Agincourt is … a victory of the weak over the strong, of the common soldier over the mounted knight…. It is a school outing to the Old Vic, Shakespeare is fun, … Laurence Olivier in armour battle; it is an episode to quicken the interest of any schoolboy every bored by a history lesson… It is also a story of slaughter-yard behaviour and of outright atrocity.

We cannot yet imply, as we can of the officer a hundred years later, that he thought killing almost degrading of his rank. But it is significant that he had begun to carry weapons of very little lethal value; and the infantry officer at least seems to have looked on himself as a director rather than agent of violence.

…the impulsion which drove a pre-war civilian to join up for … seven years with the colours, five on the reserve — was most often that of simple poverty.

Battle, therefore ….. is essentially a moral conflict. It requires, if it is to take place, a mutual and sustained act of will by two contending parties and, if it is to result in a decision, the moral collapse of one of them.

It must be counted as one of the particular cruelties of modern warfare that, by inducing even in the fit and willing soldier a sense of his unimportance, it encouraged his treating the lives of disarmed or demoralized opponents as equally unimportant.

The liberal state likes to believe that it works by consent and persuasion, that compulsion is a method of dealing with citizens to which only the lower forms of polity have resort.

The young have already made their decision. They are increasingly unwilling to serve as conscripts in armies they see as ornamental.