Awarded for Valour_ A History of the Victoria Cross and the Evolution of the British Concept of Heroism

164 AWARDED FOR VALOUR
its function. A machine does not feel compassion or remorse. Neither did
the heroic ideal that emerged from the Western Front in 1917:
A consumptive machine gunner, too scared in an attack to bolt, can sit in
a lucky hole and scupper a company of the best as they advance. Courage
isn’t what it used to be. The machine runs over us and we can’t stop it.^42
The scale of warfare and the range of the new weapons of war created a
new environment for the hero, and potentially opened their ranks to some
who had never been considered in the past. The British government and the
armed services realized these changes as they occurred and as the war entered
its final phase an interservice panel was convened on the subject of valour.
Its purpose was two-fold: to institutionalize the new heroic environment
and to restandardize the qualifications of the hero. As the next chapter will
reveal, the committee decisions reached as the war ended in the autumn of
1918 had far-reaching implications on the nature of heroism in the future.