On military courage. (History).

I will go with you and suffer whatever I must suffer. For I consider that you are my country and my friends and comrades; and with you, I think I shall be honoured wherever I may be, but without you, I think I am not able either to help a friend or hurt an enemy. Where you go there I will go also: that is my resolve.

--Clearchos to his soldiers in Xenophon's Anabasis

IN HIS 1958 book They Came to Cordura, the American novelist Glendon Swarthout investigates one of the most mysterious of all human attributes: military courage. Swarthout's tale is set during the US Army's abortive 1916 punitive expedition into Mexico to chastise Pancho Villa and his revolutionaries. The central figure is Major Thorn, Awards Officer of the campaign who is ordered to escort five cavalrymen cited for the Congressional Medal of Honour across the barren desert of Chihuahua to the town of Cordura and safety. As the patrol moves across the stark terrain, Thorn, a middle-aged soldier tortured by the memory of his own sudden failure of nerve in a previous military engagement, ponders the qualities of the five heroes in his charge whom he regards as members of Socrates' "golden race".

The journey to Cordura--which means courage in Spanish--becomes a dark metaphor by which Swarthout examines the character of wartime bravery. As they are ambushed by Villistas and tormented by heat, thirst and adversity, base qualities are soon revealed in the golden mettle of Thorn's five "heroes". With the exception of Thorn, each man falters under the strain of prolonged exposure to danger and risk. It becomes clear that the courage under fire demonstrated by the five Medal of Honour candidates is little more than a momentary aberration in their lives. In the end, Thorn, at the cost of his own life, comes to Cordura--and thus to courage--delivering the flawed Medal of Honour nominees to safety. His journey has revealed the reservoirs of a sustained bravery that he feared he lacked, and has enabled him to fulfil a sworn duty to five apparently courageous, but in reality unworthy comrades.

Swarthout's story is a testament to Winston Churchill's famous saying that danger in war, like good champagne, should be sipped slowly rather than swallowed quickly. Yet in the history of arms there have always been soldiers who have repeatedly swallowed quickly and deeply of danger. In the twentieth century, Albert Jacka of Australia and Audie Murphy of the United States were two such men. Although separated by differences in nationality and generation, they symbolise the common martial spirit of the foot soldier of Anglo-Saxon democracy. They are worthy of serious study because their experiences go some way towards explaining the phenomenon of personal courage in the impersonal conditions of industrialised war.

Like Swarthout's five heroes, most individuals are capable of either sudden bravery or, like Major Thorn, of sudden collapse in a crisis. However, relatively few men have the psychological capacity to be great combat soldiers in war. This kind of soldiering is a rare gift. As Gerald F. Linderman, the distinguished historian of the American military experience, has noted, for most men continuous success in battle is something that, in terms of psychological and physical effort, cannot be mustered for long periods of time without risking the very destruction of the human self.

PROBLEMS IN RECONSTRUCTING CLOSE COMBAT