Stand to Your Glasses Steady

Heroism is a big, broad, kinda-scary word. Webster’s dictionary defines a hero as a person distinguished for valor, fortitude, or bold enterprise; anyone regarded as having great courage or exceptionally noble qualities.

In her memoir, A Testament of Youth, Vera Brittain convinces herself that Roland’s death had some deeper meaning, that he somehow died a hero and for that reason deserved to be remembered. Edward, on the other hand, writes a letter to Vera from the trenches with quite a different tale: “It is quite easy for me now to understand how Roland was killed; it was quite ordinary but just unlucky.” Roland was mortally wounded by a machine gun volley while examining the wire in No Man’s Land one hundred yards from the German line. Was he a hero, or was he just some unlucky sap in the wrong place at the wrong time? This was the dilemma discussed in class last week.

Even if the previous unit had neglected to mention the German presence, at one hundred yards, I have to imagine it would have to be fairly obvious that they were very close to the enemy’s lines. Also, it was called No Man’s Land for a reason and usually seen as punishment to be sent out there. Making matters all the more obvious, there was a full moon. Now, there might have been some self-sacrificing nobility of the kind the poet-soldier Rupert Brooke would find endearing, but the cold facts lead me to believe that, unless those German’s were blind and stupid, Roland had a death wish going out there.

What makes his death so much more heroic than all the other soldiers who died in poison gas attacks or of dysentery in some medieval hospital? What about the soldiers who were shot going over the top in huge, massed assaults, or pilots jumping out of burning planes at several thousand feet without parachutes?

Not everyone can be a hero. Some people are simply doomed to anonymous ends. Take for instance, Pickett’s Charge during the Battle of Gettysburg. Everyone knows General Armistead mortally wounded while leading the assault on foot and waving his hat around on his sword. But who has ever heard of General Garnett, killed within twenty-five yards of the stone wall riding his horse because he was too injured to walk? Garnett is not only confused all too often with his cousin – General R.S. Garnett – but he is the only General killed during the war to never be found. To this day, no one knows where he is or even what he looks like because the one photo of him might actually be his cousin. Talk about anonymous endings…