On Heroism and its Disguises

Ken Burns's epic documentary The War, with its relentless and graphic depiction of the shock, fear, and violence of combat, whether in the air or on the ground, moved me to be grateful for the luck of having served in Cannon Company, 347th Regiment, 87th Infantry Division, Third Army. Our four 105mm howitzers fired over our front lines, not from them. Once, a German plane flew over our convoy, so we jumped into the ditches. On our first engagement, which was in the Saar region, where Germany and France come together, we were shelled by German .88s and threw ourselves down flat whenever we thought the rounds were exploding close to us. Yet, while I was in Cannon Company, I don't remember that we lost any men.

I am sure, however, that I must have helped kill many people, though I saw none of them. During the Battle of the Bulge, I was putting powder bags into a shell casing, adding the nosecone, and carrying the projectile to the man who would ram it into one of our four cannons. One of the powder bags I sometimes put into the casing, when it was called for by the forward observers, was made of white phosphorous, which created intense fire when the shell exploded. I am glad that I never saw the terrible results of our using it.

Burns's documentary was more successful in showing why it was not a "good war" than it was in showing why it was a necessary one; but it was utterly convincing in demystifying abstract or romantic notions of heroism—expressed, for example, in "The Soldier's Faith," delivered by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., as an oration for the Harvard graduating class of 1895: "That faith is true and adorable which leads a soldier to throw away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty, in a cause which he little understands, in a plan of campaign of which he has no notion, under tactics of which he does not see the use."

When he was not looking backward in piety for his fallen comrades, however, Holmes was entirely realistic in his letters and diaries about his experience, which included being wounded three times. Participating as a staff officer in the attack on Richmond, he wrote his mother in 1864 that "these nearly two weeks have contained all of fatigue & horror that war can furnish … nearly every Regimental officer I knew or cared for is dead or wounded." He felt that he had "earned the right" to decide for himself that he could no longer "endure the labor and hardships of the line," and so when the original term of his enlistment expired, he resigned from the service. Holmes's later idea of heroism in his Harvard oration was circular: "Out of heroism grows a faith in the worth of heroism." There is one part of Holmes's oration, however, that many veterans in our war could endorse: "This is also part of the soldier's faith: Having known great things, to be content with silence." It was not enough for him, but it was for many of them.

I saw nothing in the war to illustrate Holmes's "true and adorable" faith, but I did see one deed that I considered, then and now, to be heroic in quite another sense. One of Holmes's friends, William James, the psychologist and philosopher, might well have appreciated it. James did not serve in the war, but he had a close connection to it in his brother Wilkie, who was badly wounded at the battle of Fort Wagner, S.C., when he was an adjutant to Col. Robert Gould Shaw, commander of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment. It was one of the first in the Union army to be made up of freed black men. On July 18, 1863, Shaw and nearly half of his men were killed when they attacked Fort Wagner.

James, in Boston's Music Hall, delivered the oration on May 31, 1897, at the dedication of Augustus Saint-Gaudens's eloquent sculpted monument to Shaw and his...