The Joseph Rowntree Trust has issued a prissy whinge against the Army’s recruitment campaign, claiming it glamorises warfare. The trust’s report is as predictable as it is misjudged. An understanding of the values of the military world are absent, just as we would expect from a Quaker institution. One might as well ask a vegan to review the charcuteries of Paris.

The report is a cocktail of naiveté and arrogance. It assumes that today’s children and teenagers are so dumb that they are utterly unaware that a soldier’s life involves fighting and killing people. We are awash with war films, news footage from Iraq and Afghanistan and documentaries which reveal this truth in terrifying detail. Are the young so isolated that they imagine that “warfare is gamelike and enjoyable”? Is this the message of Saving Private Ryan or Zulu?

Nevertheless, the trust claims that rookies, duped by the recruiting officers’ patter, dream of a cosy life and a sergeant-major who will tuck them in bed and give them a goodnight kiss. When he doesn’t, they depart in droves. The truth is that the wastage rate of new recruits is the same as it was a century ago.

Soldierly virtues – honour, courage, comradeship, patriotism – are now sniffed at in some quarters, including one suspects, the authors of this report. Yet, the British have always responded to them with admiration; paradoxically we are repelled by the suffering of war and revere bravery, the more bloody-minded the better. The squares at Waterloo, Rorke’s Drift and Dunkirk have become embedded in our historical psyche and our national self-image. Our soldiers don’t give up and neither do we.

Heroism against the odds is part of that seductive glamour of war. Consider John Baldwin, a clerk in Victorian Norfolk who found himself “dying of ennui” and knowing “literally nothing of the world”. He enlisted and found himself in India fighting the Sikhs. Overwhelmed by “the wild uproar of fierce passion and deadly animosity” he killed several. It was solely in self-defence, and you know “self-preservation is the first law of nature”, he wrote afterwards. His emotional reactions to the excitement of war and killing can be found in memoirs from all periods, often together with moral regrets about the suffering of war.

Baldwin fought alongside men abandoned by society. Their counterparts exist today. There is an officer I know of serving in Afghanistan who had once been a tearaway at odds with the police. The army released his latent talents, educated him and gave him a purpose. The advertising puffs are right: the Army can redeem as well as offer adventure.

Lawrence James is the author of Warrior Race: A History of the British at War

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