THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF MODERN HEROISM 183
it impossible for a woman to qualify. Everett and the other misogynists of
the panel may have lost by the letter of the warrant, but in practice their
desire to exclude women from the exclusive fraternity of the VC has lasted
to the present. In the process, however, many men who would have won
the Cross under the previous interpretation were excluded as well.
The cessation of hostilities and the needs of hammering out a peace
settlement placed the new warrant on the back burner of state affairs. King
George’s reservations also delayed the publication of the new warrant. The
final draft arrived at Buckingham Palace at the end of 1918, but was not
signed until 7 March 1919. The King had reversed his position on the
inclusion of women; despite his initial instructions to Ponsonby to address
the subject in committee, he now delayed signing the new regulations until
Privy Secretary Lord Stamfordham and Winston Churchill, who had replaced
Lord Milner as Secretary of State for War, convinced him of the necessity
of their inclusion. Having signed the warrant, he forced the delay of its
publication ‘until we are no longer in a state of war.’^68 It may very well be
that he feared an avalanche of female recommendations if the warrant was
published before the official end of the war and the signing of the peace.
By holding the new rules until the present conflict ended there could be
no question of retroactive recommendation. Thus, George V did not give
permission to publish the warrant until 22 May 1920.
It was in a way appropriate that Churchill was the ‘principal minister of
state’ to countersign the warrant that married the Victorian to the Industrial
age. He himself was an incarnation of that union, with a romantic streak
dating from his earliest childhood tempered with an uncanny insight into
the nature of warfare between mature industrial powers.^69 In a philosophical
moment he pondered the changes created by the new military technology:
The heroes of modern war lie out in the cratered fields, mangled, stifled,
scarred; and there are too many of them for exceptional honours. It is
mass suffering, mass sacrifice, mass victory. The glory which plays upon
the immense scenes of carnage is diffused. No more the blaze of triumph
irradiates the helmets of the chiefs. There is only the pale light of a rainy
dawn by which forty miles of batteries recommence their fire, and another
score of divisions flounder to their death in mud and poison gas.^70
Churchill presided over the next world war, and although it did not degen-
erate into the massive stalemate of the first nor see the use of poison gas,
it was a time of mass suffering, mass sacrifice, and mass victory. The pace
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