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[number10ox]

I shall clasp my hands together and bow to the corners of the 'Net.

"It is obvious that of all virtues it is the military virtues that cannot flourish on a battlefield of paper."

-Sansom, Sir George Bailey: "A History of Japan to 1334" (1958) p.365

I shall clasp my hands together and bow to the corners of the 'Net.

Comments

[kattale]

A post from you is such a rare and precious thing that I can't possibly let it go by without responding. But killer headache=no thought process, so I'm trying to get my head around the quotation without breaking myself. I feel slow and stupid. :(

I'm thinking that it is saying battles must be waged in person, not in theory (or else not via words?). But I can think of many other virtues that would be best exemplified if not in theory. And I can think of a dozen ways battles could be wages much more virtuously on paper than face-to-face.

You have presented me with a challenge to ponder. :) I will ponder when it doesn't hurt quite so much to think.

[number10ox]

And thank you very much for the comment. Sorry your brain hurts. I don't think you need to feel slow or stupid, though. That sentence rather completely derailed my train of thought when I first read it. Sir George was just getting into a section of the book where he was discussing the duties of the members of the warrior class in the early years of the feudal society in Japan. Then he made a rather disparaging comment about the centuries later and much better-known Bushido ("The contrast between this document and the elaborate dogma of later exponents is so marked that the student cannot help wondering whether the behaviour of military men was ever influenced by so precise and specialized a code as Bushido, a code that was not formulated until long after the feudal wars had ended, when the country was at peace....") which he followed with the above quotation