War. Its always been all the rage. Bomber Harris, Commando Comics, Sven Hassel and every kid who grew up in Britain of parents who survived the war knew it. And not just the anorak sort for whom destruction rained from open bomb bays onto the illegible pockmarked landscape below, but also the carnal jack-booted sort that walked the fiction of war, of Hassel whose graphic nom de plume came perfectly constructed around the twin shatterproof lightning bolts of a nom de guerre. Hassel made war sexy. He dreamed, as most boys did, of violence without moral consequence. His heroes were uniformed contradictions, members of a penal panzer division who were both elite and anti-Nazi at the same time. They roamed Europe, legions of the damned, who had fled the politics of territorial conflict to find themselves in private wars of dispossessed metal and rage, immersed in a pornography of violence, of tank tracks and ankle scabbards. Hassel's pulp-fictive ground war was marked by brute encounter and moral degradation. But high in the same schoolboy skies raged a similar war on a different plane. This Apollonian version of warfare traded the reign of terror and the charnel houses of outlaw criminality for the high commands of aerial bombardment. Conducted at great distance and reported upon in the language not of expressionism but of objective photography, it was our own version of death on the installment plan. Harris made war acceptable. Carpet-bombing suggested the muted obliteration of that which was too distant to be seen. It was no more connected to the defacement of innocence than chewing gum on a concrete grid is to the saliva of the person who placed it there. And while Harris is dead, Hassel is still alive and said to be writing what will perhaps be his last novel. Its title is 'Glorious Defeat."





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