Base Details

If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath,
I'd live with scarlet Majors at the base,
And speed glum heroes up the line to death.
You'd see me with my puffy, petulent face,
Guzzling and gulping in the best hotel,
Reading the Roll of Honour, "Poor young chap",
I'd say --- "I used to know his father well;
Yes we've lost heavily in this last scrap."
And when the war is done and youth stone dead,
I'd toddle safely home and die --- in bed.

[Siegfried Sassoon, 1918]

The difference now is that the people sending our young men and women up the line to death are rather "wet" than "fierce"; I'd be very surprised if they bother to read any Rolls of Honour - it might discomfit them in making their initiative-led decisions; and they are unlikely to know the families of anyone who does make the ultimate sacrifice, on the home front or abroad - given how few MPs have ever served, in any sense, military, civil or voluntary.

Almost a hundred years have gone by since Sassoon wrote these words. But the words echo down the ages all the same.