In ancient warfare, the phalanx was a specific kind of troop formation in which armed soldiers were arrayed closely together in multiple rows and then advanced as one in battle. As Chris Walsh describes it here:
When considering the concept and history of cowardice, the phalanx is an instructive image in its suggestion of coercion and courage, force and free will, in the face of danger. These dichotomies raise a number of questions: If a coward is forced to fight, is he still a coward? Is cowardice a matter of will, or is it constitutional? Is refusing to fight in the face of coercion cowardly or brave? Or both? Which is more compelling, moral or physical coercion?
These are the kinds of nuances Walsh explores in this thoughtful book, in which he claims that “cowards and cowardice have something to teach us.” Walsh believes that cowardice is a subject worthy of our attention because it illuminates our moral vision: “What we think about cowardice,” he writes, “reveals a great deal about our conception of human nature and responsibility, about what we think an individual person can and should take, and how much one owes to others, to community or cause.”
Walsh’s discussion relies heavily, although not exclusively, on military references—both historical and literary—because it is the military ethos and experience that has largely crystallized and defined our concept of cowardice. But even within the military model, the designation of cowardice (as portrayed here) is often unexpectedly fluid.
Consider, for example, the story of John Callender, an officer in the Continental Army who was court-martialed by General Washington and found guilty of cowardice for retreating from the battle at Bunker Hill. According to Walsh, despite the court-martial, Callender chose to stay with his unit and went on to conduct himself admirably in subsequent battles. As Walsh notes, “At the Battle of Long Island in 1776, he fought so fiercely that he won the admiration of a British officer who kept his men from killing him.” Walsh concludes that the shame of Callender’s court-martial motivated him to his redemptive bravery. His behavior was, apparently, a result of both individual choice and a kind of moral coercion—not the actual, physical phalanx of Walsh’s description, but an abstract one.
Perhaps one of the most idiosyncratic examples offered to evoke “the tension between autonomy and obedience” in the context of combat and fear is that of Hooker DeLand, in some respects the negative image of John Callender. Deland was a Civil War soldier who had volunteered to fight for the Union—and fought well enough to earn steady promotions from private to captain.
Then, suddenly and simply, he refused to fight. As Walsh notes, he told a fellow soldier that “ ‘he thought it was too warm for him, that he did not want to get killed just then.’ ” While DeLand was convicted of cowardice and imprisoned until war’s end, his story suggests how elusive the designations of cowardice and courage can be. DeLand had already displayed courage; was he cowardly or brave when he asserted his will and refused to go back into combat? Walsh notes that DeLand was judged more harshly precisely because he had already displayed a capacity for battle.
These examples are only two in a volume packed with highly detailed, exhaustively researched material, largely about men and the conduct of war. The nuance and subtlety Walsh offers in his discussion of wartime experience contrasts with what he portrays as the common, and rather rigid, past belief that cowardice was a singular and defining trait. Public shaming of cowardly behavior in the military has often been seen as part of the discipline required to compel men to risk their lives. But Walsh argues that some of the cruel punishments meted out for cowardice—among them branding and execution—suggest that cowardice has been considered a matter of constitution that could not be “mitigated.”
In his final section, Walsh discusses more recent considerations of fear, duty, and consequences. With “a growing willingness to treat human behavior medically rather than judge it morally,” assessments of battlefield behavior have been transformed. Walsh notes that, beginning with the diagnosis of shell shock and battle fatigue in World War I, “the label cowardly was not applied as widely as it might have been, nor perhaps with the same certainty or ethical weight.”
While the movement toward a more diagnostic approach to the manifestations of fear might displease some, such an approach does not obscure the notion of cowardice but casts it in relief: “[D]iagnosis can serve the warrior spirit by confirming the suspicion of cowardice by ruling out medical explanations.” While not addressed by Walsh, it is further possible that the transition from the moral to the diagnostic increases the likelihood that the medicalization of fear (and its manifestations) could bring us full circle to the earlier, more determinative views of cowardice as part of a man’s “essence.”
Just as the contours of cowardice have changed with the mutation of the moral into the therapeutic, they have also adapted, Walsh argues, to the modern emphasis on individualism and the interiority it allows. He cites Mark Twain’s observation that a coward is a person who fails to do something he “set out to do.” Walsh notes that the “rise in individualism” has concentrated our attention “more and more about this individual sort of cowardice.”
This final discussion of individualism, existential timidity, and risk is somewhat discordant. Having given us a harrowing and detailed history of battlefield cowardice—and by implication, battlefield courage—readers may be disappointed that Walsh does not cast a more critical eye on the modern assumption of a moral equivalency between the fortitude required for self-realization and the fortitude required in the face of physical danger.
Sydney Leach is a writer in Virginia.
