The desire to be brave, to be a hero, is very strong. The fear of cowardice is equally so. Socrates via Plato argued that everyone would be brave if they were properly educated—that cowardice is simply ignorance of the fact that the life of a coward isn’t worth living. There are still several guys would, for reasons of the human weaknesses they displayed, are banned from my unit’s re-unions. If they turn up, they get ridiculed and thrown out and assaulted if they refuse to leave. This forty-odd years later. I find that unbelievable.
    It’s another reason why I don’t go to the reunions—I just don’t feel that passionately about it, and I would like to talk to the cowards just as much as to the heroes. As the man said, we all were heroes, just for being there.

The Germans were heroes too, but far less sympathetically, in The Blue Max, a spectacular World War I epic made from the rather drab novel by Jack D Hunter. John Guillemain directed sorrowfully here, and the good cast (George Peppard, James Mason, Ursula Andress) could do nothing to redeem it. All it had going for it were the vintage airplanes, and some stunning visuals of the trenches for them to bomb. The trouble was, I suspect, that it was all the work of those sorts of people who shout “Don’t mention the war.”
    Truly, all of the characters are dreadful people that no one could possibly like. It was exactly like most war films, the Germans depicted as nasty, arrogant, humourless, sadists only here there were no British or American characters to play the good guys.  Bruno Sachell wants to win the Blue Max, the award for shooting down most enemy planes (his rival, The Red Baron appears briefly). He cheats! So does everyone else. Then he has an affair with his bigwig commander’s wife, ensuring that he gets the award, and then bumped off when it is arranged by the cuckold for him to crash an experimental aircraft. No wonder they lost the war.