Laudator Temporis Acti

C.M. Bowra, The Greek Experience (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1957), pp. 23-24:

The heroic outlook of the Greeks confirmed them in their taste for war, and was itself confirmed by it. It was in this that the famous heroes of the past had proved their superiority, and their descendants wished to rival them. Greek states went to war with each other almost as part of political routine, and it is significant that neither Plato nor Aristotle thought it unusual or undesirable or suggested any means to avoid it. No doubt mixed motives were at work: lust for loot, territory, or markets; desire for excitement, fear of domination from without, envy of prestige or wealth or influence. The Greeks fought each other for the same reasons that other men do, and their attitude towards war was no less ambivalent. Just as Homer calls it 'hateful', 'tearful', 'baleful', and the like, but also speaks of 'battle which brings glory to men' and 'the joy of the fight', so other Greeks both deplore and praise war. They complain that it takes the best men and leaves the worst, that it creates unprecedented situations, that it promotes violence, that it lowers the level of decency and morals, that it destroys the grace of life and brings disease and starvation, that it robs the defeated of their liberty and their happiness. If we wish to see how well they understood the horrors of defeat, we have only to look at the Trojan Women of Euripides, which was produced in 415 BC, when, in a reckless passion for conquest, Athens was embarking on the fatal expedition to Sicily, and shows how even at such a time the frenzy for war was countered by a horror of its insensate brutality. In the Peloponnesian War, Aristophanes, whom nobody could call a crank, spoke out boldly for peace and poked satirical gibes at generals and politicians who did well out of war. The Greeks were well acquainted with its horrors but none the less felt that it had its recompenses and its consolations. They enjoyed its appalling thrills; they regarded victory as the greatest of all possible glories and honourable defeat as only less glorious. In it they were able to display to an unexampled degree that harmonious collaboration of mind and body in which they delighted and to escape from the deadening routine of daily effort into something more exciting, more varied, and in some ways more rewarding. In their attitude towards war the Greeks maintained the old heroic spirit, which frets at the limitations set on human effort and strives to break through them by some prodigious exertion and achievement.

Leslie Mitchell, Maurice Bowra: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 38-39 (notes omitted):

He came near to being killed on two occasions. In the battle of Cambrai, he was buried alive when a trench collapsed. By a bizarre twist of fate, he was saved, as he explained to an American friend, by the efficiency of German equipment:

In the battle of Cambrai I was buried in a deep dug-out, and saw the end near. However, there was a telephone there; so I rang it, and in due course it was answered from above. I naturally said 'Bowra speaking', and my old friend Humphrey Campbell-Jones, killed in the second war, then dug me out, but not before I had passed into a heavy coma. It took time, as I was some twenty feet below the surface—the dug out, needless to say, was a highly efficient German one, which we had captured.

The story was also confided to John Betjeman. He had survived only by showing great presence of mind and by having astonishing luck.

His good fortune held in March 1918. He arrived back at the Front from leave a matter of hours before the Germans unleashed their last, great offensive of the War. As his father recorded, the onslaught brought hand-to-hand fighting, with Maurice dressed in not much more than pyjamas:

His mess and quarters in the dug-out were destroyed by a direct hit from a 9′ shell and he lost everything but what he stood up in—his pyjamas and a 'British warm.' The Germans were upon them in the fog before they knew what was happening and there was hand to hand fighting around the guns. Happily, somehow or other, they were able to limber up and get away; and we had a letter from him, written just after the battle, in which he said he had been thirty-six hours in the saddle before he finally came to rest in a French farmhouse in the rear, where he had the sleep of his life on the kitchen table, and that he would not have missed it all for worlds.

Somewhere in all this, he was wounded in the knee, and he carried 'His old (war) trouble' for the rest of his life. The bravado in his letter home was no doubt sincerely felt. To have fought and survived was exhilarating. But he must also have known that he was lucky to be alive. Even as a child, Maurice had always entertained an attacking view of life. To have cheated death twice enhanced the zest for living.