Run! Run! Run for Your Life!
The Dauphin may have been a lily-livered coward. But it was Joan of Arc who ended up as charcoal.
“Yes, I am afraid. It’s no use preaching to me about it,” the Dauphin informs Joan of Arc early on in George Bernard Shaw’s play about a chatty girl warrior who insists on cutting her own hair, donning unattractive armor, wielding a sword, leading her people into battle with the English, and generally managing matters in such a frantic, driven, insistent — one might be forced to say courageous — manner that because of her bravery she is ultimately turned into charcoal.
Along the way, it is widely felt (and not merely by Shaw, but also by actual historians), Joan also succeeds in transforming a cowardly prince — yes, a fairly unpopular guy from a prominent national political family who would rather go AWOL than engage in actual military service — into a king who expects lots of men to die in battle for their sovereign.
The trouble is, initially, the Dauphin is pretty damn sure that given the risks, he doesn’t want to do everything possible to get the royal job. In fact he has some pretty intelligent reservations about the goals the girl-warrior wants to thrust on him:
“It’s all very well for these big men with their armor that is too heavy for me, and their swords that I can hardly lift and their muscles and their shouting and their bad temper,” he says, gazing around at a bunch of lords and archbishops who clearly despise him. “They like fighting. Most of them are making fools of themselves all the time. But I am quiet and sensible and don’t want to kill people ... I don’t want courage put into me.”
Thus speaks, I believe, the sanest person in literature. A man girded with the most underrated virtue in history: cowardice. A prince we’re all supposed to disdain. Even good old Shaw means us to despise the Dauphin, although the playwright was a famous pacifist. (Which, I am bound to say, I am certainly not. Hurt me, my family, or my cat, and I will definitely pay
someone else a lot of money to hurt you.)
But Shaw, and history, and most of the world, clearly consider the Dauphin a lily-livered idiot, unworthy of Joan’s assistance. They also believe the Maid herself to be, given her ambition, her wardrobe, and the courage she thrusts upon herself, the real man of the crowd. “I am frightened beyond words before a battle,” Shaw has Joan say, “but it is so dull afterwards when there is no danger: oh so dull! Dull! Dull!”
Now let’s examine a person who not only hears voices but also declares that a cessation of hostilities, an end to massacre, leaves her feeling despondent and “dull.”
What do we moderns label such a person these days? Demented? A sadist? A wack job?
Not at all. She’s a saint.
This is what we’ve come to. This is where evolution has brought us: a vast improbable landscape littered with insane stabs at bravery and foolhardy risks adopted by few intelligent creatures in the animal kingdom. Even wolves are likely to yield when confronted with large, bold prey. Yielding, when confronted by something bigger and more powerful, is what smart animals do.
But not man. No matter how hazardous or meretricious the pursuit, the tendency these days is to label it heroic, especially if the venture results in lots of deaths of people one doesn’t actually know. No matter how rash or irresponsible the pursuer, there is a compelling urge to lavish laurels on that warrior’s brow. And conversely, there is an equal tendency to designate the danger-resisters as cowards and criminals. (Literally criminals. During World War I, American conscientious objectors were packed off to Alcatraz and Fort Leavenworth. However, these kinds of dissidents are not really the focus of my argument, since in their efforts to avoid combat, conscientious objectors don’t generally cite cowardice. Which, in a way, is a shame).
Cowardice, in other words, has gotten a really bad rap. And why? I keep asking myself, what could be more sensible? More life-enhancing? Who is likely to live longer: the guy packing heat at the door or the guy hiding under the bed? Who, for that matter, is more intelligent? And more likely to live a bit longer so as to be able to procreate and have equally intelligent kids?
Cowards, after all, are the only ones who actually take the trouble to add up the minuses of defying mortality. Who do not necessarily take dumb risks and then rely on the goodwill of HMOs or the compassion of the military that sends people to war. Who come, as a result of careful deliberation, to certain rational conclusions. Namely: Death is probably not a good idea. Disfigurement may reduce marriage prospects. Insurance companies have a way of bailing out just when you most need them, as does, for that matter, Walter Reed.
In this ability to think ahead and ponder the future, the acknowledged coward is so unlike many of our famous contemporaries, a lot of whom passionately embrace valor…in print. Let’s take, for example, the author and tireless pundit Bill Bennett, whose best-seller
The Book of Virtues: A Treasury of Great Moral Stories is crammed with instructive tales extolling mankind’s finer points. Bennett is so fond of these virtues that each one is launched by a robust capital letter. As it happens, Courage is not first on his hit list. It is second: right after Responsibility, but before Compassion.
And just what constitutes Courage, in Bennett’s view? A loony early-twentieth-century advertisement for volunteers for an Antarctic expedition paid for by British explorer Ernest Shackleton:
“Men wanted for hazardous journey,” begins the ad so admired by Bennett. “Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in case of success.”
(Quick: how many “honored” names of Shackleton’s twenty-seven-man crew ring that bell of recognition just now?)
Another virtuous moment? The charge of the Light Brigade, which Bennett considers a sterling example of personal Responsibility. Yes, the very brigade that began so promisingly during the Crimean War with 673 British live cavalrymen led by Lord Cardigan, who brought them all to what became known, without exaggeration, as the Valley of Death.
The end of this story: after the Russians cleverly outflanked him, there were 118 brigade men killed and 127 wounded (most of the dead and wounded, of course, were mere rank and file and not officers). Among themselves, the Russians suspected that their enemy was more than likely, and to a man, completely drunk. This, however, is not how the massacre is generally presented today.
Why not? Because Alfred, Lord Tennyson, a more talented and earlier version of Bill Bennett, thought the moment fabulous, wondrous, and tragic, a splendid example of following orders, no matter how idiotic the titled commander who gives them. The great poet also thought the predictable defeat an unexampled profile in courage, of course. That above all. No one loves war more than a writer who’s never fought one.
As for the French who were watching aghast as the English were massacred, it was Marshal Pierre Bosquet who observed at the battle’s end, “C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre. C’est la folie.” It’s magnificent, but it’s not war. It’s lunacy. A verdict, by the way, that was interred with the bones of his poor allies.
What are we to make of all the fuss that’s regularly bestowed on courage by those who haven’t ever demonstrated the smallest inclination to indulge in it? The colorful stripes and endless sagas and legends woven in its name on acts of tremendous and unrepentant stupidity? Or the untoward indictments throughout the ages of quiet, unheralded, misunderstood cowardice, so often the modest savior of mankind?
Naturally, I think once again of the French. Of the reluctant, fearful Dauphin, Saint Joan’s Dauphin. At the end of the day, she was a brave and eager teenage heroine and she was dead. And he was still very much a coward. But he was also victorious. And he was left standing. And ruling.
True, the Dauphin didn’t get to write history or achieve sainthood. So few of us do, tragically. But he got to live a lot longer, until he was fifty-eight, which was pretty old for those days. In that time he managed to acquire a wife, two mistresses, and four children.
And that, as it happens, is what life is all about.
.....
Judy Bachrach is a contributing editor at
Vanity Fair and proprietor of
TheCheckoutLine.org, a blog that deals with death and dying.
