Modern Mystery.

The Mystery of Courage, by William Ian Miller (Harvard, 346 pp., $29.95)

William Ian Miller, a professor of law at the University of Michigan and author of piquant volumes on Humiliation (1993) and The Anatomy of Disgust (1997), is brave enough to have written a book about courage, a subject he regards-as much at the end as at the beginning of his story- as a "mystery." Not that its mysteriousness prevents it from being of absorbing interest. Miller is at his best in displaying the results of his trawlings through the literature of war for examples that illuminate what he calls "the emotional terrain" of courage, which includes all those counter-urges-fear, shame, humiliation, and disgust- that courage must overcome.

Miller discusses, for instance, the surprisingly extensive debate over which prospect is more daunting, being blown to bits by a shell or being shot with a rifle. One man can face the prospect of the first with equanimity while being reduced to abject terror by the second; for another, the reverse is the case. "To be killed by a bullet seemed so clean and surgical," wrote Pvt. E. B. Sledge, U.S.M.C., of his service in the Pacific during World War II. "But shells would not only tear and rip the body, they tortured one's mind almost beyond the brink of sanity." Capt. Robert Graves of the Royal Welch Fusiliers in World War I, on the other hand, records that the very randomness of shellfire made it less terrifying.

A bullet was aimed at you.

Facing bombs or bullets clearly requires courage, but Miller is most fascinated by the ambiguities of his subject. He begins with the case, recorded in a Civil War memoir by Robert J. Burdette, of what he calls "the good coward." This is a person who is a model of discipline and duty in every other way, but who runs from battle. His comrades treat his cowardice with indulgence because he keeps trying in spite of his fear, and Burdette records that by the end of the war he had come to believe that the coward was actually braver than those who had not run.

Miller draws another example of brave cowardice from a British memoir of the Italian campaign in the Second World War, which tells of a soldier so lacking in what J. Glenn Gray calls "a sense of union with his fellows" that he can defy both orders from officers and ridicule from comrades, perversely taking pride in the very thing of which most men would be ashamed. Miller speculates that Eddie Slovik, the only American soldier to be shot for cowardice in the last century, was such a man.

It is such cases that give rise to the alleged "mystery" of courage. What Miller means by this is simply that he can't tell where courage comes from. To him it is a mystery because we can never fully trace its psychic roots. Yet is this not equally true of good and evil, kindness and cruelty, love and hatred, and, indeed, the whole gamut of human behavior? Even though we can never fully trace the psychic roots of anything, we are culturally bred up to a childlike faith in the existence of those roots and will go on reading with unquenchable fascination those who, like Prof. Miller, are particularly skilled at digging them out.

The trouble is that, to this extent, his subject really isn't courage at all, but rather its psychic authenticity-to interest him, courage must come from within and not be just a fear of looking like a coward. But courage is particularly unsuited to being treated as a unique psychic event, peculiar to the individual in whom it does or doesn't happen, and both unpredictable and obscure in its origins. Obviously, such treatment maximizes its mystery, but then we are left with the greater mystery of how a quality so essential to the establishment and preservation of human societies can be so mysterious. If the countless armies that have marched across the globe through thousands of years of warfare had had to rely on courage to come bubbling up from some subterranean psychic spring in each individual soldier every time they needed it, they would never have marched at all.

The hard cases that fascinate Miller, it seems to me, take him further away from his ostensible subject and back, always back, to the quest for psychic authenticity. Part of the problem is that he accepts the common but somewhat unreliable distinction between physical and moral courage. "Let us accept as fact," he writes, "that the manifestly physically courageous may not be especially morally courageous. People will face death rather than follow the dictates of their conscience when it tells them that they are risking their life for something trivial, wrong, evil, or just a mistake. The harder question is to what extent moral courage can exist independently of physical courage."

Indeed! But the psychologist of courage nowadays tends to wonder if physical courage alone might not be considered a form of moral cowardice. For if a soldier is motivated to risk death only from fear of appearing to his friends and comrades as a coward, is not his act of bravery itself a form of cowardice? Miller does not go so far as to say this, but he does elevate moral courage to paramount status and so comes near to suggesting that physical courage that is born (as physical courage often is) of the fear of appearing cowardly suffers from what he calls "the taint of honor and shame."

A traditional understanding of the subject would regard that phrase as an oxymoron, but for the assiduous seeker-out of psychic roots, the paths of honor can themselves be something to be ashamed of. Likewise, physical courage that is not a manifestation of moral courage can seem almost its antithesis. To those who think like Prof. Miller, the craven sort of bravery that fears the bad opinion of others more than death itself can seem hardly worthy of the designation. We should remind ourselves that this kind of thinking is not about courage itself so much as it is a redundant tribute to the contemporary passion for genuine, unmediated feeling. That's a mystery of another kind.