War

Soldiers have fought with grit, determination, and courage for wicked causes, while other soldiers, enlisted in what we regard as good causes, have collapsed, deserted, or surrendered at the first blow. Indeed, it is a commonplace of soldiers' memoirs that they fight first and foremost for their immediate fellows, their buddies or comrades, then for their larger unit, such as the regiment, and only least of all for their country, or for an abstract ideology.

Once thrown into the chaos and terror of the battlefield, these larger abstractions are terribly remote. Yet, except perhaps for those soldiers born into a warrior family or community, it is these larger, more abstract elements that recruit them in the first place, deliver them to the battlefield, and--if they are to fight with success--provide the initial impetus that allows the more primitive commitment to their fellow-soldiers to keep them there.

Commitment in war thus operates both on t

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e weapon, a people must have been stripped of the comforts of property and the solace of routine irrevocably enough to have renounced them, but not quite to the point of passivity ... France, by contrast, had been stunned and demoralized but not spartanized by the quickest but least destructive of her twentieth-century home wars. Thus, once the armistice was declared, the tendency of the French people was to try and return to some form of normalcy, and the formation of the collaborationist Vichy government reinforced rather than countered that passive response. The passivity and demoralization were all the greater because to many French people, perhaps to most, it underlined a sense of decline that had been building for many years. The sense that the Third Republic had not been working was pervasive; military defeat simply provided a punctuation mark to failure. It was not simply the French Army that collapsed in the summer of 1940 but France itself, which drew back into itself and (save, at first, for a very few) lost the commitment to go on. In stark contrast, the Loyalist or Republican side in the Spanish Civil War did not lose to the Francoist insurgency at the first blow, or even after many blows,
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Some common words found in the essay are:
, Communist Party, France France, Orwell Communists, French Army, Free French, Franco War, Franco Hitler, London Paris, Trotskyite Communist, vichy france, french people, communist party, civil war, spanish civil war, republican cause, spanish civil, immediate fellows, french army, homage catalonia, internal divisions, vichy france guard,
Approximate Word count = 1988
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)