William Peel embodies and partly invents the most attractive form of high Victorian public-school style: devoted to his men and they to him, elegant, brave beyond belief. The slogan with which he and his blue-jackets greeted each other in the hell of his Diamond Battery at Sevastopol was ‘all will be serene’. Today they would surely have said, as the shells exploded around them, ‘it’s all cool’. Honour as cool: there is something very modern in that.
Finally, there is James Goodenough, who bases his warrior creed in his Christianity, converting the old imperialism of trade and opportunism into a deeply held belief that the empire was doing the Lord’s work bringing Christianity and justice to all.
For none of them was patriotism enough; let alone just obeying orders (indeed all three were singularly difficult to command). They each struggled in different ways to find a fulfilling personal doctrine to make the business of killing, which no society as yet has managed to do without, into something honourable, and to find a concept of honour which made sense in their time. We are unwise if we sneer at such struggles. Without the antique codes we may be left with the appalling calculations of mere utilitarianism: looming over the end of Crane’s period is modern industrialised warfare, one of whose most powerful advocates, Jackie Fisher, was a midshipman at the disaster of Tientsin in 1859 to the avenging of which Goodenough brought his Christian sword. Fisher argued later that enemy prisoners should be boiled in oil, to encourage dismay amongst their fellows still fighting; if there are no rules, and it works, why not? Crane’s heroes, in their different ways, were trying to avoid the world created by that calculus. That these tensions are still with us, and perhaps always will be, gives Crane’s book a compelling and topical interest.
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