Harvest time in a village in England. When I was in Temple Grafton in the summer of 1992 I learnt something about Ray Peace and Ronnie Williams which came as a surprise. Despite the odds against their surviving many more of their bombing missions over Europe, both expressed a deep satisfaction that they had avoided conscription into the Army. The point was to do with the proximity of the enemy. As 1942 drew to a close, the period of Churchill's ‘Hinge of Fate’, there was already speculation over the means by which an allied force might have to regain territory that had been occupied by the Nazis. It was predicted – rightly as it turned out – that this would involve intense close quarters combat, which Ray and Ronnie felt fortunate to have avoided in their own wartime careers. Their work, and even that of their colleagues in the fighter squadrons, set them at a distance from their enemy, and besides this they felt that when their time came they would rather go quickly and in one piece rather than be ‘shot up’ and sent home in pieces.

The world of 1942 now seems in some ways as remote as that of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and yet there are continuities that connect them with each other and both those worlds with our own. Much of the military writing of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was driven not by an enjoyment of killing or an obsession with order, but by uncertainties about the governmental apparatus that was to evolve in order to protect and promote the interests of a recognisably modern state.