First posted 11/11/25
Today I thought about my father and other men in our family who died in or survived both world wars, fighting against Germany and its allies. I thought also about my maternal great grandfather, who died fighting against the British in the Boer War. Wounded in a surprise attack on his tattered commando in what used to be called the western Transvaal, he was captured and died on the first of April 1902 in a British military hospital near Johannesburg. My paternal great uncle, who won the Military Medal as a corporal and the Military Cross as a subaltern, died from wounds in April 1918. For both men, their luck had run out just when the end of the fighting was at hand.
Nietzsche proposed the existence of a “heaven of chance” and a “heaven of hazard”. These are heavens known to all soldiers. But the elemental nature of combat that can be survived by the intervention of chance and choice has been all but eliminated in 2025.
Many stories of war involve episodes of blind chance. In an urban street in Germany in 1945, in a lull in sporadic action, my father got cautiously out of his Sherman tank to get the makings of morning tea for his crew. A German soldier hiding in a garden nearby fired a burst from his submachine gun at him. My father jumped smartly back in through the hatch of his tank and landed on the back of the gunner’s chair, scraping all the skin off both his shins. The tank commander traversed the turret, depressed the main gun and fired a high explosive round at point blank range at the hapless German’s position. I cannot remember what became of him if my father ever told me.
By this time my father and his friends had survived the battles to take Caen and Nijmegen. They were rolling up the enemy in his own backyard and no-one wanted to get killed with the end in sight. My father was young and fit, with instincts and reflexes honed by almost a year in action. He was also very lucky. It was no less a soldier than Napoleon who saw luck as a real and valuable military asset.
And so, to my point. The reader may have seen videos on YouTube and other internet platforms of the new warfare in the Ukraine – small drone attacks. These may be recorded by the attacking drone, or show an attack by another. Sometimes the drone will circle a tank looking for the precise point to deliver its weapon. When it strikes, it often detonates the main gun ammunition that in old Russian tanks is carried in the turret, vaporising the crew.
Russian tank crews – they seem to be the chief victims of the larger drones – have desperately developed makeshift defences on the outside of their vehicles to deflect the ordnance, but apparently to little effect. The message to me is stark – if you want to increase the chance that you will die quickly, get into a tank. Other clips are a lot more personal. A small drone pursues an individual soldier as he flees in terror, firing at or even trying to swat the device with his rifle, before it drops a small bomb or grenade on him and he slumps to the ground.
The warfare depicted in the British comics I read in the fifties and sixties about the exploits of the burly Marine commando Captain Hurricane and other outlandish characters is now gone. Even now, if troops come under attack, they seek or make cover and try to find a strongpoint to mount a defence. In this new war, a drone will follow you into that strongpoint and kill you inside it, or chase you down like an animal as you run for your life towards it.
In Ukraine, both sides have rapidly developed and exploited this technology. When the war began, Russian commanders believed that their overwhelming superiority in armour and troops would swiftly overwhelm Ukraine. That this has did not happen in the resulting set-piece battles is a testament to the courage and ingenuity of the Ukrainian troops, but on the frontline what really counts now is cheap, clever tech.
On air raid precaution duties as a teenager in Manchester my father met an old Grenadier who had survived the First War. He asked my father what his plan was. My father said he would wait until he was called up. The old man demurred. He said that, to improve his chances, he should volunteer for a good regiment and learn from, and fight with, experienced and motivated soldiers. What regiment, asked my father. The Grenadiers, said the old man. My father lied about his age in 1943 and joined the Grenadier Guards. Maybe the old soldier was right: my father came through his war unscathed – physically at any rate.
I played at soldiers in national service in the South African Defence force when I left school. Most armies use bullshit to break you down and make you fit and tough, to go the extra yard when you must save yourself or a comrade and it is a sensible thing to do. Military training has always motivated soldiers and helped them to survive and overcome. The best soldiers in training may get a trophy for passing out top of their course.
Now, the prodigy of his class at an infantry school can be eliminated by an enemy who can do far fewer push-ups, from a position behind the front line, with a weapon costing a fraction of their training. But in this new horror of war, there is no equality of hazard: the drone soldier can kill the prodigy from beyond the reach of his bullet. And the drone provides no way to give quarter, mercy at the final moment, or to take a prisoner.
Zulu soldiers annihilated in close combat hundreds of seasoned and brave troops of Lord Chelmsford at Isandlwana in 1879. They fought with an iklwa – a short stabbing spear – and despised the military rifle since it enabled the weakling or coward to prevail in battle over a man exceeding him in ability and courage. If the brutality of war is one of the chief reasons that we try to avoid it, the ability to kill a single opponent remotely, and without the ability to spare him is a new and dangerous perdition. One we compound by posting video of it on the internet for voyeurs.
Whether soldiers know about Nietzsche or not, his heaven of chance has always existed for them and enabled them to carry on. Now that an enemy, safe from your retaliation, can kill you like a character in a video game, your own abilities mean nothing. It must make soldiering an even bleaker career choice than it already was.
If an enemy attacks, we must fight the war that is inflicted on us – there is no choice then except resort to a doomsday weapon. It was said that 1914 -1918 was the war to end wars. If this new warfare eliminates the advantage of martial prowess, hope and even the heaven of chance, to what new depth of depravity has our vaunted technology brought us?
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