March 13, 2007

Dear Colleague:

"I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
Straining upon the start. The game's afoot.
Follow your spirit, and upon this charge
Cry, 'God for Harry, England, and Saint George!'"
                                             Shakespere, Henry V, act 3, scene 1

    "God for Harry, England, and Saint George!" This cry is taken up, half jokingly, in the English press when it learned that twenty-two-year-old Prince Harry, third in line to the throne, is to be sent to Iraq as second lieutenant. The British government is reluctant, for it may be obliged to guard the royal prince with a contingent of the Special Force. But Harry insists. He can't, as he puts it, "sit on his arse," when his boys are going to risk death on the battlefield.

    British society may be class-ridden, but it doesn't allow the privileged to escape military service. So many bright Etonians and Harrovians, Oxonians and Cantabrigians were slaughtered on the World War I battlefields, that Britain (so some say) was deprived of an entire generation of "the brightest and the best." While the physical landscape soon recovered at the war's end, the human landscape, thinned of its shining youths, remained desolate for decades. The extent of slaughter at Somme and other battlefields is suggested by Harold Macmillan's story. Macmillan, a future British prime minister, was a brilliant student at Balliol College, Oxford, before the war, but had enlisted in the Army before taking a degree. Demobilized from the Army and free to return to finish his studies, he made his choice: "I did not go back to Oxford after the war. It was not just that I was still a cripple. There were plenty of cripples. But I could not face it. To me, it was a city of ghosts. Of our eight scholars and exhibitioners who came up in 1912, Humphrey Sumner and I alone were alive. It was too much." C.S. Lewis's story is similar. He too was accepted by Oxford, but went to war instead, and was wounded. Unlike Macmillan, he returned to Oxford. In a letter to his father, he wrote: "I remember five of us at Keble, and I am the only survivor... One cannot help wondering why." Stories like these can be repeated over and over again.

    I said earlier that the British upper-class had to serve. But, of course, that's the wrong way of putting it. British upper-class would not want to be exempt. It would have offended their sense of honor to allow only the "lower orders" die for their country. Honor is a pagan/warrior virtue, after all, a virtue that the British nobility and upper-class retained even into the twentieth century.

    Now, what about the USA? American presidents and senators are addressed as "the honorable." They have honor and, presumably, they uphold honor. And honor in America retains the notion of warrior virtue, as, for example, in the Medal of Honor, bestowed on the bravest soldiers. Yet the American upper-class feel no obligation to die for their country and no compunction letting the "lower orders" die in their place. At the time of the draft, they thought it perfectly acceptable to evade military service by enrolling in college. The Brits would be shocked. Where is their American cousins' sense of honor?

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu