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A stirring speech, but the paean to martial honour that it is built around has always been the minority view among those who fought and bled in industrial-age warfare. The politics of Reconstruction-era America, like the politics of inter-war Europe, was defined by never again. So, in a more uplifting way, was the politics of post-WW2 Europe. War is the price we pay to preserve peace, not something valuable in its own right. This view, too, is in the old books, because things change less than you think. I think it is most eloquently put by John Adams in a letter to his wife:
The virtues of American (and before it, British) commercial culture are deep and wide - and, incidentally, unmatched on the battlefield. They should be celebrated for what they are, not compared unfavourably to the martial virtues that we appear to have given up for them. And we remember those who died to preserve them for what they gave up, not what they represent.
If the dead of Gettysburg could talk, would they agree with OWH or John Adams? Mass literacy continued to advance over the intervening decades, and the dead of Flanders speak to us through their letters. Famously, they agree with the living of their generation - war is hell, and war on that scale should only be fought to end all wars.
We men of the factories and counting-houses are not without honour (serial bankrupt Donald Trump excepted). "Dictum Meum Pactum" - "My word is my bond" - the motto of the London Stock Exchange. "The full faith and credit of the United States Government". These mean something (although unfortunately less than they would have done to John Quincy Adams), and people sleep more soundly at night knowing that they will not be ruined because of them. What are Mensur scars or the broken necks of the polo ground which OWH so admires when compared to the skills and spills of modern football (Association or gridiron) - whether you compare the quality of the spectacle at the top of the sport or the ratio of characters built to bodies maimed at the grassroots. Mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture are advanced wonderously.
And perhaps we should be more gracious if our granddaughters want to waste some of their time on painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain. Rome, after all, is remembered as much for her achievements in those areas as for her battlefield victories.
I have always seen war as a very necessary evil. We shouldn’t seek it, but at the same time, there’s always barbarians at the gates, and peace is more often than not followed by those barbarians thirsting for the blood of a people who removed the cannons in favor of flower pots, who’d beaten their swords into plows and didn’t teach their kids to fight.
War is certainly hell, but I think the slavery bought by refusing to fight is just as bad. Watching your country ravaged and looted is bad, as is the hunger that follows. What concerns me hear is that Ukraine and (I suspect) Taiwan are the first of several wars that will result from the end of Pax Americana just as centuries of warfare followed the end of Pax Romana. Porcelain is great, but I think because we’re in the heart of the Atlanticist Empire, and don’t see the problems, that we assume we’re immune from nature’s law of tooth and fang. You cannot be weak.
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