It feels like something from a vanished era in all kinds of ways. On September 29, 1829, Home Secretary Sir Robert Peel’s metropolitan London police force began operation.

First, it’s hard now to imagine not having an official municipal police force. And by 1829 the older decentralized and more citizen-based system, with some police, some militia and some informal “watches” was having trouble coping with the vast metropolis the industrial revolution had created.

Second, it’s hard now to imagine there being any issue over such matters as blue uniforms and organizational structure. But Peel believed that it was important that the police force should be clearly seen to be an extension of the public and accountable to them, not a military or paramilitary outfit. Hence the uniforms were blue instead of standard military red, there were no military ranks other than sergeant, and the “Peelers” or “Bobbies” carried no weapons beyond a truncheon and a rattle to summon assistance.

Third, the moral authority of established order was such that, while the Bobbies did have weapons for exceptional circumstances, generation after generation of these was retired to museums with very little use. For instance, flintlock pistols were replaced by revolvers in the 1860s but not until 1887 did a constable fire a revolver in the course of duty… to warn people of a fire. And this in a populace then enjoying the right to bear arms and frequently bearing them.

Fourth, as has often been noted of late, nine principles were incorporated into the “General Instructions” issued to every new officer from 1829 on. Peel helped devise them but was not apparently the author of the formal list. But consider that it includes such core constitutional notions as “To maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and that the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.” And to remember always that they are part of the executive branch of government. And such advanced “criminological” insights as “To recognise always that the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, and not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them.”

I have enormous sympathy for the police, who perform a difficult and dangerous job in an increasingly unruly and self-absorbed society. But when I look at today’s police, in their scary black SWAT outfits, or hear them involve themselves in politics via their unions, or witness the deliberate seizure of firearms from law-abiding citizens’ homes in High River, or see them acting as armed social workers who treat self-defence as a menace to decency, I fear that they have forgotten that they are the public and the public are the police.

It may be time to refound the Bobbies on those principles from a sadly vanished era.

What if? What if? Some say such historical questions cannot even be asked, let alone answered. I reply that if we cannot say what would have happened if some event had gone otherwise, we cannot speak intelligibly of causation, separate the essential from the trivial. So what if Henry Tandey had shot Hitler?

In case this question is obscure to you, there’s a persistent legend that Tandey, a British private and VC winner, encountered a wounded German lance corporal near Marcoing on September 28 and spared his life. And it was supposedly Hitler.

It seems highly unlikely. I don’t mean it seems unlikely that Hitler was nearly killed in World War I. He served throughout the war, was twice wounded and twice decorated (once on the recommendation of a Jewish superior) and must have had numerous brushes with death. Still, Tandey’s account, during the capture of Marcoing for which he won the VC, of having a German in his sights and being unwilling to kill a wounded man, who saw him and nodded thanks, has strange but highly placed support, from Hitler himself.

When Neville Chamberlain was in Germany to sign the disastrous Munich Agreement, Hitler took him to his new country retreat and showed his personal copy of a famous painting by Fortunino Matania of Tandey carrying a wounded comrade at 1^st Ypres in 1914, and said “That’s the man who nearly shot me.” Tandey did apparently spare someone’s life on Sept. 28, 1918, and Hitler thought it was him. So maybe it happened.

Now I’m all for shooting Hitler. And to kill him in a war would not have been murder, as it would have been to assassinate him between November 1918 and September 1939. But one cannot reasonably be expected to foresee that the 29-year old soldier staggering backward in defeat, exhausted and wounded, will if he lives found a totalitarian movement and, in his early 50s, wage an anti-Semitic genocide on a hideously unprecedented scale and launch a second world war.

It was pity that stayed Tandey’s hand. And pity is a good thing. By September 28, 1918 Germany was beaten, and the battle in question was over and the Germans had lost it too. I do not know whether someone else might have done what Hitler did in the 1930s if someone, Tandey or another, had shot him years earlier. Germany was rife for bitter radicalism, but Hitler brought a special combination of evil insanity and public relations genius to the task of turning that radicalism into global horror.

Whatever one decides, Tandey is not at fault for a split-second decision in favour of mercy on Sept. 28, 1918, at the tail end of a war that had seen so much death.

One hundred years ago today Rudyard Kipling’s only son, Lt. John Kipling, was killed in the bloody Battle of Loos in northeastern France weeks after his 18^th birthday. He was just one of thousands killed there, indeed just one of thousands killed at Loos whose bodies were not recovered, “A soldier of the Great War known unto God”. And yet his death has a special poignancy.

Loos itself was one of a series of offensives that failed of their high hopes as the Allies, like the Central Powers, struggled to overcome the advantages technology had given to the defence at that time. The opening day of the battle, Sept. 25, was the worst in the history of the British Army… until the start of the Somme the following summer. And the offensive was called off on Sept. 27 in the face of its evident futility, but too late for John Kipling.

The death hit his father extremely hard. As one might expect, you might say. Or even it served him right, given Kipling’s ardent imperialism including his enthusiastic support for the war that extended to getting John a commission despite short-sightedness that originally saw him rejected by the Navy then the Army. But don’t think having him made an officer was finding him a soft spot; the junior officers who “led from the front” lasted on average just six weeks before being killed or wounded.

Do not think, either, that Kipling was a bloodthirsty man who deserved to lose a child over whose grave he could never even weep. (John Kipling’s body was officially found in 1992, but there are doubts about the accuracy of the identification.) Rather, he was a man who loved duty, and who saw the need to fight to protect the things worth defending. Think of Rikki tikki tavi killing cobras to protect children, or read Kipling’s concern that if the West lost its nerve “all our pomp of yesterday/ Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!” And in my opinion Kipling was quite right about the importance of winning the First World War; see my documentary The Great War Remembered for a detailed discussion.

The loss of his son affected him deeply, and led him to become involved with the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (including suggesting the phrase “Known unto God” on the headstones of unknown soldiers and to write a moving poem about the death of John and so many others, that ends “But who shall return us our children?”

It is a very sad sentiment. But not a pacifist one. Barely seven months before his death in January 1936, Kipling gave a speech (“An Undefended Island”, to The Royal Society of St George, May 6, 1935) warning of the menace of Nazi Germany to Britain. And one imagines that had John Kipling been alive and young in September 1939, he would again have found a way to wear his country’s uniform. He was short-sighted physically, not morally or geopolitically.

It is, I suppose, always a dubious honor to be the first person killed in virtually any way or for any reason, even a noble cause. It certainly is in the case of Lt. Col. Peter Dewey, who on September 26 1945 became the first American killed in the Vietnam War.

His death has tangled roots, like virtually everything connected with that unhappy conflict. He was with the Office of Strategic Services on assignment to search for missing American pilots (Dewey was not of course the first American killed in Vietnam, just the first killed as part of the struggle against a Communist takeover after World War II) and gather information on the situation following the Japanese surrender. And the situation was murky.

For some reason the Potsdam Conference gave the British the responsibility of disarming the Japanese south of the 16^th parallel while Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese nationalists were to do so north of that line. Unsurprisingly, Chiang’s forces rapidly lost control of the North to Ho Chi Minh’s communists, as they would do four years later to Mao Tse-tung’s in their own country, and it became North Vietnam.

The British faced a challenge of their own from Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh, who had declared themselves the government of all of Vietnam. The French, meanwhile, wanted their colonial empire back, and the British general in charge, Maj. Gen. Douglas D. Gracey, rearmed the French POWs liberated from the Japanese and had them toss the Viet Minh out of the various government offices they’d moved themselves into.

Now curiously, Lt. Col. Dewey sympathized with the Viet Minh, not the British or French, who he saw as imperialists repressing nationalist rebels. And he said so, loudly and repeatedly, to the point that Gracey ordered him to get out of Dodge. On the way to Saigon’s airport with another OSS officer, Dewey refused to stop at a Viet Minh roadblock, got into a shouting match in French and was shot dead, under the apparent belief that he was French.

It does seem fitting that the first American killed in the Vietnam War should have been a well-meaning sympathizer with local nationalists who opposed “imperialism” but did not grasp the situation and perished as the result of a cultural misunderstanding involving locals he thought were nationalists who thought he was an imperialist.

Many more Americans would suffer the same fate before the ultimate takeover by the “agrarian nationalist” reformers who turned out to be, gosh, violent communists.

It’s now been exactly 10 years since the IRA officially disarmed in front of independent weapons inspectors on September 25 2005. Which strikes me as one more case of digging in the wrong place.

I don’t mean it was wrong to make peace with the IRA. I loathe the Irish Republican Army, despise their cause and regard their fellow-travellers with disgust, although I recognize that the British record in Ireland is for the most part either shabby or disgraceful, a true blot on Britannia’s generally splendid escutcheon. And I know the situation in Northern Ireland remains very difficult. But you make peace with your enemies not your friends, so the IRA had to be dealt with one way or the other.

What I find weird is insisting that they disarm. It took them years to do so after the Good Friday Agreement was signed in April 1998 and I see their point. I know, I know, when you’re demanding that terrorists stop shooting people and blowing things up it seems natural to say OK, hand over the arsenal. Which was big and included a lot of scary stuff. But guns don’t kill people, people kill people.

The right of citizens to resist tyranny is an ancient British right, stretching back to the end of the Roman occupation. It was vigorously restated in the 1688 Bill of Rights as well as in its American offshoot a century later. And if the IRA were truly determined to continue violence, they could always get more guns, explosives and so on. There is no shortage of people willing to fund and supply subversion in free societies. Indeed they could surrender many and keep some, as various splinter groups did.

Moreover, if the IRA really accepted peace, there would have been no reason to make them give up guns they no longer wanted to use. My sympathies are with them this far, though this far only: They feared they were giving up their ability to resist in return for hollow promises. And for what?

If the British authorities meant their side of the deal, and the IRA meant their side, there was no need for the latter to disarm now that they were prepared to become law-abiding citizens. If the British did not, it was foolish for them to do so, and if they did not, it was deceitful.

It is a classic materialist solution to a moral problem. But it is never good to do something that is necessarily either foolish or deceitful. Hatred flares up in the human heart, and if it is not put out there, it is pointless to try to extinguish it by squirting something down the barrel of a gun.

On your list of things that didn’t make that day’s headlines, consider the authorities driving out a trouble-maker whose own family had stopped protecting him. The year was 622… or 1, depending how you’re counting. Because the location was the Arabian peninsula and the person was a middle-aged merchant turned monotheistic preacher named Muhammad.

Yes, you know the name. It became big news soon and has been ever since. And a key event in his life and in world history was his arrival in Medina on September 24^th, after Mecca became far too hot to hold him.

In 621 he’d received a number of visitors from Medina saying they were now Muslims and would protect him. As the mood in Mecca turned increasingly hostile, Muhammad encouraged his hundred or so followers there to move to Medina in small groups and then, learning of a plot to murder him, he slipped out with a one of his disciples and by secret byways completed his “Hegira” to Medina on September 24.

At the time the authorities in Mecca were presumably mildly annoyed that he’d avoided their assassins. But they probably consoled themselves with the thought that oh well, no biggie, at any rate we’ve seen the last of that turbulent priest, now back to things that really matter. And if there’d been newspapers they’d have told you about the price of figs, a meeting of the merchant council, visitors to the pagan shrines etc. and not even consigned the disappearance of this annoying character to the back page briefs.

Within a couple of years, of course, they’d have needed the really big typeface to describe his deeds, as they still do today. But in 622 meh, cover the camel auction and forget that guy. We’ll never hear from him again.

It’s a bit of an unglamorous start. Billy the Kid was arrested for the first time on September 23 1875 for stealing a basket of laundry. But then, he had an unglamorous life despite the weird aura that came to surround it later.

He broke out of jail after the laundry heist and went on a murderous crime spree that ended, predictably, with an early violent death that came not a minute too soon, as he had murdered some 21 people by the point Sheriff Pat Garrett gunned him down in Fort Sumner, New Mexico on July 14, 1881.

We don’t even know how old “Billy the Kid” was when he died or where he was born. We know he was named William Henry McCarty, though he also went by William Bonney as well as “Kid Antrim,” and that he had no relationship with his father, and that after his mother died in 1874 he quickly started down the path that made him notorious and dead by, at the latest, his very early 20s. And that he had bad teeth. But most of what we know is the surface stuff, the stealing, rustling, gambling and killing.

Yes, he was bold. He broke jail several times and killed lawmen as well as other thugs. But he was a bad, grubby, nasty man and he died a bad, grubby, nasty death. And while he had a difficult start in life, and lived in a bad area (one documentary I watched on the “Lincoln County War” in which he took part described the region as a place where “a man would kill you just to see if a gun worked”) he made choices that other people with tough childhoods in rough places do not make.

The weird thing is, it made him an icon. Garrett became famous for killing McCarty, but also unpopular, partly because he was thought to have shot him without warning. And when he was himself shot dead in 1908 the killer was acquitted and Garrett, who admittedly was rather a nasty character himself, only interests people today because of his association with “Billy the Kid,” who became as famous as Wild Bill Hickok or Wyatt Earp (who incidentally died in 1929 aged 80), a curiously romantic figure, with a museum near his tourist-attraction gravesite.

What for? What’s to like, admire or idealize about this cold, impulsive, vicious killer whose ruthlessness wasn’t even practical, a predictable path not to years of triumphant if amoral hedonism but a hard life and an early, richly deserved death?

On September 22^nd back in 1980 the Iran-Iraq war erupted. It was certainly proof that while both sides cannot be right in a quarrel it’s very easy for both to be wrong. But the nature of the two grim, murderous sides in this conflict, their strange resemblance despite supposedly opposite philosophical foundations, throws considerable sickly light on the problems of the Middle East over the past century.

On one side was the first Islamist regime in Iran. On the other, a classic national socialist strongman, Saddam Hussein, of the sort who led anti-Western independence movements throughout the region. From Col. Nasser in Egypt to Hafez al-Assad in Syria and even to some extent the early Col. Gadhafi in Libya, they took their inspiration far more from Karl Marx than the Koran or, a less obvious but key point, from John Stuart Mill.

For these secular often pan-Arab leftists were not the first generation of modernizers in the Middle East by a long shot. Before the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I (which was, incidentally, the last jihad proclaimed by a caliph), it was possible to draw the curtains and pretend nothing important was happening outside the Muslim Middle East. But by the 1920s it became clear that the military dynamism of the West posed a mortal threat to the independence of the region.

Moreover, and worse, it was essential to preserve political independence to fend off disturbing and disruptive alien cultural influences. Yet it was clear that the West’s military dynamism proceeded from its economic dynamism which proceeded from its cultural dynamism, that is, precisely the individualism, equality and turbulence that was seen as the main threat in the first place. And so intellectuals in the region have proposed one solution after another, all involving coercing the populace into changing their way of life and thought drastically in order to avoid changing it at all. And there’s no squaring that circle. (I highly recommend Theodore von Laue’s book The World Revolution of Westernization on this problematic point).

In a recent, superb and chilling analysis in the Wall Street Journal of the European response to the Syrian migrant crisis, Walter Russell Mead says “At bottom, we are witnessing the consequences of a civilization’s failure either to overcome or to accommodate the forces of modernity. One hundred years after the fall of the Ottoman Empire and 50 years after the French left Algeria, the Middle East has failed to build economies that allow ordinary people to live with dignity, has failed to build modern political institutions and has failed to carve out the place of honor and respect in world affairs that its peoples seek. There is no point in rehearsing the multiple failures since Britain’s defeat of the Ottoman Empire liberated the Arabs from hundreds of years of Turkish rule. But it is worth noting that the Arab world has tried a succession of ideologies and forms of government, and that none of them has worked. The liberal nationalism of the early 20th century failed, and so did the socialist nationalism of Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser and his contemporaries. Authoritarianism failed the Arabs too… Today we are watching the failure of Islamism.”

He goes on to suggest, disturbingly, that Europe is now rejecting its own core values: “Increasingly, the contemporary version of Enlightenment liberalism sees itself as fundamentally opposed to the religious, political and economic foundations of Western society.” But Europe’s problems, and those of North America, are an issue for another day. What is noteworthy about the Iran-Iraq war is that, based on very different philosophies, each mounted a feeble but persistent and brutal war effort of such equal ineptitude that, coupled with the equally murderous belligerence of both regimes, meant the slaughter went on for eight years without useful result, and as soon as it was done both turned to other ways of causing turmoil and death wherever their bloody hands could reach. Clearly both philosophies were dramatic failures and, despite their ostensible differences, failures in very similar ways.

Because the national socialist alternative has exhausted itself, Islamism is the dominant anti-Western reform movement in the Middle East, seeking to move the Arab world back to an imagined era of purity instead of forward to one. But it can’t work either.

The proclamation of a jihad by Sultan Mehmet V now sounds like something out of a John Buchan novel (Greenmantle, specifically). But a century later, it’s happening again, as the region turns in a bloody and futile circle, unable to defeat the West and unwilling to embrace it.