How many people do you know who have either (a) killed or (b) murdered people? I am not conscious of having met a murderer, although John Mortimer revealed recently that one of his best friends became one. As a schoolboy, however, I used to play a board game called L'Attaque with an ex-officer who told me, between moves, of his experiences in Normandy. He recalled without pleasure or dismay how he had used his dirk to kill a German who ambushed him in a dark cellar.
My generation was spared the duty of taking aim and firing, except at targets or with blanks. Somewhat like Chancellor Kohl, we have had the good fortune not to have had to choose between squeamishness and virility. One recalls the story of a Galician Jew conscripted into the Austrian army at the outbreak of the Great War who endured his sergeants' brutalising rages with resigned equanimity. He assumed that it was part of a Jew's lot to be stunned by thunder flashes and given bad food, a straw mattress and nails in his boots. Sent at last to the front, the Jew was ordered to take part in an attack. He was horrified to find that those on the other side were firing real bullets and shrapnel at his comrades. His last words-shouted to the enemy-were, "Are you mad? There are human beings here."
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death-dealing has been both a duty and a pleasure to the human race. Beasts kill and eat each other when hungry or threatened; civilised man is piously interdicted from eating other men the better to moralise their massacre or dignify their execution. If western man had enforced cannibalism, might casualties have been limited by satiety rather than rendered countless by principle? Well, the Aztecs combined bloodthirstiness with eclectic cannibalism without losing their appetite for battle. Homo necans is, as Walter Burkert declared, the due name for our species.
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the decline of war as a routine element of diplomacy has done more to unravel traditional values than it is politic to acknowledge. In hegemonic days, Britain was always in a state of surreptitious military organisation. Since every gentleman could expect to be an officer, civilised conformity was exacted less by Christian morality than by regimental habit. "Good morning, good morning," said Siegfried Sassoon's general to two of his tommies as they marched up to Arras with rifle and pack. Although "he did for them both with his plan of attack," he at least knew how to send men to their deaths politely. Today, if you get a civil greeting in England, its almost invariable source is a recorded message. How much at ease can anyone be with himself when his government's boast is not that Britain has got the greatest fleet in the world but the greatest lottery?
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the demand for the return of corporal punishment by the same politicians who affect to crave a classless Britain is more comic than any call for a "war" with Europe, but it fails to recognise that flogging makes little sense except as part of the apparatus of the social stratification which it enforced. Unless it is administered by a convincingly superior caste, armed with an overbearing code of behaviour, it becomes only the evidence of impotent alarm.
Although I have neither been a murderer nor been murdered, I do have personal experience of Charterhouse in the days when beating was a regular ritual. It was neither shameful to be beaten nor a symptom of merit to have escaped it. My friend Brian Bliss tells me how a fellow Old Etonian once "commiserated" with him for never having been formally flogged by the headmaster (the Reverend CA Alington).
At Charterhouse, as at Eton, most beatings were inflicted by hairier older boys on smoother younger ones, often for such crimes as "festivity," Carthusian slang for insolence or cheek. Anna Freud's notorious article "Somewhere a Child Is Being Beaten" ought perhaps to have a British supplement: "Somewhere a Child Is Being Beaten and I'm Very, Very Glad." The ritual impact of hearing the sounds of a beating excited as much as it chastened the listening myrmidons. There was a certain sense of election, even stardom, in being selected for punishment; it obliged the victim not only, as Kenneth Clarke put it in his Wykehamist autobiography, to "make an arse" but also to give an impression of "sporting" insouciance. It less repressed "festivity" than lent it a naughty glamour.
The bonding effect of bondage was integral to the machinery of class solidarity: when he was already famous, Freddie Ayer was put in his place by Quintin Hogg by being reminded of how he had been flogged by his lordship at Eton. Since the lower classes were not honoured with the same implements of punishment (the cane was too good for them), the sound of their being beaten was quite distinct and their chastisement served other ends. The return of corporal punishment without the secret glamour of the regimental society which it sustained will do no more than inspire violence without loyalty and resentment without nostalgia.
