DEATH CAMPS

I have just watched the penultimate episode of the WW2 mini-series "Band of Brothers", the one in which Easy Company are in Southern Germany and discover a concentration camp in the woods, a couple of kilometres from an otherwise idyllic rural village.

War is pretty ghastly at the best of times. But I imagine that the discovery of the death camps must have been profoundly unsettling to the young men who found them. It is one thing to do horrible things to a sworn enemy in a cause which had importance for the world's future; it is quite another to do horrible things to your own side, merely because they are intellectuals, gypsies or Jews. One's faith in the decency of humanity is shaken.

I often wonder what those NATO pilots are thinking when they bomb Tripoli, and it turns out they have zapped a civilian house by mistake. Libya has no overarching cause to defend; indeed, it is not at all obvious who the enemy is. Is their faith similarly shaken, or is it just a more high-tech version of video games?

Walter Blotscher