Briton on Courage

THE ANATOMY OF COURAGE'--Lord Moran--Constable, London (8/6).

"In this book," writes Winston Churchill's personal physician, "I set out to find how courage is born and how it is sustained in a modern army of free people."

Grey, patrician Charles Wilson, Baron Moran, President of the Royal College of Physicians, is well qualified for this inquiry. Winner of the Military Cross as a medical officer of the Royal Fusiliers in World War I, he notes that "the Prime Minister . . . has taken me where I might learn from those who are doing the fighting" in World War II. The Anatomy of Courage, recently published in London, is composed largely of a series of sketches from life, mostly in World War I. P: A malingering old colonel once came to Moran pleading dysentery ("I'm afraid I'll have to go sick. It's a nuisance, isn't it?"). Wrote the doctor in his diary: "He looked old and troubled. For a quarter of a century he had been a soldier preparing no doubt for the real thing. It had come and this was the end." P:A young subaltern with "dark eyes under long lashes, a pink and white complexion" was sent to Moran for "vetting." "He made every possible excuse to put off my examination . . . but [his commanding officer] told him to get a move on. When the lad stripped, we found he was wearing a coat of mail under his vest." P: Another entry in the Moran diary: "Just now a man was brought to my dugout on a stretcher. Half his hand was gone and his leg below the knee was crushed and broken. While his wounds were dressed he smoked, lighting a new cigarette from the stump of an old one. His eyes were as steady as a child's, only his lips were white. . . . My servant grinned. 'You always know the old 'uns,' he said."

Bodies & Minds. Early in the war Moran and his fellow officers "did not bother about men's minds; we did what we could for their bodies. We did not ask whether a man was wearing well or if he would last. Of course he would last, why shouldn't he?" Only after a sergeant to whom Moran had denied sick leave blew his brains out, and the doctor had observed the corrosive effect of nearly a year in the Ypres salient, did he begin to learn what tricks war can play with men's minds, and that every soldier has his breaking point.

"The armies of long ago," observes Moran, "were recruited, broadly speaking, from men who did not feel fear. Their courage seems to have had its roots in a vacant mind. Their imagination played no tricks. . . . Were the descendants of these yokel soldiers the backbone of our army ... in 1918? I shall answer that the man who felt no fear was hardly to be found in that war. . . ."

The Fixed Resolve. Modern war also puts a far greater strain on men's nerves than ancient warfare did. It has introduced monotony, terrible noise, ever-present danger of shell or bomb out of the distant blue, long-continued lack of any rest period or of any moment free from fear. Lord Moran defines courage as "a moral quality . . . not a chance gift of nature like an aptitude for games. It is a cold choice between two alternatives, the fixed resolve not to quit; an act of renunciation which must be made not once but many times by the power of the will. . . . Some men were able to see more fully than others could that there was no decent alternative to sticking it out and to see this not in a hot moment of impulse but steadily through many months of trial. They understood on what terms life was worthwhile."

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