‘The Universal Soldier’ is a song lauding the cause of pacifism. (It was forbidden for RAF pilots to listen to it in ‘The Sixties’.)

C.S.Lewis in his “Why I Am Not a Pacifist” (The Weight of Glory) feelingly describes the life of a soldier. (He served in the trenches on The Western Front.)

“All that we fear from all the kinds of adversity , severally, is collected together in the life of a soldier on active service:

• Like Sickness, it threatens pain and death
• Like Poverty, it threatens ill lodging, cold, heat, thirst, and hunger
• Like Slavery, it threatens toil, humiliation, injustice, and arbitrary rule
• Like Exile, it separates you from all you love
• Like The Galleys, it imprisons you at close quarters with uncongenial companions.

It threatens every temporal evil – every evil except Dishonour and Final Perdition….“

As we commence the second century after The Great War, it is heart-warming to an evolving chimpanzee to observe the universal expression of Honour accorded to the soldiers of that conflagration – and indeed all wars – at Armistice Day Services in London and across the world on The Eleventh Day of The Eleventh Month at The Eleventh Hour one hundred years after the ‘monstrous anger of the guns’ and ‘the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle’ (Wilfred Owen’s Anthem For Doomed Youth) fell silent.

Chugley, The Solemn, Silent Chimpanzee.