Modern Mystery.(Review)

The Mystery of Courage, by William Ian Miller (Harvard, 346 pp., $29.95)

William Ian Miller, a professor of law at the University of Michigan and author of piquant volumes on Humiliation (1993) and The Anatomy of Disgust (1997), is brave enough to have written a book about courage, a subject he regards-as much at the end as at the beginning of his story- as a "mystery." Not that its mysteriousness prevents it from being of absorbing interest. Miller is at his best in displaying the results of his trawlings through the literature of war for examples that illuminate what he calls "the emotional terrain" of courage, which includes all those counter-urges-fear, shame, humiliation, and disgust- that courage must overcome.

Miller discusses, for instance, the surprisingly extensive debate over which prospect is more daunting, being blown to bits by a shell or being shot with a rifle. One man can face the prospect of the first with equanimity while being reduced to abject terror by the second; for another, the reverse is the case. "To be killed by a bullet seemed so clean and surgical," wrote Pvt. E. B. Sledge, U.S.M.C., of his service in the Pacific during World War II. "But shells would not only tear and rip the body, they tortured one's mind almost beyond the brink of sanity." Capt. Robert Graves of the Royal Welch Fusiliers in World War I, on the other hand, records that the very randomness of shellfire made it less terrifying.

A bullet was aimed at you.

Facing bombs or bullets clearly requires courage, but Miller is most fascinated by the ambiguities of his subject. He begins with the case, recorded in a Civil War memoir by Robert J. Burdette, of what he calls "the good coward." This is a person who is a model of discipline and duty in every other way, but who runs from battle. His comrades treat his cowardice with indulgence because he keeps trying in spite of his fear, and Burdette records that by the end of the war he had come to believe that the coward was actually braver than those who had not run.

Miller draws another example of brave cowardice from a British memoir of the Italian campaign in the Second World War, which tells of a soldier so lacking in what J. Glenn Gray calls "a sense of union with his fellows" that he can defy both orders from officers and ridicule from comrades, perversely taking pride in the very thing of which most men would be ashamed. Miller speculates that Eddie Slovik, the only American soldier to be shot for cowardice in the last century, was such a man.

It is such cases that give rise to the alleged "mystery" of courage. What Miller means by this is simply that he can't tell where courage comes from. To him it is a mystery because we can never fully trace its psychic roots. Yet is this not equally true of good and evil, kindness and cruelty, love and hatred, and, indeed, the whole gamut of human behavior? Even though we can never fully trace the psychic roots of anything, we are culturally bred up to a childlike ...