John Keegan

Speaker 30:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 30:08

The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety eight and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:31

My Castaway this week is a historian. His subject is war. He's written more than twenty books in just over twenty years, from his first, The Face of Battle, to a recent bestseller, A History of Warfare. Exhaustive research and a strong descriptive style allow him to recreate the experiences of an ordinary soldier, the men he calls warriors. Earlier this year he was invited by the BBC to give the Wreath Lectures. All this from a man who's never seen action. I have not been in battle, nor near one, nor heard one from afar, he says, but I can give myself waking nightmares about what it's like to be in war. He is John Keegan.

Presenter1:10

Have you, despite its horrors, John, sometimes wished that you had seen action?

John Keegan1:16

When I was younger, perhaps, and more foolish. Um as I get older I th I think it becomes more and more

John Keegan1:25

unthinkable and unbearable even in imagination.

Presenter1:28

But you've talked in the past about

Presenter1:31

I think in inverted commas rather, this being your guilty secret. Secret it was not, because I think all the people, all the cadets you lectured to at Sandhurst knew you hadn't seen action. But guilty is interesting. I wonder if you've felt you've been a lesser person or less able to lecture about it because you haven't seen it.

John Keegan1:49

No. I'm very lucky to be slightly disabled. I'm more disabled now than I used to be, and I think it's opportunity obvious that I couldn't have been a soldier,'cause I limp.

John Keegan1:58

And I've limped since I was thirteen.

John Keegan2:01

So soldiers, I think, treat me as rather a privileged sort of interlocutor, really. They they're prepared to talk to me in perhaps in a way that they wouldn't be to somebody who was

John Keegan2:11

A burstingly fit.

Presenter2:13

Why? I don't quite

John Keegan2:14

Because

John Keegan2:16

They know I'm a historian. They can also see that I'm couldn't have been what they are. So in a way I must can be a sort of confidant, I think.

Presenter2:24

So they tell you things that they wouldn't tell a fellow professional soldier.

John Keegan2:27

Well, I think they do tell me things that they don't talk about.

John Keegan2:32

Sometimes.

Presenter2:33

You've also said that they tell you things that you don't want to hear.

John Keegan2:36

They have done, and I'm quite good at steering away from something that I think I don't want to know about. I can guess.

Presenter2:44

What what kinds of things would they be?

John Keegan2:47

Breaking the rules of war, I think.

John Keegan2:49

Uh shooting people you shouldn't shoot.

John Keegan2:51

Um and breaking the code of honour as well, um being cowardly when you should have been brave. Although I think uh that soldiers are much readier to confess that. I mean soldiers obviously do say to each other with a laugh all the time, I didn't like that, or I didn't hurry up to the front as fast as I might have done.

Presenter3:12

You you were, as as as you said, uh not allowed into the army'cause you would have done national service. Early fifties, I suppose.

John Keegan3:17

Yeah.

Presenter3:21

You were declared permanently unfit, I think, for service.

John Keegan3:23

The doctors laughed when I saw my orthopaedic surgery scars, yes.

Presenter3:25

And they saw you come.

Presenter3:29

And how great a blow was that to you, I wonder?

John Keegan3:31

Not at all. I expected it. I knew that I wasn't going to.

John Keegan3:35

Be past.

Presenter3:36

But you went through the motions nevertheless.

John Keegan3:38

Everybody had to, and the last thing they looked at curiously was legs. We did eyes, ears, everything else first.

Presenter3:45

Fast with flying colours on all of those.

John Keegan3:47

Oh sure.

Presenter3:47

But then the legs let you down.

John Keegan3:49

Hmm.

Presenter3:50

Tell me about your first record.

John Keegan3:52

My first record is scenes from childhood. The first.

John Keegan3:57

Passage played by Alfred Brendel, who's a neighbour of ours in the country. But the reason I

John Keegan4:03

I want to hear it is because my wife plays it on the piano, and the piano is under my study, and sometimes when I'm working in the late afternoon, I hear scenes from childhood floating up.

Presenter5:11

Alfred Brendel playing the first of Schumann's Kindersenen from Foreign Lands and People.

Presenter5:17

To be fair, John Keegan, you did have an experience of war because as a child you were evacuated to the West Country. That was in nineteen thirty nine, of course, and the GIs arrived in force eventually, and you've said it was like Legoland. Can you describe why?

John Keegan5:31

The West Country is still, thank goodness, quite rustic. But in 1943 when the GIs turned up in force, it was very, very rustic indeed. And of course also the ward stopped almost all traffic. So there weren't cars, there were a few tractors, but not many. The fields were still worked by heavy horses. And then suddenly, people who sounded like the people you saw in the pictures turned up with bulldozers and scrapers and graders and began building airfields and camps and hospitals all over the place, all over Somerset and Dorset and Wiltshire and Eastern Devon.

Presenter6:08

Hollywood comes to Taunton was it?

John Keegan6:10

The most if you were nine, which I was, it was the most sort of exciting thing that could happen in your life.

Presenter6:17

And and were they, like we saw in the films, you know, gum chewing GIs who were terribly nice to little boys in three quarter socks?

John Keegan6:22

Three quarters of the map. Absolutely. Absolutely. I I I do love America. And I began to love America when I first met the GIs in 1943.

Presenter6:23

Substitute.

Presenter6:31

You of course were there with your whole family, your mother and your father, because your father was too old to fight in the Second World War. He he so in a sense your war was very comfortable, I suppose.

John Keegan6:34

Other than that.

John Keegan6:41

It was an absolutely idyllic war and I do again feel guilty about that. How when one thinks what was happening to

Presenter6:41

Yeah.

John Keegan6:48

hundreds of thousands of millions perhaps of children in occupied Europe. I mean, we were leading a sort of swallows and amazons life.

Presenter6:55

But then of course came june sixth, nineteen forty four, D Day.

Presenter6:59

You you remember that, I'm sure, because you saw quite a lot.

John Keegan7:01

Oops.

John Keegan7:03

Vividly, I was ten and one month. Well, of course, one's memories are good at that age, but I remember it as if it was yesterday, particularly the departure of the airborne divisions. We had the two American airborne divisions near us, the 82nd and the 101st, and I remember this extraordinary noise and my parents running out into the garden, and I followed them. The whole

John Keegan7:27

The countryside shook with this extraordinary noise, of roaring aircraft engines, and the the the sky was full of little

John Keegan7:35

red and green lights and it was the departure of the American parachutists to D-Day. And then next morning the b there was this endlessly repeated broadcast, um, which everybody was terribly fussy about and I got

John Keegan7:50

fed up with'cause I c knew it was all going to be a success. Which of course nowadays it very nearly wasn't in some places.

Presenter7:59

And fifty years later, I think, you were asked to brief President Clinton on this, weren't you?

John Keegan8:04

Yes, he uh in May 1994 President Clinton asked six historians to go to the White House to brief him about what he should say when he came to Europe for the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day and um uh there were five Americans and me, um, of course.

John Keegan8:22

A fascinating experience to be at close quarters with a President.

Presenter8:26

Tell me about your second breakout.

John Keegan8:28

Well, my s second record is the

John Keegan8:32

The band of the Royal Military Academy Santa is playing the Academy's slow march, Scipio. Uh, of course.

John Keegan8:37

Uh it's always played at Sovereigns Parade, when the cadets are commissioned.

John Keegan8:42

And I suppose I've been to.

John Keegan8:45

Fifty, sixty sovereigns' parades in my life. It's very evocative indeed.

Presenter9:43

Scipio the slow march of the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst.

Presenter9:48

If your experience of D Day marked you as a boy, John, would I be right in thinking that your father's experience of war marked you also?

John Keegan9:58

Well, my father had been in the First World War, marked me only in the sense that uh he told me stories about it, but I now realise very carefully censored ones. He'd been a gunner, he'd been on the Western Front uh from nineteen seventeen to eighteen. He was gassed in the March offensive of nineteen eighteen, which I think was a good thing because it kept him in hospital for a very nasty period of of the spring of nineteen eighteen. But, you know, I suppose like Dr Johnson says about men, he felt better about himself for having been a soldier, and I sensed that.

Speaker 410:32

Uh

Presenter10:32

Okay.

John Keegan10:34

The only rarely.

John Keegan10:36

disturbing thing he told me about the war. Um, he said, My mother came with me to the railway station to see me off to France for the first time. I suppose this must have been in

John Keegan10:48

August or September, nineteen seventeen, and she said to me, I shall never see you again.

John Keegan10:56

I thought what a terrible thing for a parent to say to a

John Keegan10:59

an eighteen year old or nineteen year old boy going off to to the war, but my aunt said to me that her mother was consumed by anxiety.

Presenter11:03

Uh

John Keegan11:09

and a she thinks actually worried herself to death, which

John Keegan11:13

It was common throughout Europe.

Presenter11:15

So she meant she was going to die, not him.

John Keegan11:17

Her prophecy came true. She didn't see.

John Keegan11:20

Her younger son again.

Presenter11:21

Okay.

Presenter11:22

So there was all of that going on in your early life, and, as we say, the the evacuation experience. And then when you went up to Oxford to Balliol in in the early fifties, the young men you met there had spent time in uniform, hadn't they? Again, your

Presenter11:36

living next to people who've done something that you haven't, as it were.

John Keegan11:37

Well who

John Keegan11:39

Almost all of them had been National Service officers, mainly in the army.

John Keegan11:44

And so they were twenty or more, twenty one, and they had a considerable amount of self con sort of self confidence that being a young officer brings.

Presenter11:52

And these were people I think, these these contemporaries of yours, some names we would know to day.

John Keegan11:57

I was either lucky or unlucky to go up to a bale with

John Keegan12:01

It's most brilliant p post-war generation. That's commonly said by the Dons. The Lord Chief Justice Tom Bingham is an exact contemporary of mine, Peter Brooke, Northern Ireland Secretary, and hosts of Dons and Professors at American Universities and that sort of a very, very clever lot, much cleverer than I was.

Presenter12:21

But you you've you've said since that they had had a kind of spell cast over them by this national service, this experience of of soldiering that they'd had, and perhaps in turn they cast that spell over you, or am I being too imaginative here?

John Keegan12:36

I think they did because they talked about um the officers that they'd known with such admiration.

John Keegan12:41

And that touched me.

Presenter12:44

Hmm.

Presenter12:45

And do you think that that's one of the reasons you chose military history? Or maybe even in that moment you decided to be a military historian, did you?

John Keegan12:52

No, I don't think so. You have to do a special subject. There was military history and uh I

John Keegan12:57

known long before I went that if I could I would.

Presenter13:00

Did you intend then to make it your career, your life's work?

John Keegan13:02

Not at all. I had no idea what I wanted to be. I I mean, I'd been in hospital from thirteen to seventeen. I hadn't really been to school properly, and uh I was so used to people sort of shaking their heads over me and sort of saying, Oh, well, you know

John Keegan13:16

difficult to know what you're going to do in life without any qualifications. That it was um completely miraculous to me that in the end I did pass the exams to go to Oxford.

Presenter13:27

You didn't feel intellectually inferior.

John Keegan13:29

But you bet I did, and I still feel intellectually inferior to many of my contemporaries who have uh s who some of whom are are very, very clever indeed.

Presenter13:39

Yes, but you've now been a Wreath lecturer, you know, so.

John Keegan13:41

Sucks to them.

Presenter13:42

Sucks to them.

John Keegan13:43

O okay, but uh that came rather late in life.

Presenter13:44

But uh that

Presenter13:47

Record number three.

John Keegan13:49

My third record is Andy Musik by Schubert, sung by Dietrich Fischer Diskar. And the reason I

John Keegan13:57

choose it is because uh when I was in my early teens

John Keegan14:02

The piano background was the introduction to a programme on the BBC called Music Magazine, which I thought was the most sophisticated programme

John Keegan14:14

Uh in the whole of broadcasting such fascinating people talking in such an elevated way and uh there was a sort of aspiration.

Speaker 414:31

Oh hurt coast in the middle.

Speaker 414:38

If you go and stop

Speaker 414:44

Homishes labels feel the Christ home stream.

Speaker 414:57

Prosto I know

Speaker 415:07

Yeah.

Speaker 415:08

Post meeting I love.

Presenter15:24

Dietrich Fischer Diskow, accompanied by Gerald Moore, singing Schubert's Andy Musik. You mentioned John Keegan being in the sanatorium, and I think you were in it for the best part of four years, weren't you?

John Keegan15:35

three to four I I got better occasionally and went out, but um it's sort of thirteen to seventeen, I always say to myself.

Presenter15:42

But if if if war is a great leveller, then illness is too, I suppose, and you must have met all sorts of different people in that sanatorium.

John Keegan15:49

illness is a great level. Of course, oddly we were healthy. Um we we were

John Keegan15:57

quite vigorous and uh the only thing was uh that was wrong with us was that we had T B or polio or something like that, which damages your mobility. Otherwise we were

John Keegan16:08

Healthy and in good cheer. So it was rather a lively atmosphere in the ward and and a very mixed

John Keegan16:15

Bunch, for which I am tremendously grateful. I always look back on that.

John Keegan16:19

A lot of Cockneys from the Old Kent Road because it was an outstation of Saint Thomas's. Mainly young men. I was of I was had to be in the men's ward because although I began in the children's ward I then

John Keegan16:34

went over the age of fourteen, so I had to be in the men's ward. That was odd too, being a sort of boy with uh people in their twenties and so you were a sort of middle class

Presenter16:42

So you were a sort of middle class boy who'd been to prep school and all the rest of it, suddenly finding himself living and presumably studying alongside m some working class kids. Yes. And you've said since, you know, that that you lived inside another class and that this was.

John Keegan16:56

Yes, I do. I think that's true. And very grateful for it, I am.

Presenter17:00

Is that one of the reasons, perhaps, that you've chosen to write your history from the perspective of the soldier, from the ordinary man? Is that part of the question?

John Keegan17:06

I think it's I think it has a great deal to do with it, because most people don't have the chance to live inside another class, whether whether it's an upwards or downwards movement. But um illness gives you no choice. I mean that that's what happens. And of course you d if you live inside another class you discover that um class isn't a very important characteristic, that character and personality are so much more important.

Speaker 417:28

Happy.

John Keegan17:29

That's why I I I think you're right. I think that's why I've always been much more interested in the individual in warfare than in and particularly the the ordinary soldier in warfare than commanders and officers.

Presenter17:44

More music.

John Keegan17:45

Record number four is the Pasadena Roof Orchestra playing Home in Pasadena.

John Keegan17:51

It's because these were the records that my sister and I found in the gramophone cabinet at home when we started to wonder what was in the gramophone cabinet, and of course they were the records my parents had danced to in the thirties when they were young.

Speaker 418:05

Home new railway station, hold new common train.

Speaker 418:14

If my reservation

Speaker 418:19

Oh my destination

Speaker 418:24

Beyond the western plains you see my home.

Speaker 418:29

In Pasadena.

Speaker 418:32

Oh where the grass is

Presenter18:36

The Pasadena Roof Orchestra and Pasadena. You've spent twenty six years at Sandhurst, John, as lecturer in military history, and you began writing your books towards the end of that time. So you've known a lot of soldiers, and you've studied a lot about soldiers. Soldiers are not as other men, is your conclusion. How are they different and why?

John Keegan18:55

Well, I think regular soldiers and that's what Santos produces have taken an odd decision. Uh they've they've mortgaged their lives. They've promised their lives ahead of time, as Americans would say, because um the oath they take and the uh the code of honor they follow requires them to give up their lives if if that's what duty says.

Presenter19:17

So it's simply that that sets them apart. Or are they differently motivated in other ways to create a

John Keegan19:22

Well, of course they are, but I think it's this mortgaging of life.

John Keegan19:27

in a way they're liberated from the

John Keegan19:31

Concern for personal survival and personal safety that that presses on all the rest of us.

Presenter19:37

But is it are they liberated because they're institutionalised?

John Keegan19:42

Of course they're institutionalized, uh but I th I think it's also this curious sort of inner spiritual freedom that they've got.

Presenter19:51

So they're not as motivated by money, would you say, for example?

John Keegan19:55

Oh, I think that is.

Presenter19:55

Oh I

John Keegan19:58

Uh one of the reasons why I have arguments with fellow historians is because they're always trying to fit.

John Keegan20:04

uh the warrior type into traditional historical categories. And it just doesn't work because they are not motivated by money. They're not it doesn't mean to say that they're not motiv by other material things. They're very keen on medals, for example, and promotion, but they're not motiv money isn't what makes it work.

Presenter20:23

In your Wreath lectures you talked about the soldier being misunderstood, and I think you weren't talking about what we've just been discussing, but that people presume that because he's a soldier and he spends his time practising for war, that what he really wants and yearns for is the real thing. And he absolutely doesn't, is your point.

John Keegan20:41

Um

John Keegan20:43

Soldiers, in my experience, don't like wars. It's what they do, and so when one comes round, they do it, and of course

John Keegan20:53

in a curious way they're very glad they're doing it because that means that X, Y and Z aren't doing it, um that that th th th that they become an uh an object of professional jealousy. But they're certainly not warmongers, I think that's the point. Um

John Keegan21:08

and they're very realistic about what war can achieve and what it can't achieve.

John Keegan21:13

A very senior general said to me not long ago, he said, Well, violence almost never settles anything.

John Keegan21:21

And I think that's a very common military view. They know what violence can and can't settle and they think it can't settle much, but it sometimes has to be used.

Presenter21:31

Record number five.

John Keegan21:33

Um record number five is uh the choir of Downside Abbey singing uh the the plain chant Panjay Lunga. Um I chose it partly because it's one of the great prayers of the church, but m more because our two sons went to Downside.

Speaker 421:52

Spoken there.

Speaker 422:02

Poems and part of nature

John Keegan22:04

Yeah.

Speaker 422:07

Please in leg artillery holds.

Speaker 422:35

Yeah.

Speaker 422:40

And see you soon.

Presenter22:45

the choir of Downside Abbey, and the Gregorian chant Pange Lingua.

Presenter22:50

Walking the course, John, smelling the air of the battlefield as before you write, is something you've always put great emphasis on. Um would it be impossible for you to write, for example, about Custer's last stand at Little Bighorn unless you've been there?

John Keegan23:05

I only love that it's.

John Keegan23:07

Absolutely essential to go to the battlefield by accident. Um but I think

John Keegan23:13

I now think it is, and and you certainly

John Keegan23:16

Can't understand the little Bighorn unless you go there.

John Keegan23:19

Because it it looks so peculiar on the map.

Presenter23:21

Yeah.

John Keegan23:21

But what is it that you want to feel?

Presenter23:21

But what is it that you want to

Speaker 323:23

Fever.

John Keegan23:24

Well, let me tell you about Little Bighorn. I I it's in Montana, which is uh about fifteen hundred miles from each ocean, whichever side you start. Very, very difficult to get to, and I made a special journey.

John Keegan23:37

They were all killed though the the whole of Custer's party of the seventh cavalry, about two hundred men, were killed.

John Keegan23:44

There was a last stand on a little mound, and when you stand on it, you see stretching out in a line leading away to where the the charge started little white dots in the in the scrub, and these are the headstones of the soldiers, and they are buried where they fell. And in one glance I understood what had happened in the battle, which I had not been able to make out at all, either from the descriptions or from the maps, but in a single sweep of vision

John Keegan24:17

There it all was. Now that's unusual. You don't usually get that on a battlefield. But nevertheless, you always discover something.

Presenter24:25

The point that's often made about war through the ages and the warriors who've fought it is that it's moved, of course, from hand to hand combat in the Middle Ages to this sort of

Presenter24:36

Long distance, long range, deadly stuff. You know, you can be killed by a cruise missile that you didn't even know was coming.

John Keegan24:41

Yeah.

Presenter24:42

It makes the warrior through the ages a very different creature, doesn't it? Because today.

Presenter24:48

You know, a a a a a warrior can kill a hundred men at a stroke, um, but he probably couldn't kill one hand to hand because he doesn't get a lot of pre

John Keegan24:57

Well, I um I wouldn't bet on it.

John Keegan25:02

Uh of course it doesn't often get to that sort of close quarters nowadays, whereas at uh at Agincourt, for example, in the fifteenth century, that was the only sort of

John Keegan25:12

That and bows and arrows was the only sort of warfare there was.

Presenter25:15

And that's what that warrior would have known about anyway, because he'd probably hunted for his food or whatever. He knew how to to kill with his hands.

John Keegan25:23

Uh medieval man was altogether more bloodthirsty and realistic about uh life and death and the taking of life than uh than anybody in the Western world today.

Presenter25:33

But I wonder if that's a definition of civilized man, that uh he knows to day how to kill a hundred people with one remote missile.

John Keegan25:42

It's one aspect of civilization.

John Keegan25:45

I mean, in a way, war is

John Keegan25:47

W war is completely uncivilized in one way, and and yet on the other hand

John Keegan25:51

A dutiful and obedient and well-trained and moral, if I can use the word army, is an instrument of civilization. I mean, look what goes on in Bosnia.

John Keegan26:03

What stands between the innocent and bestiality are precisely these highly motivated, civilized soldiers from from the Western armies.

Presenter26:13

Record number six.

John Keegan26:15

Record number six is uh the Adaggio from Mozart's clarinet, concerto in A and I

John Keegan26:22

choose it because my younger daughter

John Keegan26:25

Who's an actress?

John Keegan26:26

plays the clarinet.

John Keegan26:28

Uh she certainly doesn't play it as well as it's played here, but she does play the clarinet and it will remind me of her.

Presenter27:33

Jack Brimer playing part of the adagio from Mozart's clarinet concerto in A with the Academy of Saint Martin in the Fields conducted by Sir Neville Mariner.

Presenter27:41

The concluding point of your Wreath lectures, John Keegan, was that you felt very optimistic about there not being a nuclear war, that it could possibly be averted in perpetuity.

Presenter27:55

Isn't that an argument, though, predicated on on man's rationality and his reasonableness, that he will do everything in his power to avert such a thing?

Presenter28:05

But, you know, bring along another Adolf Hitler, and none of those things obtain.

John Keegan28:10

That is the worry. Um I think that the responsible nuclear powers and all the declared nuclear powers, the five of them, are responsible.

John Keegan28:23

Even Russia in tur turmoil is, I think, a responsible power.

John Keegan28:28

Are on hair trigger alert to stop what we now call rogue states getting hold of nuclear weapons, which is why.

John Keegan28:35

A sedan is constantly stood up to, and quite right too.

John Keegan28:41

Just recently, just in the last

John Keegan28:44

Almost since the Reese lectures were over, I have begun to worry about the threat of n nuclear terrorism. I always thought it a bit far fetched that uh somebody would somehow acquire a portable nuclear warhead and suitcase bomb and

John Keegan29:01

Smuggle it into one of the great

John Keegan29:04

Cities of the

John Keegan29:06

The developed world.

John Keegan29:08

I'm now not so sure.

John Keegan29:10

Um and that is genuinely terrifying.

Presenter29:13

What about ordinary war, non-nuclear war, as it were? You know, you

Presenter29:18

You still

Presenter29:20

can have people who, despite the great civilization and sophistication of the Western world now,

Presenter29:26

are powerful and charismatic leaders, I suppose you can look at Milosevic and what's going on in Kosovo and and formerly in Bosnia.

John Keegan29:33

Indeed, Milosevic belongs to you know the the years before the First World War when states thought of themselves in a way primarily as war-making parts. Mo he he it is uh very terrifying that uh r he is a rational statesman, I think, uh that rational states led by rational statesmen can still think war is a a rational act of policy.

John Keegan29:59

In a way, the rest of us are selfish. We say, well, it's not going to affect us and if if the if the Serbs and the Croats uh and uh the Bosniaks

John Keegan30:11

really want to settle their differences by violence, uh we'll do what we can to stop them.

John Keegan30:17

But if we can't, we can't.

Presenter30:18

But isn't part of the irony of our

Presenter30:20

Not seeming to be able to stop them, the fact that our weapons are now so mighty.

Presenter30:26

Yeah.

John Keegan30:26

That is, of course, part of the the irony of the situation.

Presenter30:26

Yeah.

John Keegan30:32

In the end, I mean, you could send a lot of trained Western soldiers to sit in every village and and physically prevent them from doing it, but but at a cost in life. And of course, um Western states fall back into the selfish position s supported by their populations, which which is why should our ni nice, well-trained, high-minded young soldiers go off to try and stop some Balkan bandits from being beastly.

Presenter31:01

Seventh record.

John Keegan31:03

My seventh record is um the Adaggio from Elgar's Cello Concerto, uh and that's because my elder daughter, who is a musician, who read music at Oxford, plays the cello, and this will remind me of her.

Presenter32:20

Jacqueline Dupre, playing part of the Adagio from Elgar's Cello Concerto in E minor with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir John Barbaroli. We should mention, of course, John Keegan, that you began a second career at the age of fifty-one when you left Sandhurst and became Defence Correspondent and now Defence Editor of the Daily Telegraph. Just tell me briefly, how does life among journalists compare with life among soldiers? Two very different breeds?

John Keegan32:45

Yes, they are, but you know...

John Keegan32:48

It's noticeable that even the most anti-establishment journalists

John Keegan32:53

Very often form tremendously warm and quick affections for soldiers when they're thrown among them. And I think in a way that it's because they do rather the same thing. They've got to do it now, you know. That's I mean the thing about Generalism is it's all got to be now. And that's one of the things I like about it. No paper, no meetings. Let's have it by five. And soldiers are like that. And although

John Keegan33:16

Of course, their standards of behaviour are entirely different from those of journalists. It's very odd that journalists and soldiers do strike up in practice these these very warm and sort of mutually admiring relationships.

Presenter33:29

So you've crossed that bridge, all right. What about crossing the bridge to this desert island of ours? You you presumably you could hack it. I mean, you've done a survival course or two, I'm sure.

John Keegan33:38

Uh no. Um I can't say I've done a survival course.

John Keegan33:43

But I'm quite good at being alone.

John Keegan33:45

Um that, I suppose, is what's worse about being on a desert island. You are by yourself.

Presenter33:51

But you'd obviously miss the comforts of home, which I gather is a is a lovely manor in Wiltshire. Can you cook or again have all those years in the officer's mess?

John Keegan33:59

My wife would laugh if I said I could cook, but I can cook. Uh not too badly.

Presenter34:05

Mm.

Presenter34:06

And and as you sit on the sand musing,

Presenter34:11

Um will you, as as as you mentioned, Doctor Johnson had said, you know, think meanly of yourself for not having been a soldier?

John Keegan34:19

No.

Presenter34:22

Last record.

John Keegan34:23

My last record is The Hebrides Overture, Fingle's Cave, by Mendelssohn, and that's because every year we all go the home the family, four children and our five grandchildren, and and my wife and I go to the same house.

John Keegan34:37

in West Argyllshire, in a little

John Keegan34:40

Peninsula called Knappdale, and from Knappdale we look out of the Hebrides. And once on a Scottish holiday, we did actually go to Fingles Cave.

Presenter35:47

The Royal Scottish National Orchestra playing the opening of Fingalls' Cave, Mendelssohn's Hebrides Overture, conducted by Sir Alexander Gibson. If you could only take one of those eight records, John.

John Keegan35:58

Andy music.

Presenter35:59

Yes.

John Keegan36:00

Just'cause it's so beautiful.

Presenter36:01

What about your book?

John Keegan36:03

The Thirty Nine Steps by John Buckham

Presenter36:05

And what about your luxury?

John Keegan36:07

Well, I was wondering if I could have a a French-speaking Man Friday.

Presenter36:11

Certainly not.

John Keegan36:13

Yeah.

John Keegan36:15

Uh well, I used to speak French very well and I've got rusty and I thought, um could I have a sort of French-speaking man robot?

Presenter36:25

Well, yes, as long as he has no emotions and you can't really converse with him other than to learn the language, I think that's the point.

John Keegan36:31

Well, I'll settle for that.

Presenter36:33

John Keegan, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.

John Keegan36:37

Thank you.

Speaker 336:44

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For more podcasts please visit bbc.co. uk slash radio four.