The Lives and Reputation of our Ancient Island’s Defenders of Freedom now
at greater Risk.
*
In the Daily Mail on Saturday the 24th July 2004, a timely
article by the eminent historian Max Hastings has outlined the grievous dangers
to morale of our illustrious Regiments from a politically correct Government.
* *
Death of a
Warrior Nation
By
Max Hastings
This
week’s defence cuts sound the death knell for the proud traditions which have
defined our island race for centuries.
[There
are few families in our land, who cannot trace the descent of their families
over hundreds of years and longer who have not lost loved ones in defence of
their country, and the defence of many oppressed nations worldwide. Once you
take away the reason for an unselfish act of service to your country then the
result will be the beginning of the end of those most stoic and dedicated
defenders of Freedom the world has seen for over 2500 years]
One of my family lives in a little street in Clapham. I
asked her the other day: did she know why it is called Aliwal Road? ‘NO’ she
said- and I bet you don’t either.
On Jan 28,1846, General Sir Harry Smith with 12,000
British troops, defeated 20,000 Sikhs at Aliwal in the Punjab. It was a decisive battle of the Sikh Wars
We will not claim that this was a victory to rank
with Blenheim and Waterloo, but the Victorians- then building terraced villas
in Clapham by the thousand-were proof of it, and immortalised it in a street
name.
The 19th century produced a host of
British imperial military triumphs. Back at home the teeming millions of our cities
took up residence in streets named Waterloo Crescent Atbara Road, Ladysmith
Villas, Mafeking Hill, Colenso Gardens. What is more, you can bet that
everybody who lived amid their petty bourgeois splendours knew exactly what the
names represented.
The British have never been a militaristic people, but we have ever been
proud to be a martial one. How I
love the epitaph Harry Smith, victor of Aliwal composed for himself:
‘I have served my country nearly 40 years, I have fought
in every quarter of the globe, I have driven four-in –hand in every quarters, I
have never had a sick certificate.’
‘I have been present in as many battles and sieges as
any officer of my standing in the Army. I have never fought a duel and only
once made a man an apology, although I am as hot a fellow as the world
produces; and I may, without vanity, say the friendship I have experienced
equals the love I bear my comrade, officer or soldier.’
Harry
Smith was a warrior and proud of it. He was one
of tens of thousands of his kind whom Britain has spawned through the
centuries, commemorated by memorials up and down the land of the kind Ken
Livingstone is eager to remove from London.
Smith,
represented a great national tradition of service, duty, honour, discipline,
adventure and sacrifice.
In the
House of Commons on Wednesday, Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon rose to make a
statement about spending cuts. He talked of money in millions, soldiers in
thousands, ships and planes in scores.
Yet
never mind such details just now.
Hoon’s real business, as Blair’s undertaker, was to sound a death knell for the
British warrior heritage.
It
is a paradox that Tony Blair likes to send Britain’s Armed Forces to risk their
necks for HIS favourite good causes.
He is the only member of his own party who cares a fig for them, and yet
that fig is not enough to persuade him to honour the bills.
The
warrior ethos and the Blair project are misfits. New Labour thinks it is
about caring, not fighting. The
Prime Minister who committed the Army to Iraq is the same man who has struck
the most damaging blow at military morale in modern times: the ridiculous
interminable and obscenely expensive Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday.