THE GLORIOUS PRIVILEGE OF SACRIFICING ONESELF

Richard A. Koenigsberg

How does a soldier’s death produce national unity? The soldier's death represents a demonstration of devotion to a sacred ideal. Willingness to send young men to die in war is how a nation “puts its money where its mouth is.”

Soldiers are celebrated and revered because, like Christ, they take the sacrificial burden upon themselves. They are designated victims, required to suffer and to die. 

The job of political and military leaders is to persuade young men of the virtue of sacrifice. This is accomplished by appealing to their narcissism and idealism through the use of words like “honor,” “glory” and “heroism.”

In a lecture forming an important part of the training of British Officers in the First World War, Colonel Shirley (Kerr, 1993) stated that his objective was to convince the soldier who had entered the service of his Country to proceed to serve her “with all your heart and with all your soul.” If you have done your best and yet must fall," he explained, you may take comfort in the thought that you will have
"Suffered for a cause greater and more noble than that for which any man has ever yet sacrificed his all.”

One million volunteers joined the British army in the first year of World War I, 1914. War Office recruiting stands were inundated with men persuaded of their duty to fight. On September 9, 1915, Basil Hart (Kerr, 1993) asked his parents not to wear mourning clothes in the event he died. “I do not wish you to regard my death as an occasion for grief,” he said, “but of one for thanksgiving. For no man could desire a nobler end than to die for his country and the cause of civilization.”

Frenchman Robert Dubarle (Horne, in Coetzee and Shevin-Coetzee, 1995) wrote shortly before his death of the “glorious privilege of sacrificing oneself voluntarily." Let us try, he said, without complaining too much, to "offer our sacrifice to our country and to place love of fatherland above our own grief.”