The new angels

Out of respect: Wootton Bassett marks the passing of every soldier killed in combat in Afghanistan

- THIS was the last night in Cape Town. I did a good many guards during my 21 years service but not one that gave me so much trouble and anxiety as this one. Our regiment was so well known and a great number drunk, several were what we call dead drunk. I had over 40 prisoners on my list. One man by name Singleton died suffocated with drink. He was carried helpless to the guard room like some others who were in the same condition. I afterwards was told that Singleton had boasted what quantities of wine he could drink. The poor fellow paid dear for his folly.

- A British squaddie is under arrest in Germany for allegedly joyriding in two armoured vehicles and running a Military Police patrol off the road. The 18-year-old soldier was ‘highly intoxicated’, according to German police, when he apparently careered through the gates of the Hohne Barracks in north-western Germany. Reports say he first drove off in an armoured command car, but he reportedly came off the road a few moments later. With the camp on high alert, the squaddie was then somehow able to take another vehicle – this time a tracked armoured ambulance – and sped off in that. A Royal Military Police patrol that tried to intercept the ambulance was said to have been forced off the road by its driver, who apparently crashed into a tree moments later. A German police officer added: “Apparently he muttered something about wanting to see green fields and trees.

Two eras, two accounts. Sergeant John Wall served in the 9th East Norfolk Regiment between 1857 and 1878 and, after retiring, provided one of the few records of service from among the other ranks of the Victorian army. The other comes from the Evening Standard from February this year. Two eras, two accounts, one familiar theme. Put soldiers in peacetime barracks and allow them access to alcohol and they become a pain in the arse.

Because they are young and fancy free, because they exist in a peer-led competitive environment, there is an air of inevitability about this behaviour. And (as we see above) thus ever was it so. Visit barracks in Aldershot, Colchester and Catterick, you will find them some distance outside the settlements that give them their names. However, until just recently, the hammered squaddie out on the rampage stereotype was known well beyond garrison towns. Useful blokes, just don’t socialise with them.

Conversely, whereas soldiers once enjoyed a reputation lower than an infantryman’s boot at the bottom of a rain-soaked trench, of nurses no poor appraisal could be aired. Nobody knows where or when their nickname originated, but it may have come from the unattributed quote: “Nurses are angels in comfortable shoes”. The heavenly allegory arose around the time of Florence Nightingale, who pioneered many of today’s nursing methods. She once took time out from cleansing Crimean wards to opine: “Nursing is an art: and if it is to be made an art, it requires an exclusive devotion as hard a preparation as any painter’s or sculptor’s work; for what is the having to do with dead canvas or dead marble, compared with having to do with the living body, the temple of God’s spirit?  It is one of the Fine Arts:  I had almost said, the finest of Fine Arts.” William Osler, the father of modern medicine, went further, declaring: “The trained nurse has become one of the great blessings of humanity.”

Nurse Ratched, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest's tyrannical medic, and quite some distance from the once popular view of the 'angel'

It is unlikely that such high words would be heard these days. Rather, the profession has undergone an marked collapse in confidence among the general public, informed by the likes of the BBC’s Undercover Nurse Panorama programme, which seek to blame the carers while largely ignoring the deficiencies of the system they struggle to work within. This is a failure of journalism, because it shoots the foot soldiers (no pun intended) while allowing the decision makers to go largely unquestioned.

However, there is more to this than reporting come up short. With or without it, there has been something of a divorce – or at least a trial separation – between the medical community and the public it serves. This is partly to do with the ascension of individual rights that make patients (and their relatives) that much more difficult to manage because many expect hotel rather than hospital standards. This leads to ridiculous wastes of time – the family of a patient is currently suing a Welsh hospital over the disappearance of their elderly relative’s nightie. At worst, we have witnessed a a sky-rocketing rise in incidences of assaults against hospital staff. Edwina Hart, the health minister, recently decided to view the front line for herself, spending a night shift shadowing the casualty ward at the University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff. She returned convincingly shocked by what she witnessed, and told the Assembly’s Plenary of her desire for stiffer sentences for patients who attack medical staff.

But the NHS has in recent years made itself so hard to love. Visit any outpatient unit and you will often spend hours reading walls plastered with signs that outline what the service cannot do for you, and of the narrow behavioural boundaries you are expected to respect. You will read these many times over as your appointment slips back and back and back. We’re not with the Republicans on health care yet – nowhere near it – but our hearts are becoming ever more heartened to the plight of the NHS because of personal experiences of chronic under-service.

Much of this is not a fault of staff. On an individual level, they remain much loved. Again at UHW, the average ward will receive cash and gifts sometimes running to thousands of pounds from grateful patients and relatives. (All of which is intended for nursing staff. Sadly, the cash is usually siphoned off for ‘ward funds’, but that’s another story.) It is systemic failure that brings the brickbats down on nurses’ heads.

Ironically, it is also management shortcomings that has elevated our troops from soldiers to heroes. Unlike the NHS, it is clear to all of us how the Government has failed so far in Afghanistan. The thought process is fairly rudimentary. Our near-Pavlovian response to another casket trundling through Wootton Bassett is to wonder if that poor boy would still be with us if he had flown rather than rode to war. And if he died as a consequence of a roadside IED, we believe Whitehall has failed him and his family.

The public has swiftly dug a huge well of sympathy for our under-resourced forces, and that is to their great credit that they understand well William Westmoreland’s maxim that “The military don’t start wars -politicians start wars”. In its rush to recognise José Narosky’s belief that “In war, there are no unwounded soldiers”, public opinion has tipped into a mawkishness that most squaddies would find toe-curlingly embarrassing.

Those who enjoyed ITV’s a Night for Heroes on Monday night, its second military awards (perhaps it might become The Bullets?) may agree with Napoleon’s view that “a soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of coloured ribbon”. But the notion that a piece of tin may compensate for the trauma required to receive it is further from the truth than Helmand is from Hirwaun. Sir Tasker Watkins, the former deputy Lord Justice and past chairman of the Welsh Rugby Union, never once publicly discussed how he won the Victoria Cross he received as a lieutenant in the Welch Regiment while fighting in Normandy hedgerows shortly after D-Day. We literally only have his citation.

Most soldiers who serve in Afghanistan would more closely identify with Siegfried Sassoon’s  ”citizens of death’s grey land”.  They don’t have the luxury of arguing over the rights and wrongs of this conflict – although, ironically, the cult of eulogy that has grown up around the dead has all but finished the anti-war movement as a force for change. However, for soldiers, there is only the immediate business of staying alive to deal with – or, as Betrand Russell put it: “War does not determine who is right – only who is left”.

There are two issues why this swing-too-far benefits neither the soldiers who fight nor the country they fight for. This sympathy must coalesce more urgently around an impetus to bring the troops home, otherwise it runs the risk of tipping into glorification. In such a landscape, a genuine debate on the merits or otherwise of this conflict become obscured because, as Lloyd George once said: ”The chariot of peace cannot advance over a road littered with cannon”.

Secondly, it does not chime with the soldier’s experience. They need our support, in many ways. But it is for them to dictate how that should be administered. The simplification of morally-difficult debates in this country means we risk giving reality TV-like salutation and cod-psychotherapy and little else. We – even those of us who were enlisted in the forces and were fortunate enough not to serve in such cursed times – have no real conception of this war. Not really.

There is a German proverb: “A great war leaves the country with three armies – an army of cripples, an army of mourners, and an army of thieves.” Soldiers have become our new angels only because they and their experiences are as remote as those of the heavenly host.