Throughout history the English have been a warlike lot. Often we fight among ourselves - there have been a good few civil wares - and when we were not slaughtering each other, we practised on our neighbours, the Scots, the Irish, the French . . . When that got too easy, we set off around the world to find other people to fight. This was usually done with a hubris that invited some ludicrous pratfall. · Do you know which crazy field marshal told the Duke of Wellington that he had been made pregnant with an elephant by a French grenadier? · Or which cowardly general