"John Bull into Battle: Military Masculinity and the..." Topic

… British Army Officer during the Napoleonic Wars.

"A dominant theme in recent scholarship on gender and war has been the tendency of societies to value military masculinity and its associated attributes more highly than the forms of masculinity associated with civic virtue.2 In this narrative the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars are accorded a pivotal role, the mass mobilization required by the war effort contributing, it is argued, to the production of a newly virilized and martial model of gendered national identity.3 In France, the conflation of citizen and soldier following the revolution led to an identification of military service with political rights and an emphasis on the horizontal and fraternal bonds that united men as ‘brothers-in-arms' within the republican army.4 Similarly, the reform of the Prussian army that followed its catastrophic defeat at the hands of Napoleon in 1806 constructed Prussia as a ‘manly' nation and introduced a new cult of valorous and sacrificial heroism.5 Unlike France and Prussia, Britain during this period saw neither the introduction of mass conscription nor the expansion of political rights, but the size of the armed forces did increase massively through voluntary enlistment into the regular army and the proliferation of national defence units. This militarization of British national life, Linda Colley argues, encouraged an ethos of ‘heroic endeavour and aggressive maleness' and fed into a conception of Britain as an ‘essentially "masculine" culture … caught up in an eternal rivalry with an essentially "effeminate" France'"
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Amicalement
Armand

Our God and soldiers we like adore
in times of trouble, then no more.
Danger past both requited,
God forgotten, the soldier slighted.

(smile)

Amicalement
Armand