The British, as we have seen, had already developed a clear concept of their unique nationality, one based more on xenophobia than on the brotherhood of man. For them the conflict was simply another round against the old enemy, France, and the fact that the French proclaimed the rights of man was, for many, a good enough reason for rejecting them.
– Michael Howard, “The Invention of Peace.”

On Monday morning, the sun rose bright and hot in a cloudless steel-blue sky, and the birds sang, and the day felt tailor-made to make me feel better.

Uni is going well enough. I learned something about nuclear strategy that came as a surprise to me, and was equally surprised (but pleasantly so) to realise that having (not to blow my own trumpet) a superlative knowledge of weaponry does actually really help in understanding the driving forces behind a lot of military policy and decisions – though, of course, it’s what the decision-makers thought their kit was capable of, rather than what it actually was. More of that in a side post. Also, it says a lot about Rob Thompson that he can make logistics fun.

James texted me to say that the Royal Mail had let us down, and our tickets to the Decemberists hadn’t arrived. I called back, quite angrily, to say that was bollocks and that if we’d paid for them we should have them, and to call up various ticket lines; and he did, and so we got in his car and rolled down to the HMV Institute to listen to Colin Meloy singing nasally about dead girls’ ghosts/indentured miners/doomed love-affairs with spies and wood spirits/riverside towns/the end of the world. They didn’t play many of my favourites (half of which then DID show up at the Bristol set they played the following day!) – but we sang along to The Engine Driver with heartfelt collective melancholy and Don’t Carry It All with boisterous defiance, and screamed like drowned men being eaten by a whale for the second encore as the band swayed madly to the mariner’s waltz.

I have jumped through the numerous hoops the census has so far put in front of me (first online test: 78%, second: 99%), and will hopefully have a job come Easter; if not, I fancy a long slow summer of kicking back and actually read all these dissertation sources I’m accumulating. I guess there are exams, too, but eh.

I’ve been hanging with Redbrick folks much more often; from the pub quiz (at which Online swept the floor with everyone – hell yeah, knowing where Tashkent is) to general chilling in the office of a Thursday, chatting with the excellent people of the Redbrick Jewish Media Conspiracy (most of the online team seem to be of Jewish ancestry one way or another), sneering at Sam’s iPad and occasionally even uploading articles like I ought to. The really rather good new website at http://redbrickpaper.co.uk (good in style, rather than the substance that I don’t really read) has so far not fallen over on its face and required my attention. It’s been suggested I run for online editor next year, but don’t think I will; it sounds like a rather terrifying amount of commitment, and my days seem to be getting inexplicably swallowed up at the moment anyway.

I don’t give a damn about student politics, the stupid slogans, the election garbage that’s turned the front of the library into a rubbish dump haunted with politically inclined muggers – the only good thing the whole sorry process has brought us is Louis Reynolds’ quite vicious parodies (“You don’t understand the guild. But I’ve got sweets, a pseudonym, and I’m dressed like a tit. VOTE FOR ME OR THE TERRORISTS WIN.”) But Sam invited me to help with the online reporting of the Guild elections, so I did, bringing boatloads of doughnuts.

We set up our laptops, and begged a lamp off the tech people in the bowels of the Guild. Up in the gallery of the Deb hall, among all the lights and rafters, the Redbrick crew affected button-down shirts and scholarly pullovers; next to us, the BURN FM (university radio, as we are the university newspaper) team all sat in identical black t-shirts, deploying expensive-looking audio equipment. The hall was lined with light-spangled black curtains, the testing routine included dry ice and garish flashing lights, and while I was still resolutely apathetic about student politics, I couldn’t help but love the pomp and circumstance.

My duty was moderating the comments on the live feed in realtime, as they came in at a rate of about one a second, which was like leaning into a firehose spray of internet idiocy. The crap Guild wireless kept breaking, the BURN FM servers keeled right over under the unexpected pressure of large numbers of people actually tuning in; most things that could go wrong did. I was learning a job I had never done before, making decisions at ridiculous speed. The thermos-load of strong tea and the sugar-dressed, jam-crammed doughnuts probably helped, but it was an incredible rush sitting there in the dark with fingers flicking madly across laptop, no matter how inconsequential my work really was, no matter how divorced I was from caring about the actual issues. I’m now fairly certain I get high off pressure, and was buzzing with exhilaration and adrenaline by the end of it. Rather than ride it out and crash hard, I dropped my kit off at home and spent the evening walking around in the dark cooling off, before coming back to Reservoir Road and falling soundly asleep to the slightly-too-appropriate strains of a Corb cover of Sunday Morning Coming Down.

BA War Studies students at this university already feel marginalised, under-taught and neglected. We are constantly competing with regular History students for modules that should be ours preferentially, leaving some of us with war-unrelated modules that may cripple their degrees. We have struggled to differentiate our course from standard History, save that we have even fewer contact hours than History students. We understand that this is not a “cut,” but an investment in postgrads and research – but from our perspective, it has the same effect.

The teaching fellow and academic advisor whose positions are about to be lost are the heart of the undergrad course. It is their work and their contact – in class and in office hours – which make the difference. They are not flawless – but from here, it feels like they are all we have. The majority of the War Studies faculty, while their academic credentials are impeccable, are not primarily tutors; some have no experience in education, and based on those who have applied to them for dissertations, regard undergrads as an annoyance to be avoided wherever possible. This may not be the intention, but this is how the department is perceived.

I and my fellow students already feel neglected. Those of us having our dissertations supervised by the teaching fellows – of which I am one – are especially worried of the effects this decision will have on our final marks; you can be certain this lack of regard for our degrees will certainly be in the National Student Survey responses. From an undergrad perspective, this is not an “expansion” of the War Studies course; it is a reduction to an already under-taught BA. Regardless of your assurances, we have no faith that academics who are primarily being brought in to support research and postgrad supervision will be able to give us the same amount of time and attention.

I get three hours of academic contact a week. This lack of direct teaching is of course traditional in humanities; the idea that independent study foists a spirit of critical thinking and removes the need for instruction is an old, and persuasive, one – and when a degree was Government-funded, this was perfectly acceptable. But today’s undergrads are paying thousands of pounds for their degrees; they will shortly be paying tens of thousands. The question will arise: what are they paying for? Library access? The minimal attention we are getting is barely acceptable now; no student would want to pay twice as much for our current course, if they knew how little they were getting for their money. No student would now, if the tuition and guidance given to undergrads is being further reduced.

This is an interconnected world. Web forums and blogs allow opinions to circulate widely with future students. This trend is becoming more and more developed; the outspoken, connected students of today are increasingly influential in the choices of the students of tomorrow. We do not only inform our friends, our younger peers, our siblings; we inform the entire pool of potential War Studies applicants. We are the ambassadors of this course. You cannot afford to ignore us.

War Studies, class of 2012

Op Art last Wednesday, on the industrialisation of war, was the most technical lecture we’ve had so far (done by Rob Thompson, who seemingly has about the same mentality as me when it comes to weapons) and it worried me somewhat. Because I understood it all. Not just the better-artillery-means-this-tactical-change etc, not just the gradual and then intense ramping up of logistical pressures caused by the development of rapid-fire artillery and machine guns, or the huge parts system required by ever more sophisticated weapons and ever greater teeth-to-tail ratios, but the real technical stuff: deflagration rates, chamber pressures, hydro-pneumatic recoil mechanisms, terminal ballistics. I didn’t just know the ramifications and the scuttlebutt, I knew the physics and the metallurgy. I was a regular Hermione in there.

Also, Schlieffen had no idea what he was doing.

Though uni only furnishes me with two official excuses to go onto campus each week, I’m making an effort to be there – in the library, if nowhere else – more often, and it’s a good thing; I don’t know if I’m doing much more work, but I feel more productive. A couple of friends have resolved to do regular 9-to-5s at the library, which might actually be a good idea…

Part of this is a renewed commitment (christ, what a marketing-scumbag I sound like) to Redbrick; now that they’ve got some people who actually know what they’re doing to rebuild the website, which I’m sure is beyond my abilities, all I need to do is general tech support and fixing it when it goes wrong, which is well inside them – even though they use Macs. Hawk, spit etc. And I like Redbrick, and the warm office filled with friendly journo-hacks; later this term, I’m going to be unofficially doing Micaela’s Online Editor thing, supervising the uploading of WordPress articles on Thursday (ie, the exact same thing as I’m doing for money right now, but with copying and pasting rather than writing.) Talked with one of the uploading folks on Thursday, to find that she’s the sister of one of Olly’s Warwick friends – small world. I have also been spending more time in general chilling with Samuel “King” Lear, including an excellent curry on Thursday afternoon before going together to the Law-for-Non-Law Society… except as it turned out I got the date wrong, and it’s next Thursday. Well done me. Also went to a work experience fair, which was a huge disappointment, being basically nothing but large organisations datamining our e-mail addresses without actually offering anything.

Ought to be getting our essay marks back this Wednesday. Ought to. Group Research is coming to a head; two of our six never show up, when they do show up they say nothing, and when they do say anything it’s useless. One of the two opened today’s proceedings with “I’ll be honest, I haven’t done anything,” which pretty much says it all. I know this is public, and there’s a sliver of a chance that it might make its way back to them, so I won’t say anything here I wouldn’t happily say to their faces. GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER GUYS, THIS IS PATHETIC.

Ned came over on the weekend; I made her the Famous Thai Chicken Curry and we saw the closing night of Olly’s Spring Awakening at Warwick, which was… something. I don’t know quite what I was expecting, but it wasn’t this.

…fun, though.

Every day Svetlana Vladimirovna works a long shift at the machining factory beside the smelter at the edge of her city in central Russia. The factory makes the best beds in the Soviet Union, all of them of exceptional fine steel. But no one in Svetlana’s city, including Svetlana, has a bed. This is an unfortunate but perfectly understandable matter of policy. The comrades who run the factory, and who have designed such magnificent beds, better than any beds in America, have decided in the spirit of the revolution and correct socialist principles that they must give beds first to all of the hospitals, and to the army, and to the universities, and to the collective farms, and to many other important institutions necessary for the people and the government in the world’s most rapidly and inevitably advancing socialist society. To do this, the factory must work round the clock. Three shifts a day, and only rarely stopping on holidays. It is understood that the workers need beds. But it is not yet the workers’ turn. Only recently did cosmonauts receive beds!

And so everyone who works at the bed factory returns home after each shift and sleeps on the floor.

One summer, Svetlana’s sister Natasha, who long ago married a man in Leningrad and moved away, returned for a visit. She was appalled that after ten years Svetlana still had no bed. After all, Svetlana was strong of hand and skilled with tools and one of the best machinists at the factory. “My dear sister,” Natasha said “You have not been thinking correctly. It is very easy to have a bed. Each day you must steal one piece of bed from the parts bins at the factory and smuggle it home. And after a week or two you must assemble the parts. Then you will have a bed. And you will never again sleep on the floor.”

Svetlana listened closely. “My dear sister,” she sighed, “it is you who are not thinking correctly. We have tried this many times. We have stolen the parts and carried them home. We assembled them in the room. And every time, after we finish, we discover that instead of a bed, we have an automatic Kalashnikov.”

The hair demanded one hour’s attention. The crown and back were smeared with wax and fastened back so tightly by a ribbon that individual hairs were liable to spring out again with an almost audible snap. Finally the head was liberally sprinkled with powder (at an allowance of about 2lb a month), and the locks at the side were curled up by one of the soldier’s comrades or by the company friseur at the captain’s quarters. The grenadiers had the special obligation of keeping their moustaches stiff and smooth with black wax, and in order to keep the points in pristine condition they used to tie them up with thread before they went to sleep.
– Prussian army, mid-18th century.

Essays were handed in at the end of a tea-addled writing marathon: a 4,000 word comparative book review, of which I remember not a single word, and a 4,000 word ramble on the recalcitrant indecisiveness of 18th century warfare, complete with unnecessarily florid language and opening quote from Edward Gibbon. My printer ran out of ink at the eleventh hour, but as for once they weren’t handed in in a complete panic, I had plenty of time to run down to Soraya’s and use hers. I actually think they were pretty good. I know I’m jinxing myself to say so, and I know I left some fairly important things out of ROMW, but yeah. Quietly confident.

Another term starts, and with it even less attention from the department. Crit analysis doesn’t exist any more, bringing our contact hours down to a numbing three per week, and has been replaced by dissertation prep, which I’ve heard nothing of yet. Group Research at least has some attendance these days, but we still don’t seem to be getting anywhere. ‘Nam is fun as ever; in the near future I’m doing a group presentation on Ap Tau O, in which Charlie ambushed an American armoured column and made armoured columns look a bit silly. I’ll get to a) talk about tanks and b) use the word “audacious” a lot, so it ought to be fun.

Rise of Modern War has become Introduction to Strategy/Operational Art, which is also cool (and has much more sophisticated weapons! Though Toby has a much too high opinion of the Dreyse needle gun…) but seems much more about theory than practice. We do presentations on various modern military thinkers, and I reckon I’ve drawn the shortest straw, focusing on two rather odd interwar British thinkers who had all their best work nicked by the Huns: Basil Liddell Hart (self-aggrandising wanker) and JFC Fuller (nutty fascist who thought he was a wizard). I do at least have Jon as my winghollyman, but why couldn’t I have drawn Mao and Che?

Ah well. We do what we can, with what we have.

Term One is over. It was a good term! Let’s have more like it.

I have three things to do over Christmas. One is a 4k essay for Critical Analysis; the same subject as the 1.5k book review which I blagged in about half an hour for a 77 (which a little bird told me was actually the highest mark in the year; how did this even happen?) so I am not exactly frightened about it. One is another 4k essay for Rise of Modern War, which I have been doing lots of reading and prep for and have an immense stack of books to carry home; inside sources tell me that Toby’s marking is pretty savage, so it’ll get a good deal more polish and painstaking, though it’s half done already. The third is organising and planning a group research trip to the archives in London. Let’s not even talk about that.

The Big Things I was getting into at the start of term haven’t panned out exactly as hoped. Redbrick have obtained some tech support blokes who are (unlike me) worth their salt; in a meeting with them they reeled off TLAs with wild and gay abandon while I struggled to get FTP working (turns out guild internet was blocking it; still looked a right idiot.) I like the Redbrick people, but will, without much reluctance, give up the Technical Directorship that I am criminally unqualified for. The History Department’s staff-student committee might have been effective at tackling my issues if it was well-attended, well-advertised, resourceful, regular and capable of actually talking to the rest of the department; it’s none of these things, and the one-hour meeting I was actually invited to (out of two in a term) was almost a complete waste of time, in which a tutor basically contradicted the War Studies guarantees Flash had extracted previously, the complaint about office spam was pre-empted by someone proposing a leaving present for the spammer and a thank-you card for what a good job she did, and the suggestions for dealing with book shortages met with a flat “you can’t do that”. On the other hand, I have become Treasurer of the War Studies Society, which ought to be mildly interesting and will certainly, as every extracurricular thing claims, Look Good On Your CV. I was elected unanimously. It was nice.

Thanks to my brother, I have scored a sort of blogging job, writing posts for money; it’s about the same payoff each week as I would expect from the tiny part time jobs I applied unsuccessfully for last year, except it’s less than a tenth the work and I can do it from my laptop anywhere. So not a lot of money, but enough to cover my weekly food expenses with a little left over to buy small fun things or offset impending poverty.

I have also, after much casting about and procrastinating, decided on A Career, and something to actually do with my life. I think it’ll be interesting, I think it’ll be challenging but a challenge I can take, it’s in a field that is going to get shaken up quite a bit in the next few decades, and if I can fight my way through the qualifications and get a job with the right people it it will also see me comfortably off for the rest of my life. More about later; I need to talk to people about it over Christmas before I shoot too high. Let’s talk about that face-to-face.

I’ve gone and mail-ordered myself a 1-litre Thermos, after the problem of procuring lots of cups of tea during hour-long L4D campaigns was discussed by Tom, Bill and I. It goes very nicely with my 1-litre teapot and is ace for instantly making myself a cuppa whenever. I also fill it up last thing at night and have fresh hot tea in the morning. It’s lovely.

After a visit to Olly’s friend Taylor over in Sutton Coldfield this weekend, I tried to make my way home as eight inches of snow descended on Brum. Trains were a hilarious nightmare, though not nearly as bad as the catastrophe last January, and I actually got on one after only about fifteen minutes of standing in a shivering, irritated press of humanity. On the slow, halting journey out to Selly Oak, I struck up a conversation about phones with a couple of fellow passengers, and another passenger gave me a mint; it’s nice how well people get on when they’re packed into a sardine can pretending to be a train. As I came home, there was a car with its wheels flailing in the ungritted snow on the fairly steep incline at the end of Reservoir Road; I asked the driver if he needed help, and pushed on the bumper while his tiny son regarded me impassively through the rear window. I got driven the last couple of hundred metres home for my trouble. Did I mention eight inches of snow? It’s wonderful, breathtakingly gorgeous. I took some pictures on my phone camera, might upload them later if they’re any good.

My toothpaste tube has “TOOF GOO” written on the lid in black permanent marker. It looks like my writing, but I can’t for the life of me remember where it came from.

So, yeah. Good term. But I’m rather looking forward to getting home.