For King and country? Europe’s young may not be willing to fight

“Older men declare war. But it is the youth that must fight and die.”

—Herbert Hoover

Count me in. Fight for what, decide which capitalist exploits me? Not interested.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Over the eight grinding weeks that followed, American, British and Canadian soldiers scrapped to break out of the Allied beachhead and, at an agonizingly slow pace, move forward through Normandy’s tall and tangled bocage (hedgerows).

According to military historian James Holland’s “Normandy ’44: D-Day and the Battle for France,” those two months saw a daily casualty rate that at times exceeded the World War I slaughters at Passchendaele, Verdun or the Somme.

Meanwhile, an Unherd poll in the U.K. last week found that while 54 percent of Britons think the country will be at war within five years, and yet, there are no signs of much of a fighting spirit — no resounding “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, Or close the wall up with our English dead.”

And, for all the tut-tutting over Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s odd decision to leave the D-Day remembrance early, the parents of the young are of the same mindset as their offspring, with just less than a quarter saying they’d want their children to fight to defend the country.

This week, German Minister of Defense Boris Pistorius is due to unveil a formal partial enlistment proposal to bulk up the Bundeswehr’s active service ranks and beef up reserve forces too.

Infamously, in 1933, Oxford University’s debating society passed the motion, “That this House will under no circumstances fight for its King and country” — which Winston Churchill later blamed for shaping Hitler’s conviction that his European foes were easy pickings.

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