I AM LOOKING at the exhibition catalogue by Matthew Cook, lately in Iraq both as a serving Territorial and as the Times war artist. The pictures have calm power: here is a RAF soldier patrolling past a shabby garage, glancing at some Iraqi boys who may well want him dead. Here is a Royal Horse Artillery foot patrol interviewing locals amid tangled power lines and ramshackle breezeblock walls; their body language is studied casual but behind them a sentry crouches, looking round the corner. Here is a soldier from the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, hands on hips, surveying a wrecked Land Rover. You can see his thought processes: whoever may have died in that landmine ambush, he is chiefly wondering what parts can be salvaged.

Illustrations speak silently, enabling meditation on the uses, abuses and betrayals of the Armed Forces. For rarely can Britain have approached Remembrance Day with a stronger current of doubt and bitterness running within those Forces. Not for decades has Kipling’s 1892 poem Tommy been more apposite: “We aren’t no thin red ’eroes, nor we aren’t no blackguards too/ But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you;/ An’ if sometimes our conduck isn’t all your fancy paints:/ Why, single men in barricks don’t grow into plaster saints.”

Injury is added to insult almost daily. Last week, after tormenting seven British soldiers with suspension for nearly two years, a court martial for murder collapsed when the judge ruled the evidence grossly unreliable. Witnesses — flown over and paid $100 a day — admitted to lying and collusion fuelled by these payments.

Even the alleged victim, Nadhem Abdullah, is not proven to be dead: nobody searched hospital records, there was no post mortem, the death certificate was issued without sight of a body. Nobody could identify the accused. Last April the trial of Trooper Kevin Williams similarly collapsed; 11 more soldiers are due in court next year, some on charges from 2003.

Senior army doctors have told journalists that troops in Iraq are suffering levels of stress comparable with those of the Second World War, partly because this current conflict is so unpopular but largely because of “a belief that firing their rifles in virtually any circumstances is likely to see them end up in court”. Recruits straight out of training are explicitly warned of this, and of the agonising slowness of the legal process. Then they are shot at and bombed. More seasoned soldiers are depressed by news that earlier service could land them in court: a new historic investigation team is “reviewing” operations over the 30 years of Troubles in Northern Ireland and, rightly or wrongly, soldiers see this as a threat to them at the very moment when Irish terrorists are being effectively pardoned. On the Army’s informal website “Severely Annoyed Lt” writes: “How many of our lads are now gonna have a big cloud hanging over them for years? How many in sensitive ops are gonna be compromised by having their names and mug shots all over the Mirror and the Star?”

Meanwhile Territorial soldiers — 14 per cent of our Forces in Iraq — are pitched in after minimal training and come home to find themselves often unsupported, psychologically or medically. And it is now routine for soldiers to buy their own torches, Camelbak water bags and other equipment. Kipling murmurs again: “ . . . Makin’ mock of uniforms that guard you while you sleep, / is cheaper than them uniforms, an’ they’re starvation cheap . . .”

We also have a prime minister who appears to have learnt nothing from Iraq and who is revealed by Sir Christopher Meyer to have muffed his chance to delay George Bush’s assault till the war got legitimacy. So what does he do now? Throws out incautious references to “doing something about Iran”. It won’t be him that does it, or his children. It’ll be the poor bloody infantry again, bringing their own torches.

There are, of course, several threads in all this. Courts martial are arranged by the Army Prosecuting Authority; although soldiers have said bitterly that the army “family” let them down, the APA actually lies outside the military chain of command and is supervised by the Attorney-General. His office says it did not interfere with any decision to prosecute: however, it is hard not to suspect that politically it is useful to be seen to give generous support to Iraqi accusers, however flaky, at the expense of your own troops. It defends us against the accusation of “victors’ justice”. The snag is that our soldiers feel like victims themselves.

The same applies to Northern Ireland. The philosophy that draws a line under terrorist crimes seems not to apply to the military. Patrick Mercer, the Shadow Defence Minister and a former infantry officer, calls it “an appalling betrayal of every British soldier who did his duty against a treacherous enemy”. Even if you are glad to see our Army held to higher standards than murderous bombers, it is hard not to feel unease.

Soldiers are not saints. They may sometimes be rough, scared, deficient in split-second judgment. Our Army has suffered years of sneaky cutbacks, not least in expensive but civilising things like putting all soldiers through prisoner-handling courses. This has lately been accompanied by cultural contempt from the 1960s generation: remember Peter Mandelson, as Northern Ireland Secretary, sneering at the Household Division as “chinless wonders”? Yet the British Army is still pretty good: professional, upheld by tradition, gruffly idealistic about Queen and Country, reluctant to grumble. Its top brass will not thank me for pointing at the disaffection creeping through the ranks, at recruiting difficulties and the quiet exodus of soldiers buying out.

But it is not their fault. It is the fault of callow, modish thinking since 1997 and relentless cheeseparing before that. Politicians must grasp that it is not enough to wear a poppy on TV and pose with tanks. If you’re going to have an army, treat it with respect.

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