The great cloud of witnesses

October 31st is Reformation Day and the day following is All Saints' Day: 

Reformation Day is the anniversary of Martin Luther's challenge to debate his 95 theses—not the beginning of the Reformation but an important point in it. Halloween is All Hallows Eve, the evening before All Saints’ Day. Days were thought of as evening to evening so the eve was the beginning of the next day—think New Year’s Eve or Christmas Eve. Although today most approach it as a secular holiday that wasn’t its origin and for Protestants, all believers are “saints” and All Saints’ Day is when we acknowledge “the great cloud of witnesses” who have passed on. So on Halloween, we can celebrate both the Protestant Reformation and all those believers who have gone before.

Therefore being justified by faith,
we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ:
By whom also we have access by faith into this grace wherein we stand,
and rejoice in hope of the glory of God.

Romans 5:1-2 [KJV]

The sky is falling

I would describe myself as a philosophical pessimist, but a temperamental optimist. As the election approaches an argument against despair:

Some Americans will wake up next Wednesday in despair. Half the country—or at least a sizable part of the losing half—will feel that all is lost, every ounce of their hope and hard work has been wasted. The candidates themselves trade on these themes. ....

Both sides are treating this election as a potential apocalypse. Everything is on the line. The party is over for good if the wrong party wins. But is it? Is the American experiment really so close to the edge?

Not from where I’m sitting. If you zoom out—and I mean way out—things are going pretty well in the land of the free and the home of the brave. We are on the cusp of our 250th birthday. We still have our republican form of government, our Constitution and Bill of Rights, despite some close calls. Roughly 2% of the population lost their lives in the Civil War—the equivalent of 6.5 million people today. In the 20th century we made it through two world wars, a great depression, the assassination of two presidents and the resignation of another, the trauma of Vietnam and the fall of communism. Even after all that we stood tall as the world’s sole superpower.

Sept. 11, 2001, didn’t kill us. Neither did the housing collapse nor the financial crisis. We beat Covid. We even survived the ugly Trump administration and its uglier backlash. ....

Something about how our Founders went about their work has set us up for centuries of success, and the end isn’t remotely in sight. There’s life left in Lady Liberty, plenty of it. The United States of America is still the last best hope on earth.

All the evidence you need is piling up at the southern border. People from everywhere risk everything to get here—to work, to raise their children, to make a future. China doesn’t have this problem.

If you’re a candidate for high office, there may be some political value in running around with your hair on fire, shouting like a street preacher about the end of democracy and the loss of the country. The stakes are highest during the waning days of a losing campaign. But don’t fall for it. The pendulum always swings. All is never lost. .... (more)

Matthew Hennessey, "The Election Will End. The World Won’t," The Wall Street Journal, Oct. 30, 2024.

Conservatism in the wilderness

In a recent Facebook comment I indicated that I was a conservative, and consequently most often voted for Republican candidates. I'm not planning to vote for President this year—neither candidate promises to deal with the most pressing problems endangering the Republic. Neither do I have any confidence in their character or competence. Charles C.W. Cooke is dispirited by the prospects of the next four years, whichever candidate wins the Presidency, but he is less pessimistic over the long term:

For a conservative classical liberal such as myself, this election season has been alarming and grotesque, and I am convinced that, one way or another, we are destined to pay a price for it. But I do not worry about conservatism in the longer term, because I believe that the central insights of conservatism are correct. Human nature is immutable. The world is a dangerous place. Ambition must be channeled productively. We cannot spend more than we make. There are no solutions, only settlements. Equality under the law is superior to the alternatives. Practice is a better indicator of success than theory. Power corrupts less when it is shared between competing institutions. Government ought to be as close to the people as possible. That which cannot go on forever will stop. From time to time we take a vacation from these truths, but a vacation is all it can be, for, eventually, reality will kick in — yes, even in Washington, D.C. (more)

Charles C.W. Cooke, "Will Conservatism Recover?," National Review, Oct. 24, 2024.

When things fall apart

Every Sunday at The Free Press Douglas Murray writes about "Things Worth Remembering." This Sunday his choice is from T.S. Eliot's play, Murder in the Cathedral:

.... In the time between its first staging, in 1935, and the completion of The Waste Land in 1922, Eliot had recovered somewhat from the fragmented mindset that had defined his early work—though he would spend the rest of his life periodically confronting despair. His personal revival was in large part, or perhaps entirely, due to a personal religious revival. He converted to Anglican Christianity in 1927.

Murder in the Cathedral is shot through with the struggle against hopelessness. It is a dramatization of the martyrdom of Thomas Becket, who was the archbishop of Canterbury in the twelfth century. History tells us that he clashed with England’s reigning king, Henry II, as church and state so often do. Many suspect that it was at the orders of the monarch that Becket was assassinated in 1170—in Canterbury Cathedral. ....

Murder in the Cathedral has lines as memorable as the most memorable lines of his poetry. The soon-to-be martyred Becket receives this warning, for instance, from a narrator, known as one of the Tempters, who come along to test him:

The last temptation is the greatest treason:
To do the right deed for the wrong reason.

These lines require some thinking about.

But there is one passage from Murder in the Cathedral that I often think about, and sometimes say to myself. It is spoken by Becket, in a meeting with another of his Tempters. And although it may seem bleak, it is, to my mind, somewhat consoling:

We do not know very much of the future
Except that from generation to generation
The same things happen again and again.
Men learn little from others’ experience.
But in the life of one man, never
The same time returns. Sever
the cord, shed the scale. Only
The fool, fixed in his folly, may think
He can turn the wheel on which he turns.

We always live in tumultuous times. That seems to me to be the nature of things. As Eliot’s fellow convert, C.S. Lewis, said—in another speech I have quoted in this series—even the historical eras that seem most placid turn out, on closer inspection, to have been filled with alarms and crises. .... (more)

Douglas Murray, "Things Worth Remembering: T.S. Eliot Put His World Back Together Again," The Free Press, Oct. 27, 2024.

None of the above

I seldom post about partisan politics here, but as the election approaches I've been thinking a lot about the Presidential contest. I actively dislike both major party candidates and have been debating whether to even vote for President. I never had that problem before 2016. Sometimes I was authentically enthusiastic about a candidate — although the last time was long ago. Usually, I have had little difficulty discerning what seemed to me the lesser evil. Today, I encountered Lionel Shriver's "America’s last undecided voter." Her concerns are mine. I wouldn't go so far as saying I'm a "double hater." I don't hate either candidate, but I don't think either should be President. Whoever wins, it will be a very long four years.

I’ve watched fellow ‘double haters’ squirm in print. There are two models for wrestling with this dilemma, one exemplified by Andrew Sullivan. The conservative commentator ‘came out’ in a September Substack newsletter – no, not in that dated sense: everyone knows he’s gay – in support of Kamala Harris, only to lavish the overwhelming majority of that column on what a ghastly candidate she is. ....

Academically, I profoundly sympathise with Andrew’s contention that any former president who has hindered the peaceful transfer of power, and any candidate who refuses to commit to accepting the results of the election, has invalidated himself for high office. But I am so blindingly bored by countless hysterical screeds decrying the character of Donald Trump and deploring the guy as a ‘threat to democracy’ that I’m loath to subject you to more of the same. For what gets less play is the ‘Democratic’ party’s threat to democracy.

Granted, our friend Kamala is an empty pantsuit, insecure and at least subconsciously aware that she’s in this thing way over her head. So if she wins, her presidency will likely be titular. She will do as she’s told by the same handlers who controlled her senile predecessor, and her administration will pursue four more years of roughly the same progressive policies. That makes her sound like the safer bet. But continuing the same policies is only safe if those policies were ever safe, and there’s nothing safe about four more years of wilful self-destruction. ....

...[S]ince when did Democrats care about the constitution? Supreme Court packing, Senate packing with new, Democratically controlled states (DC and Puerto Rico) and backhandedly abolishing the Electoral College all happily rattle in their bag of prospective tricks. The party has shamelessly weaponised the judicial system to keep Trump off the ballot or throw him in jail, which is creepy even to people like me who despise the guy. Democratic refusal to prosecute shoplifting abandons the state’s protection of private property. The Biden administration has systematically pressured social media companies to censor or suppress commentary unfriendly to government policy; Harris has never distanced herself from such violations of the First Amendment. ....

I detest Kamala Harris. Empty, incapable and dim, she’d make for a piss-poor specimen to break the ultimate glass ceiling. To the degree that she has any real convictions, I share few of them. With thanks to Holden Caulfield, I simply can’t bring myself to publicly plump for such a phony. I also can’t bring myself to publicly back Donald Trump. I vowed long ago to never, ever burden myself reputationally with supporting that clown on the record.

I’ve been in a state of paralysis this whole campaign season. I find it impossible to determine which victorious candidate could turn out to be worse. I accept that neutrality amounts to cowardice. Still, at the risk of appearing pathetic, for now I’m sitting this one out. I at least share Gerard Baker’s certainty in the Wall Street Journal this week that my country will survive either terrible president, a fragile confidence which these days has to pass for optimism. (more)

Lionel Shriver, "America’s last undecided voter," The Spectator, Oct. 26, 2024.

"Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear..."

Jake Meador, on Tolkien's view of moral responsibility. This was published in September and I missed it.

.... There is a simplicity about Tolkien’s moral vision that is refreshing. Certainly, there are times when the answer to the right course of action is not altogether plain, and wisdom and prudence are needed to help one see the right way. But if honour compels one toward a certain action, come what may, then nothing else matters—at least not for Tolkien.

We might stumble over the centrality of honour because Tolkien draws on a moral vision largely forgotten in our day. But the wise elders of old understood that when an individual faced a question of right and wrong, they were also facing a question of honour and dishonour. ....

For Tolkien, the demands of honour wed to wisdom and prudence are generally the only demands on us when we consider what we ought to do. History is simply the stage on which we act, playing our part well or poorly. Our feet are set down at some moment in time by forces entirely outside our control, and we must decide how to walk. As the wizard Gandalf counsels elsewhere in Lord of the Rings, “All we have to do is to decide what to do with the time that is given to us.” But this is not how many of us think about the relationship between time and moral choice. Rather than the space in which we make choices, history has come to be one of the central inputs that informs our choices, competing with the claims of honour as defined by the moral law.

Consider the ways in which both the Right and the Left now routinely avail themselves of what might be called “the appeal to the calendar.” The Left, including former president Barack Obama, have long spoken of the possibility of being “on the wrong side of history,” as if history itself is a moral force that calls us to certain choices and will judge us should we choose wrongly. Yet the Right makes its own appeal to the calendar. Any number of moral horrors are tolerated and justified through the claim that the offending party “knows what time it is,” and therefore must be allowed or even encouraged. ....

Tolkien did not think much of such “historical” arguments. In The Two Towers, Éomer, the prince of Rohan, says to Aragorn, the rightful king of Gondor, “It is hard to be sure of anything among so many marvels. The world is all grown strange.... How shall a man judge what to do in such times?” To which Aragorn replies, “As he ever has judged. Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man’s part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house.” While Tolkien certainly had a category for complex moral problems and possessed a deep understanding of the need for wisdom in approaching moral difficulties, he had no category whatever for engaging in evil to secure good ends. One’s moment in history did not let one off the hook of acting with honour. ....

Our hope is never to vanquish evil altogether, for we cannot do that. But we can act, as Tolkien says in The Return of the King:

Other evils there are that may come; for Sauron is himself but a servant or emissary. Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.

Those who wish to fight the long defeat well know that the “weather” facing future peoples is not ours to rule. But we can uproot what evils we encounter in hopes that our children and grandchildren might see a more fruitful crop than we ourselves ever shall ..... (more)

Jake Meador, "The Long Defeat of History," Comment, Sept. 5, 2024.

Equality

"Equality" is an essay by C.S. Lewis that appeared in The Spectator on 27 August 1943:

I am a democrat because I believe in the Fall of Man. I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason. A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in democracy because they thought mankind so wise and good that everyone deserved a share in the government. The danger of defending democracy on those grounds is that they’re not true. And whenever their weakness is exposed, the people who prefer tyranny make capital out of the exposure. I find that they’re not true without looking further than myself. I don’t deserve a share in governing a hen-roost, much less a nation. Nor do most people—all the people who believe advertisements, and think in catchwords and spread rumours. The real reason for democracy is just the reverse. Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters. ....

Every intrusion of the spirit that says ‘I’m as good as you’ into our personal and spiritual life is to be resisted just as jealously as every intrusion of bureaucracy or privilege into our politics. Hierarchy within can alone preserve egalitarianism without. Romantic attacks on democracy will come again. We shall never be safe unless we already understand in our hearts all that the anti-democrats can say, and have provided for it better than they. Human nature will not permanently endure flat equality if it is extended from its proper political field into the more real, more concrete fields within. ....

C.S. Lewis. Present Concerns, HarperCollins, 1986.

"The echo of a tune we have not heard"

From a C.S. Lewis sermon delivered Church of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford, on June 8, 1942:

In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited. ....

C.S. Lewis, "The Weight of Glory," 1942 (pdf)

A repellent thinker

Whittaker Chambers inoculated me against Ayn Rand. So, unlike many other male adolescents my age, I never bothered to read her big books. Today I enjoyed reading this about her and her "ideas." A few excerpts from "Atlas Schlepped":

Rand’s fiction closely resembles Soviet socialist realism except for preaching the opposite politics. Call it capitalist realism. In the most perceptive article on Rand I have encountered, Anthony Daniels claimed, without much exaggeration, that “her work properly belongs to the history of Russian, not American, literature.”

In the 1950s and 1960s, Rand’s novels and essays achieved enormous popularity. Ayn Rand clubs sprang up on college campuses; a handful of influential figures, most notably Alan Greenspan, the future chair of the Federal Reserve, were at one time her disciples; and her books have sold tens of millions of copies. Although serious scholars and journals regarded her novels as devoid of literary merit, they felt obliged to argue with them. For a while, there was no escaping Ayn Rand. ....

Rand differed from the radicals on one key issue. For them, socialism solved all questions; for her, it was capitalism. In almost all other respects, their views coincided. Both embraced militant atheism and regarded religion as the main source of evil, for Marxist radicals because it was “the opiate of the masses” and for Rand because it preached “irrationalism” and altruism.

In Soviet thinking, radical materialism entailed a centrally planned economy presided over by an omniscient Communist Party. In rejecting government for “pure capitalism,” Rand was closest to the Russian anarchist tradition. There is no government in Galt’s Gulch, the utopian community of industrialists described in Rand’s last novel Atlas Shrugged. “We have no laws in this valley,” Galt explains, “no rules, no formal organization of any kind.... But we have certain customs, which we all observe.” The Soviet Union regarded Communism, symbolized by the hammer and sickle, as the ultimate social system. Galt’s Gulch features a dollar sign three feet high, and when Rand died, her body lay in a funeral home beside one twice that size. ....

Is it any surprise that Rand strongly appealed to bright teenage boys? As comic book writer John Rogers remarked, “There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.”

With ambiguity and compromise characterized as moral treason, Rand’s novels feature principled heroes and dastardly villains, just like socialist realist fiction. In The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature, Rand argued for what Soviet theorists called “the positive hero,” the perfectly virtuous person who speaks the indubitable truth. Rand’s novels all contain such spokesmen, typically male, who display the physique of a Greek god, the nobility of a hero, and the charisma accompanying absolute self-confidence. ....

...Jews should be grateful that Rand did everything possible to conceal her background. The less this terrible author of lifeless prose and repellent ideas owes to Judaism, the better.

Assign her instead to the Russian tradition, which features so many repellent thinkers that Rand’s ideas can cause no measurable damage. Neither can her fiction much diminish the glories of Russian literature. A canon including Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov can hardly be marred by a few puerile novels. Atlas Shrugged, remarked Dorothy Parker, “is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.” (more)

Gary Saul Morson, "Atlas Schlepped," Jewish Review of Books, Fall, 2014.

Aging

I enjoyed this from Patrick Kurp:

I’m reminded of my age only when someone holds a door open for me (That’s my job!) or performs some other courtesy. I was returning to my car from the university library, carrying a canvas tote bag of books, walking with the aid of my cane, as usual, when a young man asked if he could carry them for me. A complicated set of reactions: 1). That’s what a boy asks a girl. 2). Do I look like a cripple? 3). Thoughtfulness and good manners aren’t extinct after all.

The essential image of ourselves we carry around with us doesn’t really age. We’re simultaneously twelve, forty-three and whatever age we happen to be at the moment. I’ve known too many who are preoccupied with getting older, an obsession now exploited by multiple industries. .... (more)

Patrick Kurp, "'An Echo of a Song a Stranger Sang'," Anecdotal Evidence, Oct. 6, 2024

The virtue of pig-headedness?

An interesting essay about intellectual humility:

Suppose you want to be a better person. (Lots of us do.) How might you go about it? You might try to become more generous and commit to donating more of your income to charity. Or you might try to become more patient, and practise listening to your partner, instead of snapping at them. These commonsense prescriptions invoke an ancient ethical tradition. Generosity and patience are virtues – excellences of character, whose exercise makes us flourish. To live well, says the virtue ethicist, is to cultivate and exercise just such excellences of character.

Part of living well, though, is thinking well. Our souls have an intellectual, as well as a practical, part; we cannot live fully flourishing lives unless we flourish intellectually. Are there, then, specifically intellectual virtues – excellences of intellectual character, whose exercise makes us good thinkers? Aristotle – whose works remain a touchstone for contemporary virtue theorists – certainly thought so. The intellectual part of the soul, he wrote in his Nicomachean Ethics, strives to attain truth; accordingly, he thought, the intellectual virtues are just those dispositions that qualify it to perform this function. Where the virtue ethicist bids us to be generous and patient, temperate and brave, the virtue epistemologist bids us to be thoughtful and fair, to be diligent and open-minded. At their most ambitious, the virtue epistemologist argues not just that such traits are valuable for their own sake, or that the exercise of such virtues will (tend to) yield knowledge, but, further, that our grasp of what knowledge is, in the first place, parasitic on our understanding of such virtues. ....

Like everything else, virtues go in and out of style. One purported intellectual virtue in particular has recently become intensely fashionable. Philosophers, psychologists and journalists all urge us to be more intellectually humble. Different thinkers characterise intellectual humility differently, but there are some recurring themes. The intellectually humble have a keen sense of their own fallibility (‘I’ve been mistaken in the past’). They tolerate uncertainty (‘We might never know the full truth of what happened’). They recognise the partiality and ambiguity of their evidence, along with the limits of their ability to assess it (‘New information might come to light’; or ‘I might be misinterpreting this data’). ....

‘When citizens are intellectually humble,’ write the philosophers Michael Hannon and Ian James Kidd, ‘they are less polarised, more tolerant and respectful of others, and display greater empathy for political opponents.’ The intellectually humble, writes the psychologist Mark Leary, ‘think more deeply about information that contradicts their views’, and ‘scrutinise the validity of the information they encounter’.

But the empirical work that underwrites these glowing assessments is often questionable. Many studies assess the intellectual humility of their experiments’ participants via self-reports. Subjects are asked to rate their level of agreement with claims like ‘I am willing to admit it if I don’t know something’; those who rate high levels of agreement are classed as having a high level of intellectual humility. The worry is not just that we are often poor judges of our own strengths and weaknesses, but rather, more specifically, that it is precisely those who are lacking in humility who are likely to give themselves high scores. Humble people, after all, don’t go around talking about how humble they are. To say ‘I’m very humble’ makes for a comically self-undermining boast. ....

Even so, one might think, intellectual humility surely has an important role to play. Intellectual humility can temper some of our worst instincts. People often underestimate just how hard it can be to work out the truth. Equivocal, murky evidence is blotted out in favour of the tidy, familiar narrative. Expertise in one domain is illicitly projected onto others. Past failures – fallacious inferences, or snafus of spatial reasoning – are glossed over. Those who value intellectual humility, to their credit, beseech us to be on our guard against these all-too-human tendencies. ....

We have reason, then, to be sceptical of the ambitious virtue epistemologist’s claim that we understand what knowledge is via our grasp of the intellectual virtues. Still, that’s compatible with thinking that intellectual humility makes for a genuine virtue, and, as such, that we should aspire to cultivate it.

But what if it turns out that our intellectual icons – our exemplars of the intellectual good life – tend not to be humble? What if it turns out that the growth of knowledge proceeds not via humility, but rather via stubborn pig-headedness? .... (more)

Rachel Fraser, "Against humility," aeon, Oct. 3, 2024

Fame in Heaven

Jake Meador writes "A Tale of Three Pastors" today and at one point quotes a line from C.S. Lewis's The Great Divorce. I last read that book a long time ago even though it is a favorite. This is where Meador's quotation from Lewis appears:

.... First came bright Spirits, not the Spirits of men, who danced and scattered flowers soundlessly falling, lightly drifting flowers, though by the standards of the ghost-world each petal would have weighed a hundred-weight and their fall would have been like the crashing of boulders. Then, on the left and right, at each side of the forest avenue, came youthful shapes, boys upon one hand, and girls upon the other. If I could remember their singing and write down the notes, no man who read that score would ever grow sick or old. Between them went musicians: and after these a lady in whose honour all this was being done.

I cannot now remember whether she was naked or clothed. If she were naked, then it must have been the almost visible penumbra of her courtesy and joy which produces in my memory the illusion of a great and shining train that followed her across the happy grass. If she were clothed, then the illusion of nakedness is doubtless due to the clarity with which her inmost spirit shone through the clothes. For clothes in that country are not a disguise: the spiritual body lives along each thread and turns them into living organs. A robe or a crown is there as much one of the wearer's features as a lip or an eye.

But I have forgotten. And only partly do I remember the unbearable beauty of her face.

"Is it? ... is it?" I whispered to my guide.

"Not at all," said he. "It's someone ye'll never have heard of. Her name on earth was Sarah Smith and she lived at Golders Green."

"She seems to be ... well, a person of particular importance?"

"Aye. She is one of the great ones. Ye have heard that fame in this country and fame on Earth are two quite different things."

"And who are these gigantic people ... look! They're like emeralds ... who are dancing and throwing flowers before her?"

"Haven't ye read your Milton? A thousand livened angels lackey her...."

C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, 1946. A pdf of the book can be found here.

The experience of war

John Keegan was an English military historian. The book of his that I first read was The Face of Battle (1976) about the experience of combat, and perhaps especially how that experience for the individual soldier hasn't changed much over time even as technology has. I loaned that book to a colleague—a Korean War combat veteran—who told me it was a very good description of his experience. Keegan later wrote the scripts for a series titled "Soldiers: A History of Men in Battle" (1985) narrated by Frederick Forsythe. It doesn't seem to be available on DVD but I discovered that much of it can be found on YouTube. Last night I watched the first episode, titled, like the book, "The Face of Battle."

I have no personal combat experience and can claim nothing beyond book knowledge. I did use episode one of the series with some confidence as an introduction to a unit on the military in an elective I once taught.

Most of "Soldiers A History of Men in Battle" can be watched on YouTube.