Imagination and Courage

—How often have I heard the remark, “ I should not be such a coward, were it not for my imagination ” ! The conclusion would seem to be that the less imagination one has, the more courage he will display. Is this conclusion a valid one ?

But first let me premise : there is a kind of courage at which men always marvel,— courage wherein, the usual motive of incurring risk being absent, an individual will still face grave danger with stolidity and with the calmness akin to indifference, which is the recognized property of the veteran. This I have myself seen in a first action, and on the part of those very far from possessing the temperamental recklessness so generally a concurrent quality in persons who face cheerfully the chances of war.

During a calamitous and, I regret to say, a rather precipitate retreat, a body of men who were making a reconnaissance had passed into a field which was skirted by a heavy rail fence. Our pursuers were not only close upon us in outnumbering security, but were also extremely well mounted. They were the dreaded Virginia cavalry of the rough-rider Stuart. Suddenly, a youth—a non-commissioned officer who had been selected for the position of sergeant-major more for his gracious mien and shapely form than on account of any record —deliberately turned back, and as deliberately put up the bars through which our men had retreated; by this action delaying our pursuers until we were in safety.

“ That young fellow,” remarked our colonel, “should be made an officer. He looks intelligent, and we know he’s brave. Send him to me.”

In the course of the interview that followed at headquarters, I asked the young man something about his sensations while in unusual peril.

“I have n’t any,” he said quietly.

“How so? Surely you have had but little experience ? ”

“ Very true, sir. But before I enlisted, the horrors of war had so familiarized themselves to my imagination that the actual scenes were a relief, they fell so far short of what I had fancied and of what I had feared.”

To me, at that time, this was a new view of one of the sources of courage ; yet I saw the reason for what the men, in speaking of their young comrade, called his “apathy,” — an apathy which our Crimean veterans frankly envied him. The truth was, the boy’s imagination — he was scarcely eighteen — had done for him that which usually requires years of frightful experience. Already he had the invincible calm of the old soldier, and all through a mental process over which, it might be, he had no control, but which, nevertheless, was an essential part of his nature.

I do not claim that my hero presented an ordinary case, or that he could readily have been duplicated in our ranks. The converse was only too frequently illustrated, for most of our soldiers found war infinitely worse than their poor imaginations had pictured it : hence were they unprepared for the confusing suddenness of the ghastly scenes through which they were to be hurried, — the delirium of fear, the awful sense of chaos and colliding forces as though worlds clashed in the meeting ! To encounter all this with anything like the “ equal mind ” prescribed by antique valor, it is necessary to have seen it often, or to have secured the needed familiarity in some other way. This our young sergeant-major had done. He was not unlike the rower who should first practice in a heavy boat before racing in a light one. He was brave because of his imagination; veteran because of its excess. Von Moltke’s blackboard taught the Prussian neophyte how France was to be conquered, how invincible zouaves and grizzled African veterans should be led to hopeless defeat. In some such fashion the teeming mind of our young soldier showed what dangers were to come and how they must be met.

I am aware that the case in point is open to this objection : that, had the youthful hero been made of weaker fibre, his imagination, instead of seasoning his sensibilities by a sort of moral vaccination, might have deterred him altogether. I would be far from maintaining that the gift of imagination alone would make a coward brave. I am not even inclined to deny that usually it will add somewhat to the burden of him who conscientiously carries a musket into battle ; but I would deny that the imagination invariably is put to such ignoble use as the rank and file of carpers would have us believe. On the contrary, I am more inclined to think that so gracious a gift has in this assumption served too often as an excuse for cowardice. Surely it is fair to suppose that with the faculty which makes pictures and poems there would naturally go a pardonable pride in its possession, — a proportionate shame at the thought of proving deficient in any manly quality. Indeed, I have not hesitated, when men pleaded imagination in excuse for defective courage, to rejoin, “A fancy that can conjure up a battle might well go a step farther, and conjure up a court-martial whereby the offender should be sentenced to be shot for cowardice ! ”