First published 2003 by Pearson Education Limited
Published 2014 by Routledge
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am grateful to the History Department of the Australian Defence Forces Academy, Canberra, for awarding me a visiting fellowship that enabled me to write the last third of this book, and for many stimulating discussions about monarchy and war. John Reeve helped me think about navies, while Peter Dennis provided insights on George Vs role in the First World War. John Coates, Robin Prior and Jeff Grey taught me much about Australias armed forces and its equally superb red wines. I was able to try out some of my ideas on monarchy and war at seminars at the Defence Forces Academy, the Australian National University and at Flinders University, Adelaide, where I received many useful and, at times, passionate comments. I am grateful to Dick Kohn of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who, without realising it, first gave me the idea for this book. I am sure that his forthcoming monograph on the military role of US presidents will be an invaluable comparative study. Since the conception of this book Heather McCallum has been all that a good editor should be: encouraging in her praise, constructive in her criticisms. Editors such as she make not only writing, but revising, a pleasure. To my old friend and comrade if not in arms, at least in the Intelligence Corps Tony Clayton, I owe an immense debt. He has not only been a constant source of inspiration and stimulating ideas, but has read the manuscript with his usual diligence. As a visiting professor at Duke University I have been able to test my thoughts on war with my students, as I have with the members of the Triangle Institute for Security Studies. Friends at Wolfson College, Cambridge, provided a congenial environment for research, while the staffs of the Cambridge University Library and the D. H. Hill Library, North Carolina State University, have been unfailingly helpful. I would like to thank Peter Boyden of the Army Historical Museum for answering questions, John Morrill from Cambridge for wisdom and encouragement so freely given, and Joe Hobbs, friend and colleague for over three decades, for numerous discussions about military history. Joe Caddell and William Leuchtenburg answered questions on naval history and the US presidency. Finally to my wife Caroline, my greatest debt is due.
Raleigh, NC
1 April 2003
THE TRADE OF KINGS
War is the Trade of Kings. John Dryden, King Arthur, II (1691)
E very year on the second Saturday in June the sovereign takes the salute as her Guards troop her colour on the Horse Guards Parade at Whitehall. The custom of showing the standard before all of the regiment goes back to the seventeenth century, if not before, when the colours were a rallying point in battle [Plate 1.1]. Soldiers not only had to be able to recognise them in the smoke and chaos of combat, but on campaign had to gather around the colours every morning in case of sudden attack or, more often, to assemble on parade in their ranks to march off as a unit. While the first record of trooping the colour can be found in the order books of the Coldstream and Grenadier Guards for 1749, the modern practice dates from 1805 when the ceremonial was carried out to celebrate George IIIs birthday. During Queen Victorias reign it was held on 24 May, her actual birthday, while today it is held in June to mark Queen Elizabeths official birthday.1
For the tens of thousands who watch the trooping in person, and for the millions more who see it on television, the rousing music, the precise marching, colourful ceremonial, and martial discipline of this ritual are part of the pomp and circumstance which the British rightly claim to do so well. It is a reassuring link with a safe past, a constant custom in a changing world with an uncertain future. Yet the excellence with which the Queen and her soldiers perform this ritual hides three important points about the relationship between the monarch, her people and war.
Whether we like it or not, the journalist Gwynne Dyer observed, War is a central institution in human civilization.2 The clich that wars settle nothing is absurd. Men fight because they believe doing so will solve their problems. The Second World War, for instance, solved the problem of Hitler and Japanese militarism, although it did produce the new problems of the cold war and nuclear annihilation. Societies spend huge resources in men, material and money on wars, not only because they perceive there to be advantages in winning, but because the costs of losing may be horrendous. The vanquished may be killed, their property destroyed, their children abused, their women raped and consigned to concubinage. The Russian treatment of Germans in 1945 showed that the fate of the defeated has changed little over the centuries.
