Grades of Courage.

While I was having my lunch today, I watched an episode of an old British TV documentary series called The World at War. Today’s programme was about the resistance in Germany to Hitler and the Nazis, with particular reference to the failed assassination attempt in 1944. It showed footage of a subsequent trial.

A thin, bespectacled young man stood alone, confronted by a cruel judge and surrounded by a hostile host. Is there any situation lonelier or more sapping of a person’s self-confidence than that? He said that he had fought bravely at the start of the war, but had become disillusioned with the policies of the Reich and disturbed by the murders he had witnessed. The judge howled at him, called him ‘scum,’ and tried to shout him down. The man talked quietly on, knowing that he was condemning himself to a brutal and painful execution.

This is not the hot, adrenalin-induced courage of the battlefield, nor the stoical sort exhibited by bombed out civilians who can do nothing about their situation but try to survive. This is the cold, quiet, considered kind. I think it is maybe the purest.