Writing my post on“Dulce et Decorum est”, I got to
thinking about all the misery of the First World War. And this coincided with
a thread one of my Facebook friends started.
He posted a link to a book about (I presume) gallant
stands made by small forces against large ones. You know, like Custer against
"all the Indians in the world" (old Bill Cosby routine). I don’t know anything about Outnumbered,
Outgunned, Undeterred: Twenty Battles against All Odds, or its author;
and I can’t find it in any of my local library systems, so I’m unlikely to
read it soon.
But the FB thread took an interesting turn when one of the
contributors thought it a shocking crime that the book doesn’t appear to
include an account of the battle of Saragarhi,
at which 21 Sikh soldiers fought to the last man against all the Afghans in the world (apparently; well, okay, 10,000 of them).
This person’s primary source was a site called Badass of the Week, with which I’m
not taking any issue. Although where I come from, you don't spout streams of factoids as gospel when you only cite a single source, and that source's name is Badass. Just sayin'.
It was when someone put forth the example of
the battle of
Rorke’s Drift that things got cherce, IMO. If you’re unfamiliar with the
incident, it was part of the British campaign against the Zulus, fought in
1879. At its most basic, about 150 British and colonial troops fought off an
assault by somewhere between 3000 and 4000 Zulu warriors.
(And if you’re of a mind, I commend to you the 1964 film Zulu, which has
its historical limitations, but presents the most powerful battle sequence I’ve
ever seen in a movie; and I’ve seen a lot of them.)
Well, Ms. Badass was apparently not fully conversant
with Rorke’s Drift, but sniffed it off as “somewhat…less noble [than Saragarhi]…b/c the British
at that time were defending themselves on turf that was not rightfully theirs
in the first place. The Sikhs, OTOH…Saragarhi was right there in the Punjab—their
home.”
Leaving aside the rather fine point that the Sikhs
in question were actually serving in the British Army (or, technically, in the
Indian Army, which was an imperial arm of the Brits), and therefore defending
(British) imperial interests; and also leaving aside the fact that on the
subcontinent if you try to lay out clear boundaries as to what plot of land “belongs”
to which group of people, you’ll drive yourself nuts…that little bit of snottery
just ate my lunch.
Because here’s the deal: if the point under
discussion is the few taking a stand against the many, the issue of the
political ends that caused the soldiers to be sent to defend (or attack) a
particular place doesn’t factor into the evaluation of their last full measure of
devotion to duty. The PBI (poor bloody infantry) of any army never gets to vote
on whether they’re going to deploy to Iraq, Islandlwana or Illium.
It’s what they do when they get there that can
inspire admiration or revulsion.
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