What made you write a book about that? I have often been asked this question, with that sneering "that" unsubtly implying that my book’s subject is decidedly and deservedly obscure.
It’s fun to slap the “coward” label on terrorists, politicians and Sony executives, but why would anyone want to read, much less write, an extended historical analysis of cowardice? An early review noted that mine is the sole work on the subject in the U.S Library of Congress catalogue, making me “the pre-eminent researcher in the field”. I think the reviewer was at least half- and probably more than three-quarters-joking. Whatever the remaining fraction of seriousness, I’ll gladly and greedily take it. But I must admit that the field – let’s call it Cowardice Studies – is not exactly booming.
What made you write a book about that? Often the question comes with a bemused and accusatory air. Fair enough. I am pretty averse to conflict, agreeable to a fault, adept at changing the subject, at delay and dodge. “Funny,” said my girlfriend at the time I began the project, “you writing about that”. This was years ago, in the last century, actually, the last millennium. I’ve done a lot of delaying and dodging of the project since then, but my girlfriend was referring to my dodging and delaying when it came to her – to us. Mine was classic lover’s cowardice, typically described these days as fear of commitment. Yeats captured beautifully how haunting this could be:
Does the imagination dwell the most
Upon the woman won or woman lost?
If on the lost then admit you turned aside
From a great labyrinth out of pride,
Cowardice, some silly over-subtle thought
Or something called conscience once....
I had turned aside, and cowardice was indeed the reason, as the woman lost rightly said.
Rightly – but wrongly too, if her intention was to persuade me to stick around, for no man wants to be thought a coward, certainly not by his prospective spouse. Do I really need to go into this? German slang for “coward” – schlapschwanz (“limp-tail”) – suggests the intimate implications, and the cowardice of the bedroom can ripple outward. First World War posters told the women of London, “If your young man neglects his duty to his King and Country, the time may come when he will NEGLECT YOU”. It can also work the other way around: If your man neglects you, he will neglect his country. So now the ambivalent, noncommittal boyfriend must be not only a bad lover but a bad citizen too – a deserter? As you will have gathered, that particular great labyrinth is no longer my girlfriend.
What made you write a book about that? Sometimes the question is asked defensively, as if the questioner and his country were being accused. It does not help that a chapter of the book is devoted to cowardice in American history. “Profiles in Cowardice” tells of how the first thing General George Washington did upon taking over the Continental Army was to confirm convictions for cowardice of soldiers at the Battle of Bunker Hill, and it explores how cowardly soldiers were a problem in every American war, how the wars themselves were driven by the fear of being cowardly.
It also tells the famous story of General George S Patton calling two battle-fatigued American soldiers “cowards”, and slapping them for good measure. Then there’s the less famous story of Lyndon Baynes Johnson’s thinking when he decided to escalate American military involvement in Vietnam: “If I left that war and let the Communists take over South Vietnam,” he recalled, “then I would be seen as a coward and my nation would be seen as an appeaser....” Whether this worry was itself cowardly is a question worth asking, and worth asking about other episodes in the shadow history of a country whose anthem sings of its being the “home of the brave”.
But non-American readers should not feel too superior. Every nation has such a shadow history, and in fact Patton thought other places had it worse than the US. On the eve of the invasion of Sicily in 1943, he told his Italian- and German-American soldiers that their forebears had left Europe in search of freedom – a brave legacy that contrasted with the enemy’s cowardly inheritance: “The ancestors of the people we shall kill lacked the courage to make such a sacrifice and continued as slaves.”
Please, I’m not here to offend. See above regarding my cowardly agreeableness. Although I’m Irish-American, I certainly won’t presume to say that my great-great grandfather who crossed the Atlantic was any braver than his brother who stayed to face famine. I won’t say that my distant Irish cousins are even more cowardly than I am. Nor will I explore the instances in Irish history when the “bearna baoil” was not fully manned.
It’s just that, if I did my job right, there is something in the book to offend everyone. To those who want to side with Patton, to label the enemy cowardly and wield the shame of cowardice against anyone reluctant to fight, I point to the terrible damage that can ensue, and not just on the battlefield or in geopolitical struggles, but on street corners and in schoolyards and boardrooms – wherever and whenever the fear of seeming cowardly leads to physical or psychological violence. And I note that unthinkingly calling someone a coward ignores what we know about the hard-wired differences in how people react to fear, and about how trauma can break even the bravest people down. Those soldiers Patton slapped were indeed suffering from battle fatigue. Patton may have been, too.
But to those who point to the bloody history caused by the shame of cowardice and say that the whole barbaric idea should be consigned to the dustbin, I say that the idea of cowardice still has its uses. Patton’s army helped win Sicily. There are some duties we shouldn’t shirk, and some fears we should confront, the fear of being cowardly among them. Given the stakes, figuring out when the idea of cowardice is dangerous and when it is ethically bracing deserves our attention. That (among other things) is what made me write the book.
