Mind-Munitions

12
Introduction
as experienced by the soldiers. Today, that gap appears to have been
substantially narrowed by the presence of the mass media, and
especially television. But is this in fact the case? Or does it merely
raise new problems for the projection and presentation of warfare?
The Roman writer Livy wrote that ‘nowhere do events correspond
more to men’s expectations than in war’. Yet even volunteer,
professional troops suffer from low morale and even panic if there
is too wide a gap between the expectations of what war will be like
and its realities on the battlefield. Factors such as bad weather,
poor food and low pay can sap the morale of even the best-trained
armies. Discipline and training designed to foster mutual reliance
are essential factors in maintaining good fighting spirit, but this is
difficult with conscripted troops reluctant to fight or fearful of
their fate. Hence the use of incentives such as money, social status,
personal or family or national glory, and even religious promises of
everlasting life. A brave soldier who becomes a war hero might have
all of these things; a coward would be denied them. Hence propagandists
exploit both positive and negative incentives in order to
persuade men to overcome their fear and risk their lives in the most
brutal and terrifying of circumstances.
But what about the reasons for the soldier being there in the first
place? Throughout history, great emphasis has been placed upon
the justness of the cause for which men must go to war. Yet, as Lord
Wavell wrote in 1939, ‘a man does not flee because he is fighting in
an unrighteous cause; he does not attack because his cause is just’.
Wavell’s view was that good morale was determined by the degree
to which a soldier felt part of a cohesive unit, a small core of
mutually reliant individuals, and the degree to which that unit
identified with the society on whose behalf it was fighting.
Propaganda for and about war, therefore, cannot be studied
merely by confining its analysis to the battlefield. It requires a much
wider context extending into every aspect of society. At the end of
the eighteenth century, Thomas Malthus wrote that ‘a recruiting
serjeant always prays for a bad harvest, and a want or unemployment,
or, in other words a redundant population’. Motivating men
to fight – for the history of warfare is largely the history of male
aggression – has always been a major problem for history’s recruiting
serjeants. Hence the need to glorify and publicize military
achievements to a wider public in order to increase the sense of
mutual identification. Soldiers fight better if they know that their