Holmes as the essence of the "soldier's faith." What might look like blind obedience was a suspension of personal safety and a sublime indifference to personal rewards—the overcoming of everyday "inhibitions," as James would have put it.

When a column is sent to an assault, the men at the head know they are sent to their death, and that the glory of victory will be for those who, passing over their dead bodies, enter the enemy's position. However, they do not reflect on this injustice, but march forward. ^*

Sorel criticized Napoleon for introducing a merit system into the army, thereby weakening its revolutionary ardor. Such devices sapped heroism at its source. ^†

The object of war was glory, not plunder or personal gain, and it appealed to heroism, not to envy and hatred. Almost everything Sorel said about war comes back to these two points, which can be further condensed into the statement that war represented not just aggression but disciplined aggression and that the specific content of this discipline was the discipline against resentment. "Everything in war is carried on without hatred and without the spirit of revenge: in war the vanquished are not killed; non-combatants are not made to bear the consequences of the disappointments which the armies may have experienced on the fields of battle." No doubt this is an idealized view of war, a preindustrial view at that. But Sorel's eagerness to expound the "idea of war conceived heroically" did not blind him to less exalted ways of making war. He knew that warfare, like any other calling, could be corrupted by the superimposi-

____________________

*

Recall Carlyle's praise of the fox, who does not spend his days lamenting the injustice of his lot; if he did, he would never catch the geese.

†

Note the religious parallel. Reformation theology, of the kind that influenced Edwards and Pascal (and ultimately Sorel himself, by way of Pascal), insisted that true virtue lay in indifference to rewards, celestial or otherwise. Religious liberals in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries began to argue that God hands out rewards in strict conformity to merit. Meritocracy appeared to furnish the only rational principle of justice.

-311-