Lions Led by Donkeys

Another word often bandied about in place of ‘soldier’ is ‘serviceman’. The make-up of that word is interesting; apart from ‘man’, the other part of that conjunction is ‘service’ which is ironic because these servicemen in serving their country receive shockingly poor ‘service’ in the event of death from their own government. There is currently a death-in-service benefit of four-times salary for armed personnel killed in action. That fact, sitting there by itself, does not sound particularly generous and in the context of modern-day Britain, it looks much, much worse. The maximum pay for a...