Remembrance day salutes man’s ancient instincts

War has a fatal attraction for men, says James Delingpole. Those who fall in combat are indeed the best and the bravest — and we shall certainly need their like again

Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, and I’m sorry to repeat such a hoary cliché, but the reason it’s so hoary is it’s true. There’s barely a chap I know who doesn’t wonder how he’d fare if forced to undergo the ultimate male test — combat. And the ones who claim not to wonder such things I find frankly a bit weird. Are they not in denial of almost everything it means to be a man?

A boy’s childhood is — even now, in an era when we’re supposed to have evolved from all that militaristic nonsense — a preparation for war. Some of it’s plain obvious, like the way boys love to fight one another with sticks, and shoot each other from behind corners going ‘peeeooing peeeooing’ (or, better still, ‘trrrrrrrrrrrrr’ if they can roll their ‘rs’ and do machine guns) with their pointed fingers.