All societies that maintain armies maintain the belief that some things are more valuable than life itself. Just what is so valued varies. In previous times, wars were fought for causes which now seem incomprehensibly trivial. In Europe, for example, armies were mobilized in the name of defending religious ritual or chivalric honour. William of Normandy, speaking before the Battle of Hastings, exhorted his troops to avenge the spilling of" noble blood"(Anonymous, 1916). To fight for such matters appears' barbaric', or, worse still,'mediaeval'in today's balance of priorities. The great causes for which modern blood is to be spilled are different; and so is the scale of the bloodshed. As Isaiah Berlin has written," it is by now a melancholy commonplace that no century has seen so much remorseless and continued slaughter of human beings by one another as our own"(1991, p. 175). Much of this slaughter has been performed in the name of the nation, whether to achieve national independence, or to defend the national territory from encroachment, or to protect the very principle of nationhood. None of these matters was mentioned by Duke William on the south coast of England over nine hundred years ago. Eve of battle rhetoric is always revealing, for the leader will remind the followers why the most supreme of all sacrifices is being called upon. When President George Bush, speaking from the Oval Office in the White House, announced the start of the Gulf War, he expressed the contemporary common sense of sacrifice:" All reasonable efforts to reach a peaceful resolution" had been expended; acceptance of peace at this stage would be less reasonable than the pursuance of war." While the world waited," claimed Bush," Saddam Hussein systematically raped, pillaged and plundered a tiny nation no threat to his own." It was not individuals who had been raped or pillaged. It was something much more important: a nation. The President was not just speaking for his own nation, the United States, but the United States was speaking for the whole world:" We have before us the opportunity to forge for ourselves and for future generations a new world order, a world where the rule of law, not the law of the jungle, governs the conduct of nations." In this new order" no nation will be permitted to brutally assault its neighbour"(George Bush, 16 January 1991; reproduced in Sifry and Cerf, 1991, pp. 311-14). The moral order that Bush was evoking was an order of nations. In the new world order, nations would apparently be protected from their neighbours, who would also be nations. As always, what is left unspecified