War, wine and the brilliance of Beychevelle

If only toasts and good wishes were weapons of war. At every serious repast I have attended since the invasion began, someone has raised a glass to the heroes – and heroines – of Ukraine. The rest of us have responded with a blend of solemnity and moist-eyed emotion.

One’s emotions are strange. I can read about the deaths of warriors on the battlefield, now riding with the Valkyries on their way to Valhalla, and merely respond with a dry-eyed salutation. But hearing of some old girl who had been living in hunger and squalor and terror in a cellar for days and indeed weeks, with the regular crump of shellfire threatening death at any moment, and now weeping with joy not only because she had been evacuated but because she had been able to bring her cat with her; that is tear-duct time. The brutalities of war inflict their full horror on the vulnerable. Homo homini lupus.

Yet there is more to war than savagery. It brings out the best in the human condition, as well as the worst. On the one hand, brutality and slaughter; in the opposing camp, bravery and sacrifice. ‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.’ Horace’s words are moving. But so are Wilfred Owen’s. Himself moved by the butchery of the Western Front, he added a brief preface to Horace: ‘The old lie.’ Yet most soldiers would prefer Horace’s version of the truth. That preux chevalier Robert E. Lee once expressed a sentiment which would have been understood down the ages by many of those apprenticed to the profession of arms: ‘It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.’

The other evening, I expressed the view that more than anything else I could think of, servitude et grandeur militaires embodies the ambivalence of the human condition.