ABSTRACT
In the early 1920s one of the greatest of American warriors, George Patton, wrote an article entitled ‘The warrior soul’. In criticising the German performance in the Great War he acknowledged that no other people had sought so diligently for pre-war perfection. They had built and tested and adjusted their mighty war machine and become so engrossed in its visible perfection, ‘in the accuracy of its bearings and the compression of its cylinders that they had neglected the battery’, or what Patton called that ‘implausible something’, the soul. Despite the physical impossibility of locating the soul, he believed that it could readily be discerned in the acts and thoughts of soldiers. ‘So with war . . . there hovers an impalpable something which dominates the material . . . to search for this something we should seek it in a manner analogous to our search for the soul.’1
