Politics & Power Quote by Patrick MacGill

MacGill turns the patriotic origin story inside out: enlistment, that most mythologized act of public virtue, is treated as something men can barely account for without embarrassing themselves. The line lands with a journalist's ear for the dodges people use when asked to justify their own choices. "Few men could explain" isn’t just about inarticulateness; it’s about how war scrambles the neat narratives a society wants. If they tried to explain, they’d "only prove" something nastier: that even the supposedly noble can be a kind of accident.

The pivot is the politician’s cliché about voters doing "the right thing from the wrong motive". MacGill borrows that sneer and aims it at recruitment rhetoric. It’s a shrewd move. He doesn’t deny that enlistment can be "the right thing"; he questions the moral clean-room fantasy around why it happens. Men sign up for wages, escape, peer pressure, adventure, status, shame, boredom, fear of being thought a coward. In that list is the subtext: the state depends on mixed motives, then launders them into a single story called duty.

Context matters: MacGill wrote out of a world where working-class men were aggressively courted and coerced into uniform, then expected to wrap their private messiness in public nobility. The sentence is compact cynicism with a humane edge: it refuses to romanticize the enlisted man, but it also refuses to let leaders pretend they recruited saints.