Batman (military) Batman (military) A batman or an orderly is a soldier or airman assigned to a commissioned officer as a personal servant. Before the advent of motorized transport, an officer's batman was also in charge of the officer's "bat-horse" that carried the pack saddle with his officer's kit during a campaign. The U.K. English term is derived from the obsolete "bat", meaning "pack saddle" (from French "bât", from Old French "bast", from Late Latin "bastum"). A batman's duties often include: The action of serving as a batman was referred to as "batting". In armies where officers typically came from the upper
What Is a Nation? Anderson also points out that the reason many French citizens of Renan's time knew anything of these massacres was because they learned of them in state-run schools. Thus, the state itself preserved the knowledge which needed to be forgotten for national identity. In a 1995 book, "For Love of Country: an essay on patriotism and nationalism", Maurizio Viroli called Renan's essay "the most influential late nineteenth-century interpretation of the meaning of nation", because of its focus on the "spiritual principle" as opposed to race, religion or geography. Other authors, like Joxe Azurmendi, consider that really there is no such opposition