Michael Fry: Lions can now hold the donkeys to account

IN THE days of the independent Kingdom of the Scots there was a Spanish ambassador, Pedro de Ayala, who reported home in wonder: "They spend all their time in wars, and when there is no war they fight with one another."

At that point, the turn of the 16th century, Scots already had a European reputation for fighting prowess. Quite apart from their strife at home, they were enlisted by the French to set about the English and later in the Thirty Years' War by the Protestant side to hound the Catholics. After the Union of 1707, as the British government sent its Scottish regiments off to imperial wars, they were liable to encounter Scots recruited on the other side, into the armies of Egypt or the Hejaz or Hyderabad.

Arguably the greatest military conflict of all for every nation that took part in it was the First World War. It was a war not just of professional armies, as previous wars had been, but a total war, one that reached down into civil society, into cities, towns and countryside. And it tested them: it changed their lives, it brought them hardship and it took their sons, whom it killed.

There has never been any reliable official estimate of the number of Scots who fell in that war, because the British government was wary of producing one. Its supreme commander, General Douglas Haig, himself a Scot, convinced himself his Scottish regiments could win the war for him, so he liked to send them over the top first, often to be slaughtered. There are certain unofficial estimates suggesting Scotland suffered the highest rate of casualties of any nation on the allied side. Yet Scotland fought the war through without flinching. If that was the test, Scotland passed it.

It all adds up to a glorious record by any standards, and its effects can be felt down to the present. When the battalions of the Royal Regiment of Scotland reach home from their tours of duty in Iraq or Afghanistan, they can be sure of a warm welcome as they parade through the garrison towns. They may no longer be so strongly attached to particular parts of the country in the way they once were as independent regiments, but the old ties remain strong.

Still, a different attitude can also be detected. This is not so much a result of political change, because the wars that Britain is fighting today are, broadly speaking, backed by the political class: we will get a new government this year, but fight on still. Even so, the soldiers tell us they do not believe they are receiving the support at home they hope for and feel entitled to expect.

The greatest visible change is in the public reaction to casualties. In the past Scots took for granted that in war soldiers get killed. The poignancy of individual tragedies was always sublimated in the greater glory of the national cause and of the victory that rewarded it, since we have usually won our wars. Afghanistan is an exception: imperial Britain lost three wars there and now post-imperial Britain looks like losing another.

Yet that hardly accounts for the novel reluctance to accept that death is inevitable in war. At the Battle of the Somme, Scotland could take hundreds of dead in a single morning and not flag or fail. In Afghanistan more than 200 Britain soldiers have been killed since 2001, 10 per cent of them Scots, so the death rate is minuscule by historic standards.

Of course we grieve over every life lost, but this time round each seems somehow to have struck home harder. While nobody ever thought of inquiring into the circumstances of individual deaths during the First World War, today every single military fatality is investigated by an inquest, on the same terms as a domestic murder or a road accident in the local High Street. At the end a civilian coroner who may never have held a gun passes judgment on a clash that took place thousands of miles away, and sometimes he has been scathing on those he holds responsible for what happened. We may sense a public mood building up that casualties even at a modest level are intolerable, tha