Compared with the cost of weaponry, that would have been a negligible cost. In the Second World War, all the combatants had plenty of people who spoke their opponents’ languages and spent months or even, in the case of the Japanese, years training translators and interpreters. Has the conceit of the English-speaking world really reached such dizzying heights?The Iraqis are fighting clever. A spokesman for the Iraqi Information Ministry yesterday morning said “the British are the Condottieri of this century” Condottieri were 15th-century Italian “soldiers of fortune”. Mercenaries have a long and respectable tradition in military history. More than ten years ago, in an article in International Affairs, I suggested that, in the new world order, UK forces might become the “soldiers of fortune” of the international community. I meant the international community as represented by the UN, not the United States.There was another Iraqi statement, too, that they would not leave the bodies of dead Allied troops lying but would bury them “in accordance with their religious principles”.

That is absolutely correct, under the Geneva Convention, if the locations are identified in such a way that the bodies can be recovered subsequently. In the current climate, I would not be surprised if someone takes offence at that Iraqi statement. But why? That is what we do with their dead.”Know your enemy and know yourself.” That is the lesson some Allied leaders seem to have forgotten.Christopher Bellamy is professor of military science and doctrine at Cranfield University. I got on my scooter at Piazza della Repubblica, the circular piazza in central Rome, where art nouveau nymphs prance in the central fountains, and had ridden 20 yards when I realised that I hadn’t put my helmet on.

I stopped, fished it out of the box at the back and set off again. The lunch I had proposed to a fellow correspondent had been cancelled twice for reasons beyond our control Today looked more promising. There was no news to speak of, the sun was shining, spring was in the air: we might sit outside, share a carafe of wine I launched myself down Via Nazionale toward our rendezvous. I launched myself down Via Nazionale toward our rendezvous.
What happened next suggests to me that, after barely six months in Rome, I have already gone native in ways that are not entirely wise. I was in no special hurry, but to be on a motorino in Rome is always to be dashing, grabbing fractional advantages, carving up the car drivers, squeezing through the clotted traffic A little way down the avenue there was a Fiat Panda. The lowest form of Italian car life, Pandas routinely travel 20kph slower than anything else on the road.

This one was barely moving, just inching forward as the driver craned his head to see the name of the side street.Two months ago, I would have bided my time and waited for the old chap to sort himself out. But now I am a Roman, so I twisted the throttle and swerved my Honda 125cc two-tone Chiociolino contemptuously around him – whereupon there was a loud bang and I found myself lying on my back in the middle of the road.Yes, I have been blooded – not literally, I hasten to say; I suffered only a couple of bruises I had received a glancing blow from a passing taxi. Worse than the pain and the minor damage to the bike was the injury to my dignity, the awareness of eyes up and down and on both sides of the road feasting on my misfortune. But you can’t truly call yourself a Roman motorcyclist until you have spent a few moments lying in the middle of the road, looking up at the sky, your machine abandoned some way off like a large crushed insect, while the traffic carves a path around you and the pedestrians stop and gawp.As you drive around Rome, it’s not unusual to see three or four such incidenti in a day.