ABSTRACT
For many years an obscure quotation from an equally obscure Victorian general, Sir William Butler, graced the bulletin board outside the offices of the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences at the school where I teach, the United States Naval Academy. It read:
The nation that will insist upon drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is likely to have its fighting done by fools and its thinking by cowards. 1
Butler’s insistence that academe and the military must go hand in hand is a sentiment that today seems quaint if not archaic. A hundred years and two World Wars ago, things were quite different. There was nothing even faintly comic about the notion of a scholar soldier, of a Benjamin Jowett in spurs. What made King Alfred ‘England’s Darling’ even more in the nineteenth century than in the ninth was the general acknowledgement that he was the first native of the British Isles to combine in his person the moral, physical and intellectual virtues of the ‘model Englishman’. 2 That he did so while serving his nation as a conscientious and indefatigable king seemed particularly fitting in the England of Queen Victoria and her ‘Saxon’ consort Prince Albert. This was the ideal that found material expression in the wonderfully romantic statues of Alfred that now stand on the High Street of Winchester and in the marketplace of Wantage. As the Right Hon. J. Bryce, MP, enthused in a speech given in 1898 to promote a national commemoration in celebration of Alfred’s forthcoming millenary: ‘He was a man valiant in war, but also just and lenient in peace. … But though much of his life was spent in fighting, he was also the first of our kings who set himself deliberately to work to promote learning, education, and culture in the people, still fierce and rude. … He showed that union of force & strength & courage with wisdom & piety & the love of letters which was the note of all the greatest men in the Dark and the Middle Ages.’ 3