Ten

Conclusion: The New Hero in Action,

1940–2006

T

he 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.
It may seem strange that a book dealing with the Victoria Cross that
has spent so much ink on the nineteenth century and the First World
War sums up the remainder of the history of the Cross in a single chapter
encompassing the Second World War and all of the Crosses granted since.
A few things must be taken into account at this point. The basic parameters
of the Victoria Cross were established during the nineteenth century, with
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