A Hero's Sacrifice

In war the greatest battles, especially if a leader, are with one’s self. Swim on the surface of your command, or drown under its weight? How they carry you under! Those kilograms of obligation, expectation, and doubt. Then that kitbag of mad ideas. These far too heavy to bear. Paul Scott, The Mark of the Warrior. The best leaders not armoured knights but water-diviners.…

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The stronger the leader the more fragile. Paradox or simple common sense? A question we must answer, for it determines our view of authority; a subject acute in time of war, when jobs for officers far outstrip the talent to fill them. It’s crucial to this novel. Craig, though an experienced army officer, believes, through the failures of his last mission, that he is no leader of men. Lacking an impersonal core - a concrete bunker where a heart should be - he doesn't have the inhumanity - its cold calculation - necessary to keep his men alive (or so he thinks). Preferring life to death he lets death win. This man doesn’t have a killer’s instincts. Too sensible. Ordinary. Living on the surface of existence, Craig cannot dive deep into those paradoxical whirlpools, where lies swirl up into truth, and death tumbles back into life. A prosaic man, he lacks the prophet’s mad realism; is mercifully free of its ruthless imagination. But there are times when the group requires a belief in abstract concepts with their disregard of pleasure or pain.

John said: Finish me off: but I did not finish him off because while he lived there was hope for us of the forest and when he died there were left ourselves and death, and only luck dividing us from it, or mercy, divine providence, what you will. A man could not trust in luck, or in mercy. In the forest he could trust only in the destroyed man, the man who beat and hammered and shaped the senses of living men into a single weapon to demonstrate his will and knowledge of the enemy. Ramsay must prove to be such a man.

Craig is too egotistical to be a true commander. He thinks of individuals rather than the unit, feelings before ideas. Death is not welcomed as an heroic sacrifice. This makes him weak. When a fellow officer is fatally wounded he refuses this officer’s request to finish him off. A mistake. Not only does he prolong the man’s agony, he puts the other men’s lives at risk: the Japanese are close behind. Such sentimentality, out of place at a time when hard bargains must be struck with commonplace morality, is a solvent dissolving the bonds of a group; that cohesive force which both protects the men - no man to survive on his own - and raises them to ever new heights of endurance and heroism. To single a man out, to put him before that collective bond, is to break the group’s spell, thus losing energy and belief. A band of men is a molecule of human atoms held together by the force of a leader’s personality, who embodies both its communal identity and its shared faith. And in a paradox of psychology, the best leaders those who rise above the unit and its members. The great ones stand alone. Idea incarnate.

Six people died on that expedition; John shot by the Japanese, five drowning when a raft disintegrates in the river. Craig blames himself, even though he wasn't responsible for that raft. It is the natural feeling of a humane individual, conscious of his own weakness, that refusal to shoot a dying man. He feels he has failed. And is afraid to re-enter a jungle now dense in ugly associations. Of course he questions his ability to command. A bad omen for someone who trains others to be officers. To lack confidence in one’s powers is lose the requisite touch in this game of war, the simulated battles of the training ground. The conscious mind, now too active, throws up too many obstacles. Doubt gets in the way of intuition. It is to go down the wrong track…. To make the right decisions at critical moments we have to feel the situation; it is thinking without thought, a clever instinct, an experienced impulse; the rational act not the analytic reflection. The grace of the craftsman. Alas, Craig is reduced to the production line of war, a semi-skilled soldier.1

John’s brother joins Craig’s training camp. For Craig, this young man has all the qualities of which himself is deficient. The instinct to kill. Toughness. That detachment. A born leader! He forgets Ramsay is young and idealistic. A dangerous oversight. Clever and charismatic youth is apt to put idea before reality…. Here the idea - a plan of campaign - comes before the individual capacities of the men, their frailties and inexperience. The young overlook so much in life because they have so much life in them. Youth itself a superhuman category, all obstacles falling before their will and self-belief. Impossible dreams appear but common acts, and when added to a clever, practical mind: we are not talking men but Greek myths. Of course Ramsay wins the competition for the best field exercise, which the cadets act out in the jungle mountains. Craig is the umpire.

Craig stared at him. He said, “Ramsay, why do you want the men to dislike Baksh?”

Ramsay stared back, surprise growing on his face. “But he’s the villager, sir. They wouldn’t like a man who’s tipped off the enemy about them.”

Now Craig saw that Ramsay had truly crossed the barrier which separated the one reality from the other. He said, “All right—call your platoon commanders. Call Baksh,” and it seemed to him that, as he said the words, he delivered himself with the others into the hands of the whole man who was not for them a man at all but the sum of their separate longing to survive in the dark, green, drowned world.

To imagine a game as the real thing; this is the power of a great leader. Life re-invented within the mind of man. It is how we manage others, incite daring exploits and gain victories: by conquering their imaginations. One creates the group and the belief in the group; some big idea its totem pole. Ramsay sees further than most, and through this special insight - his sixth sense - acquires an aura of mystery and magic amongst his subalterns, who come to believe in themselves through him. A man different from the rest. He belongs to a race of charismatics; whether priest, artist or general. We witness its qualities of attraction and strength, but also the weaknesses and dangers.

On arrival at the camp the cadets share a rough equality. This rapidly changes during the exercise, Ramsay feeling himself growing away from these men. He is becoming a different kind of person; one less human. He treats Baksh, a British soldier, as if he really is a Japanese prisoner; which encourages others to do the same. Even Baksh succumbs to Ramsay’s imagination; by the end of this trip he too thinks of himself as the enemy; and will act like one, if given the chance. Ramsay’s jungle has become a novel where the author creates his characters, moving them around at will. An extraordinary quality, but also disturbing, for we suspect Ramsay no longer sees these men as people. Malleable (and thus disposable) as figures on a page.

At first we think not. He is an acute psychologist, able to understand and predict his men’s feelings and likely reactions. Ramsay works on all levels. Blake cheats - he’s not supposed to know the whereabouts of Ramsay’s base camp. Ramsay therefore uses Blake’s spy to trick him: Baksh is allowed to escape, and will unknowingly send Blake’s troops to the wrong ford. This is one level, of tactics. There are others, much deeper and which shock the mediocre Craig with their profundity. Ramsay is mining the deepest levels of the psychological coalfield. Baksh is given special treatment - extra rations, another man’s socks - so as to alienate him from the platoon. Weakening the bonhomie between this man and his colleagues, it generates a resentment that goes beyond Baksh to focus on the ‘enemy’; thus stiffening group feeling, a common hate the strongest of all bonds. These men are being forged into a unit, to increase each man’s power and range.2 For when part of a group, and feeling its force and purpose, we’ll undergo any kind of sacrifice, even of our own lives, to serve it: the pressure of that collective ideal is irresistible. Ramsay knows what he’s doing. The harder the exercise the greater the group feeling, and the more power he commands; but to maintain it he must keep the men’s confidence. 

Craig waited. He waited for Ramsay to say something that would make it ring true, that would make it seem as sound a plan here in the ravine as it had seemed in Khudabad, that would ease his doubts and remove the fear that had begun to eat into his marrow.

Ramsay said, “Of course it doesn't ring true. Nothing rings true until it’s happened.”

“What happens may be the wrong thing.”

“What could happen that may be the wrong thing here?”

“The plan could misfire in some way. We could find Blake waiting for us at the Elephant Hill crossing.”

“But we could find him waiting at the ford, too.”

“The patrols said there was nobody at the ford, Bob.”

“I know. But there might be someone at the ford now. There might be someone at the Elephant Hill crossing. We shan’t know until we get there. We can’t know what Blake’s decided to do. We could have an easy crossing or a tough crossing, with or without the Baksh plan. It seems sensible to have a crack at making a situation that’ll suit us.”

“Bob’s right. Anyway, the Baksh thing is laid on. We’ve got to wait and see how it turns out.”…

[Ramsay] lit a cigarette himself, turned to Craig, offered him one. Craig took it, fumbled for a light, then bent to the glowing end of Ramsay’s cigarette, and as he did so Ramsay said, “It’s all right, sir. Baksh has gone now.”

Startled, Craig looked up at the dark shape of Ramsay’s face….

A few minutes after midnight two men came in with a message from Lawson that Baksh had gone. An hour later they began the march back along the ravine. 

Telepathy! Great leaders, like the great artists, have an instinct and a confidence that is uncanny to us ordinary mortals. And when battles are won they seem clairvoyant and invulnerable. These not people, but wizards, even gods.

Craig’s error is to surrender to this power, which as yet is raw and immature.3 Believing himself weak he is overly sympathetic to the ‘strong’ Ramsay, who is behaving too aggressively and with no humanity. This is only an exercise. The long trip round Khudabad is justifiable. But to take Baksh prisoner and force him to walk, and without boots and rations? Baksh is not a Japanese. Ramsay has conflated a game with real life. It suggests he cannot differentiate between ideas and the reality they represent; a serious failing in a commander, who has to know the limitations of matériel and men. This will affect his image, as such ill-treatment ripples resentment through the ranks. By the time he gets his command, the consensus, if such behaviour continues, will be that he is a bastard, not the ideal epithet for an officer; who must win the trust and liking of his men, these complex emotions, tied to ideas of dependability, hardness and justice.4 Men will accept any amount of rough treatment if they think it just. Not so if they think it a mere act of will…. Craig tries to persuade Ramsay to ‘kill’ Baksh, thus removing him from the game. Ramsay refuses - there must be no interference in his plan. Acting the detached, impartial referee, Craig defers to Ramsay. Another error. He should have insisted on Baksh’s retirement. No battle simulation requires such fanaticism and risk. Craig is too weak, too affected by that last tragic expedition, to override this overconfident youngster. A critical mistake, and a turning point.

For a long time he stared at the opening into the jungle from which the men had ceased to erupt. His extended body was now poised uncertainly, deprived of the final eruption which would give it wholeness, complete identity, and in this state of half-being his mind rebelled and he wished that the jungle would close on the one side and on the other to swallow both the men who had not come and the men who had come and now moved invisibly upon the ridge to lay upon it part of the pattern of safety he had devised.

I am safe, he thought; in myself, by myself, there is safety. I could go now, alone, or stay here, alone. I am in myself all that I want of myself, and the safety I have devised is not for myself but for a force which represents me. The patterns which I lay down on the ground in the forms of men are the patterns of my own body which can both attack and defend. Here, where I stand, is the heart of the pattern. Here, where I stand, I stand, and for some reason it is not enough.

It is not enough because the thing that I hunt, the thing which waits and defends itself against me is not a man but a pattern devised by a man which describes that man. I am not a man who moves through the forest to attack this other man. I have become a pattern which moves through the forest to attack another pattern, and in the struggle between pattern and pattern is the shape of the struggle between myself and this other man; between myself and Blake. Blake and I fight each other in patterns. My right arm is a platoon of men which moves over the ground as my arm might move through the air to strike. My doubled fist is a spearhead of men and the weapons they carry are the knife I might grip in that fist.

The sun was below the hill now and he stood in shadow and watched the place in the jungle where the men who would complete his pattern must emerge. He stared for so long without moving his eyes from one spot that they began to play with him the jungle tricks with which he had become familiar. The trunk of a tree half exposed behind the laced creepers and leaves was a man, silent, watchful. The movement created by a current of air was the movement which followed the bending, the sharp twisting of a body. The leaf which trembled form the fall of a drop of water from the leaf above, trembled from the touch of a finger.

It is not a man, he told himself, it is not the movement of a body, or the touch of a finger. It is a man and a movement and a finger only to men who have no forest-wisdom and are incapable of becoming a pattern, who are not extended, stretched through the forest. From where I wait I have knowledge of the ridge behind me that I have not myself trodden, and of the part of the forest where my eyes saw movement and from which part of me has yet to emerge. The men on the ridge and the men who are still in the jungle do not have this knowledge because they are only the nerves reaching into the centre. I am the centre reaching out through the medium of the nerves.

But this centre and this nerve pattern is not myself. It is what I am forced to be but wish not to be. I would wish to sever the nerves from the centre and let the centre go back into myself so that I might be alone in the forest and move in my own safety towards an end or a beginning of my own making.

It would be easy, he thought, to turn now and go into the forest alone in the gathering darkness. But he continued to stand, motionless, and in a while he heard the sounds that the stragglers made as they came down the spur. 

Using Baksh as a decoy Ramsay marches his men to a difficult crossing point in the river. It is now, as he watches his men traverse the water, that he feels the fragility of all leaders. To be powerful is to extend yourself through others; less an individual person than a network. The result is an enormous increase in force, but also a vast vulnerability, for these men, extensions of yourself, are not under your complete control. Their mistakes are your mistakes; a man’s wounds one’s own. So much power, yet it rests on shaky foundations,   dependent, as you are, on those separate from yourself. A scary feeling. It is why Ramsay feels that urge to run away, to be alone, to recover his humanity once again. This is the supreme test of a leader. Can Ramsay cross to the other side? Give up his self, submerge the ego in the group, and then come out on the other bank, master of both himself and others? One must be secure in one’s own psyche to take such risks with one’s identity. To lose it (at the right times) and keep it (when it matters most)? Magical abilities.

There is an accident. In trying to save a soldier Ramsay drowns. He has failed the test.

What has gone wrong? This young man has been allowed to take too many risks, and in the critical moment they overwhelm him. This crossing was too dangerous for such an exercise. An experienced officer would have factored in the possibility of an accident and its fatal consequences. He hasn’t. Ideal and the real conflated, the difficulties of the real are underplayed. In this critical moment Ramsay forgets about his men, now just pieces in a pattern. It is the narcissism of youth; that inability to separate one’s ego from others, who are reduced to mere objects or replicas of one’s self. Then that tendency to believe ideas are reality.5 It is to think that if something can be done it will be done. Not helped that for idealists, fanatics really, death holds no fears.

There are errors of judgement and psychology. In a battle is it better if a private or the commander dies? I have answered my own question. The leader is of supreme importance to the life of the group, who lives off his presence. He must live on, while others die. Those who lead - the group’s totem pole - must be brave and they have to survive: no foolhardy risks please. Thus the wise officer cultivates a distance from the group, and accepts the hardest task of all: he must sacrifice his men in a crisis.

But this is an exercise. Because he has created unnecessary dangers Ramsay must sacrifice himself. No choice. The occasion demands it. To willingly let another man die during a game - unthinkable!  It is also bad psychology: no officer would keep the trust of the men after that. Ramsay dives into the river and drowns.

I am making allowances.

If this had been a real battle he would have done the same thing. Ramsay cannot conceive of himself outside the pattern he makes. This man a natural network not an individual. Always to submerge himself in the group not rise above it. Late into the exercise Ramsay tells Craig that his brother’s deliberately mangled the raft so as to drown the weaker soldiers, who thus wouldn’t hinder the platoon’s retreat. That was an error, he says, because he broke the pattern, destroyed the essence of the unit, the mystic bond connecting all its men.6 All are saved or none. It is a crazy notion. Also revealing. For Ramsay, leaders don’t bungle, they only make large, cosmic mistakes. A collective identity rises a man above all petty concerns. Only the group has meaning, has life…. It is not so. In a body an arm or a leg are not as important as the heart or brain. In the last analysis a group is only an idea, and this idea is a bonding agent. Now of course, we know, that the stronger the bond the easier for the leader to rule, for the group will govern itself.7 But Ramsay is a concept freak; he thinks the idea all important, bigger than any man’s existence. It is Craig’s job to correct him. The exercise not just about training the men to work as a unit and obey orders, it is to train officers in how to act with insight and wisdom, which in part requires an education in both the value and the dangers of ideas and group feeling. But Craig has his own problems, of which Ramsay appears the solution. Seduced by this young man’s exceptional qualities he fails to exercise his own judgement. He lets our young hero down. Ramsay, taking the idea to its extreme, and fusing it with his own identity, goes too far. A touch of humanity, a sense of balance, a feel for the material…the referee should have pulled his whistle out. To command men we have to see them from the outside. A leader to remain aloof from his group. The young, so keen to lose themselves in a band of brothers, have to be trained to be detached, to respect the individual in man. 

A soldier trips in the water, and floats away, he is going to drown. Ramsay, with full pack on, jumps into the river and saves him, at the cost of his own life. He has taken on too much. He doesn't think enough of himself. And dies. We sit on the sofa, looking at the wall, shocked into immobility, the novel sprawled at our feet. We had forgotten that the strongest leaders are also the most delicate. Power its own weakness.

Review: The Mark of the Warrior

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1.The great novel about this: The Hunters, by James Salter.

2. For a similar but more brilliant scene: Alexander Baron, From the City, From the Plough.

3. The soldiers are lucky in From the City, From the Plough: every knows about the ‘Mad Major’.

4. Wonderful examples in From the City, From the Plough.

5. The great novel is Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma, especially the early scenes around Waterloo.

6. We note just how close Ramsay is to the Mad Major in From the City, From the Plough.

7. Especially when in battle. A big theme of From the City, From the Plough.