Heroism's End? THE MASK OF COMMAND

By Otto Friedrich

A military historian who had never seen combat, John Keegan distinguished - himself a decade ago by writing The Face of Battle, a vivid triptych on three epic British battles that had all taken place within about 100 miles of one another: Agincourt (1415), Waterloo (1815) and the Somme (1916). Keegan ignored many considerations of high strategy and concentrated instead on what the ordinary soldiers had encountered through the centuries: the recurring experience of pain, noise, terror, courage, exhaustion.

Now, while quoting Montesquieu's dictum that a "rational army would run away," Keegan has undertaken a kind of sequel that shrewdly explores the various ways in which a gifted commander can not only steel men for battle but lead them to victory as well. Once again he has chosen a few avatars to illustrate an evolution in leadership:

The heroic style. Here is Alexander the Great, who smashed the Persian Empire and led his devoted Macedonian phalanxes all the way to India. A fearless warrior, he was wounded eight times before succumbing to a fever at 32.

The antiheroic style. Here is the Duke of Wellington, who described his soldiers as the "scum of the earth" and often had them flogged. But his meticulous planning and preparation enabled his disciplined troops to defeat Napoleon at Waterloo.

The unheroic style. Here is Ulysses S. Grant, who rode into battle with a cigar in his mouth and was all too often drunk, but who became commander of the Union armies because President Lincoln said of him: "I need this man. He fights."

The false-heroic style. Here is Adolf Hitler, who indulged himself in late- night monologues to his adjutants about vegetarianism, the old days in the trenches and the "sapping effects" of Christianity while his armies plunged toward disaster on the Russian front.

Hitler? Yes, there are asymmetries in Keegan's battle plan. Though Hitler was indeed the German supreme commander in World War II, he is the only civilian political leader in this quartet. He is also the only loser. If we study Hitler, why not Napoleon instead of Wellington? Conversely, the modern analogue to Wellington is not Hitler but Dwight Eisenhower. But Keegan is following a somewhat unorthodox method, not deriving a theory from his examples but choosing his examples to illustrate a thesis.

About each of his four characters, Keegan poses a fundamental question: Did he believe that it was necessary for a commander to fight at the head of his soldiers? Keegan's answers: Alexander always, Wellington often, Grant no more % than necessary, Hitler never. Keegan attributes this chronological evolution to the continuing development of longer-range weapons, which made a general's presence on or near the battlefield increasingly perilous. At the same time, technology also provided the telegraph, telephone and radio, making possible the commander's separation from his troops. This trend reached its culmination in World War I, when the "chateau generals" on both sides lived in comfortable villas far from the trenches and ordered futile new offensives until the troops were near mutiny. In World War II, while Hitler relied on propaganda about his war record, Eisenhower made a great point of being seen among his G.I.s and talking with them about their mission.

To be a successful leader, Keegan argues, a commander must master five imperatives: the imperative of kinship (persuading his troops that he understands and cares for them); the imperative of prescription (being able to tell his troops exactly what he wants and why); the imperative of sanction (convincing the troops that they will be rewarded if they fight and punished if they don't); the imperative of action (knowing when to attack); and the imperative of example (showing that he shares in the troops' dangers).

Or so things stood until the coming of the nuclear missile, when all the rules abruptly changed and the leadership of men in combat suddenly became secondary to the decision on when to push buttons. What is needed now, says Keegan, is "an end to the ethic of heroism . . . for good and all." In a nuclear showdown, he concludes, a leadership can justify itself only "by its detachment, moderation and power of analysis." Keegan thinks the U.S. got that leadership from John Kennedy during its only real nuclear confrontation, the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. As for the next time . . .