Conclusion: The New Hero in Action, 1940–2006

Abstract

The Great War killed the Victorian ideal of heroism along with the Victorian Army. Four years of total war created a heroic concept that was lean and merciless. The nature of warfare had changed, and continued to change during the interwar period as weapons and ideas cobbled together in the dark days of the stalemate were refined into systems and doctrines by the survivors. More important, the war had brutalized society, or at the very least numbed it to the magnitude of losses generated by industrial-scale warfare. Nineteenth-century colonial concepts of warfare simply did not apply any more: the death of 35 sepoys from the Kapurthala Imperial Service Infantry killed in 1897 was officially a ‘disaster’. In 1919, the loss of 113 dead and 200 wounded in a single day’s work on the Northwest Frontier was recorded with as much passion as a laundry report might arouse.¹ As a result of these changes and the decisions of the VC committee at the end of the First World War the cost of heroism increased for the remainder of the century and the nature of the hero became something very different from that of his nineteenth-century ancestor. The heroism of the frontier had also paled in comparison to the sacrifices of the Great War. With the exception of a half-dozen Crosses won in 1919–20 in connection with tying up the loose ends of the war, only three VCs came out of the entire interwar period. The full effect of the new paradigm of heroism established by the interservice meeting had to wait for the next great war to take effect.