Risking Your Life

The causes which will or will not make a man risk his life are necessarily quite different in kind from those that will make him risk any pleasure that depends on his life. You can only bribe him to die with certain things, and not others. And one of the things with which you can bribe him can be most shortly described as a brass band. He will cheerfully die in an atmosphere of triumph--nay, he will even cheerfully be defeated in an atmosphere of trump. But he will not do the same things in an atmosphere of defeat. This romance is the most real of all the realities of war. Its necessity is as practical as that of petrol for motors or food for men. It is proved by experiment in the fact that successes have often been gained through the presence of some commander even when he did not command, or that under a certain degree of failure in the whole body the moral breaks and there is rout...Men will only accept such tragedy if they may treat it as comedy. It is necessary, I say, to dwell for a moment on this fact, lest anyone should still suppose that in recruitment one can make progress by pessimism. The men are not needed because of our defeats. The are needed for our victory 320