I am glad, but not surprised, to see that Miss Yonge has held to this sound distinction in her golden little book of “Golden Deeds,” and said, “Obedience, at all costs and risks, is the very essence of a soldier’s life. It has the solid material, but it has hardly the exceptional brightness, of a golden deed.”
I know that it is very difficult to draw the line between mere obedience to duty and express heroism. I know also that it would be both invidious and impertinent in an utterly unheroic personage like me, to try to draw that line; and to sit at home at ease, analysing and criticising deeds which I could not do myself; but—to give an instance or two of what I mean:
To defend a post as long as it is tenable is not heroic. It is simple duty. To defend it after it has become untenable, and even to die in so doing, is not heroic, but a noble madness, unless an advantage is to be gained thereby for one’s own side. Then, indeed, it rises towards, if not into, the heroism of self-sacrifice.
Who, for example, will not endorse the verdict of all ages on the conduct of those Spartans at Thermopylæ, when they sat “combing their yellow hair for death” on the sea-shore? They devoted themselves to hopeless destruction; but why? They felt—I must believe that, for they behaved as if they felt—that on them the destinies of the Western World might hang; that they were in the forefront of the battle between civilisation and barbarism, between freedom and despotism; and that they must teach that vast mob of Persian slaves, whom the officers of the Great King were driving with whips up to their lance-points, that the spirit of the old heroes was not dead; and that the Greek, even in defeat and death, was a mightier and a nobler man than they. And they did their work. They produced, if you will, a “moral” effect, which has lasted even to this very day. They struck terror into the heart, not only of the Persian host, but of the whole Persian empire. They made the event of that war certain, and the victories of Salamis and Platæa comparatively easy. They made Alexander’s conquest of the East, one hundred and fifty years afterwards, not only possible at all, but permanent when it came; and thus helped to determine the future civilisation of the whole world.