term Hollow Man,
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,
rather, with his radio blaring, listening to some jazz music saying that his soul was disassembled in the presence of God.
He was not humbled by the circumstance. It passed him by completely hollow men.
Though plenty of Hollywood people who go to the battlefields and come away completely unmoved by what they see.
Are they to be? Are they fortunate or the unfortunate human beings?
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.
And this is what I try to explain in the book. A code like betrayal.
War involves betrayal, many different levels.
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.
You can be betrayed by senior officers who are betraying you purely for their own ambition.
You can be betrayed by yourself, by your own naivete,
and you realise that you are partly at fault for the horrendous circumstances in which you find yourself.
Betrayal is an existential code in life, and it's really an existential code in war.
I look at courage, the young Henry Fleming who joins up because he's read Homer, because he wants to be a Homeric hero.
He wants to write himself into the history books he realises on an anonymous battlefield like the American Civil War,
where you can be killed very anonymously. It's very difficult to be a Homeric hero.
I look at trauma, which for us perhaps is the most important existential code of war now,
as it's the reason for the greatest incidence of hospitalisation of our forces.
And we still debating what trauma actually is. Trauma has existed.
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.
You see a bureaucracy which is trying to send an unwilling soldier because most soldiers have been on winning.
They've been peasants and workforces who have not thought about causes.
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.
And for them, the enemy is never shooting at them. Well, that's one enemy.
It's the rear echelon officers who put them in the position to be shot at for reasons they don't know.
It's not their fight most of the time. But peasants have been victims throughout history.
So the other point that Contra says is that history is our humanity.
That's what history is. It's nothing more than our changing humanity and our changing existential codes.
So take honour for Achilles.
Honour is not what it is for us. That Achilles honour is not what it is for some sort of a breach in stone.
Dallas judge us upon his description of the Battle of Waterloo,
which Tolstoy said told him everything he needed to know about war before he experienced it himself for the first time.
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.
Three pages for this young dandy poet, Moody for Fabrizio Achilles would have had no time for him whatsoever.
But he has a wonderful sense of honour. He can recognise himself in Achilles, but Achilles would not be able to recognise himself, unfortunately.
And then, of course, as Kundra says, history is also about Caprice.
It's about contingency. It doesn't have to have any meaning. You can fight a war.
You can come back, but it really is meaningless.
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,
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.
This is his kneecap and hobbles for the rest of his life. That's it.
That is Jack's experience from battle and of war.
Totally meaningless for everyone concerned. But that, unfortunately, is also history.
Let me come to an end by quoting from Friedrich Nietzsche, who was the father of all good things.
War is the father of good prose. Unfortunately, war is not the father of good prose.
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,
which are frequently ghostwritten and not particularly well written, even by the ghost writers or by the popular writers.
They're not great. But why do we need great writing to bring these characters alive?
The characters we find in the popular books are stock figures that represent the kind of stock figures that we
imagined you'd find in war the cowardly NCO or the bullying master sergeant or the not so heroic young officer.
These are stock figures because there's no such thing as a not so heroic young officer.
Heroism is usually the product of the hour. You don't join up to become a hero.
Most people join up because they have to. They want to survive.
They want to come back. That is the overriding need.
But most soldiers I want to come back.
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.
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,
because they found out something about themselves they didn't know before. Real people are the kind of people who populate Tolstoy's stories.
They're a mix of cowardice and courage, the heroic in times and on heroic at others.
The important thing is that the characters should live not just on the page, but should live off the page.
But they should not be one dimensional. They should not live in just the dimension of the book.
They should live with us. After we close the book. Important thing is that they have survived because every generation has read into
them and found something in them that resonates with them and the experience of war.
That is why Soldier Story Home, where we still have translations last year we have two translations of.
This year has been one. This is why soldiers in Afghanistan read Flashman.
A Padre wrote to the Times Literary Supplement to say, What are my soldiers reading in Afghanistan?
They are reading Homer. But what they really like reading is Flashman.
And what they really like about Flashman is that he survives the nefarious illness of the politicians and the
pundits and the public intellectuals and all the people who cheer on but don't take any dangers themselves.
I think the silliest argument of all is that to be a great work of war, it has to be anti-war.
Well, apart from the fact that it is very difficult for anyone to be anti-war before the 19th century,
I think the great writers are conflicted about it. I don't think Homer particularly loved war.
He's very scathing about it. He calls it atrocious. He calls.
He talks about the savagery of men. He talks about areas the god of war being two faced and lying.
And yes, he created an Achilles, the greatest warrior that anyone has ever created.
A man that so many soldiers would love to be and fear they might become virtual was probably a pacifist.
If it is possible to have a pacifist in the Roman Empire, and yet, despite himself,
he created in the news the greatest Roman learned someone who was loved by 19th century Britain
because he seemed to be the personification of the good Victorian soldier on the frontier.
The Pax Romana. The Pax Britannica. Selfless, patriotic and always willing to sacrifice women, not sacrifice women, but sacrifice the love of women.
Virtual manages to lose both his wife and his lover at the same time, all in the name of duty.
And this was considered absolutely echt for a British soldier in the 19th century.
Shakespeare was Shakespeare anti war or not? If you want the greatest travesty portrayal of Achilles, read Troilus and Cressida.
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.
The Greeks were a bit conflicted about Achilles as well. They didn't take him at his own estimation of himself.
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,
Macbeth, Anthony and Othello, you don't get greater than that in terms of what they were as people.
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.
They show us every side and they leave us to decide whether war is good or bad,
whether a particular war is right or wrong, where the war has meaning or no meaning for those who fight it.
And that leads me to the conclusion that we read literature for a reason.
It's hardwired into us. We know that storytelling is hardwired into us because without storytelling, we couldn't cooperate with each other.
And we also couldn't cooperate with each other against the enemies, whoever the enemies may be.
We believe that language was hardwired into us so that we could evaluate people, so we could tell someone, This is a good guy.
We can sign a contract with this fellow because he always honours his contracts.
But this is a faithful husband to a great mother. This is why we have language so we can evaluate without evaluation.
We would not be able to progress very far. Some of cognitive scientists like Keith Oakley and Passionate Muse book that came out last
year say that we live in fictional worlds because it strengthens our belief in humanity.
The characters we adopt, we admire that we identify with strength and our commitment and our belief in our own species.
It's a survival mechanism.
The report was produced earlier this year to show that in the computer games that people play now, those who play super heroes,
kind of marvel comic characters are even more selfless in the game than those who play ordinary people.
They're out to prove something. Out to show.
But they are superior people because of their selflessness, their willingness to sacrifice themselves.
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.
If you were bitten by the wing serpent, you would die of a horrible disease called corrupt blood.
And then something happened that the programmers hadn't expected.
But one thing happened, which is they hadn't expected that we're all very fallible human beings.
When we get bitten by the serpent, we're not supposed to return home because we will then infect our families.
We're supposed to be quarantined. But people did go back home. But then they found that some people were deliberately infecting themselves in
order to teleport themselves to the enemy and kill the enemy as suicide bombers.
And the Department of Homeland Security discovering this turned up because they were
interested in what is the pathology of someone who wants to become a suicide bomber.
And Americans can do this as well in certain circumstances in virtuality, not in the real world.
But virtuality is becoming more and more the real world. And in virtuality, we have our avatars.
We have people who are ourselves. What is the first avatar in history?
It's Patroclus in the Iliad.
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.
He's the avatar of Achilles. He's representing him on the battlefield.
That's the first avatar in history long before we got into the world of computers.
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,
this very mystifying ritual part ritual, part reality that we engage in.
I just conclude on this note. I, I reread a lot of these books.
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,
but I was a different person in part because I read those books.
And it's that dialectical relationship between reader and text,
which is the most fascinating thing about literature and which go back to films which we were discussing,
which I don't think a film can actually give you for all sorts of reasons.
Film would tell you a story and a wonderful narrative, make it great characters like Dr. Strangelove.
But I'm not sure that you can still fit the great texts.