Men worth remembering

On 8 November 1917 Lieutenant Darcy Jones was trotting across the Negev desert with the Worcestershire and Warwickshire Yeomanry when the order came to charge some Turkish gun positions. Jones and his fellow Worcesters drew their sabres, split into twos and threes and rode at a full gallop under heavy fire towards the 2,000-strong enemy who outnumbered them by more than ten to one. Over half the Worcesters were killed or wounded, but the enemy were routed. Jones, not unreasonably, considered the action ‘the most exhilarating moment of my life’.

Well, quite. If there’s a man alive who wouldn’t happily exchange every single one of his life experiences for the chance to have done what Jones did that day, then I should like to know what’s wrong with him. We know war is hell: no one who has been through it (with the possible exception of Ernst Jünger) has ever claimed otherwise. The problem — problem, at least for those naive fools out there who think that war is something man will one day evolve out of — is that we also know that the thrill of going into combat with your mates and emerging unscathed is the ultimate male rite of passage.

It’s the ‘emerging unscathed’ which is the difficult bit. Here is General Sir Cecil ‘Monkey’ Blacker describing his D-Day: ‘Mike Pratt’s troop was the first to be hit: his tank exploded in a ball of flame and he perished with the whole of his crew.’ Another man, ‘his face, by now engulfed in flames, was a charred and unrecognisable mess’, though he survived to drive his London taxi again. ‘He shrugged off sympathy and was wont to comment, “My wife prefers ugly men”.’