Quote Originally Posted by jmm99 View Post
Some (Gabriella Blum not among them) cite the following incident (mentioned in Blum's 2009 article as quoted below) as evidence of an enemy spared by the humanitarian instincts of the poet and mythologist Robert Graves (one of my favorite authors on myths)
I had forgotten about Walzer's Naked Soldier. Thanks for reminding me. The key difference in the account you then quoted from Good-Bye to All That is that Graves refers to the target as a naked man, not a naked soldier. The passage in Walzer is meant, I think to highlight the tension thast exists in the fact that a soldier is also a human being. Some of us (Americans at least) are stuck with words from the Declaration of Independence (all men are created equal) that make it hard for us to separate the soldier from the human being. I do not think that Graves had the same problem, as you note by saying the act was less than humanitarian--the sergeant was a better shot after all.