I often thought of dropping the school, but I could never bring myself to fail or to publicly admit failure. I stuck it out.
FROM THE DIARY OF CONRAD SCHWARTZ
There is more to an army than weapons and training. Even more important than these two is spirit, the elusive esprit de corps. The men must believe in themselves and in their organization, and they must believe it in a deeply emotional way, rather than in a coldly logical manner.
You see, war is an absolutely irrational phenomenon. There is not and never was any sane reason to risk your only life attacking someone for some possible material or emotional benefit. Even if one was absolutely immoral, the plain fact is that you have everything to lose and damn little to gain.
It only makes sense to fight when someone else is attacking you, and even then there is a large element of the irrational in it.
Any individual man in a battle line can improve his chances of survival by running away. If he runs and everyone else stands and fights, odds are that he will live, while a certain percentage of those that fight will die. Yet if everyone runs, that army will take far higher casualties than if everyone stands and fights. The vast majority of casualties endured by a defeated army happen after the battle, during the mop-up operation after the battle line has faded.
So as irrational as it sounds, on the average your odds of survival are better if you stand and fight, even though as an individual your odds are better if you run away.
It is irrational. It's crazy! And therefore a winning army must be a special kind of crazy. The people in it must be insane enough to be willing to die so that the army may win. That special kind of insanity is called spirit.
You build spirit in many strange and irrational ways. One is that you stage special ceremonies, and our "Sunrise Service" was our most important one.
I wanted an oath of allegiance that would have emotional impact and be understandable to young and uneducated people. I carefully studied all the oaths that I could remember, but most of them were either too legalistic, like the military swearing-in ceremony, or they really didn't say much, like the American pledge to the flag. By far the best of the lot was the Boy Scout pledge and the Scout law. I modified it slightly to suit our circumstances, but every day of a trooper's life started out with this service.
They woke at dawn to the sound of bugles and were out on the parade grounds before the sun peaked over the horizon. At the first sliver of sunlight, a very short mass was said, less than eight minutes and without a sermon, though it took work to get the priest to do this at first.
I had a small band, some brass and percussion, play Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man." Then we raised our right arms to the sun and recited:
"On my honor, I will do my best to do my duty to God and to the Army. I will obey the Warrior's code, and I will keep myself physically fit, mentally awake, and morally straight."
"The Warrior's code:"
"A Warrior is: Trustworthy, Loyal, and Reverent; Courteous, Kind, and Fatherly; Obedient, Cheerful, and Efficient; Brave, Clean, and Deadly."
This was followed by the orders of the day, where the men were told what they'd be doing for the rest of the day.
The whole ceremony took less than twelve minutes, but it was done every day of a warrior's life. Forever.
Other things were done to build spirit. You wear the same kind of clothing, so you all look the same and start to think that you all really are the same. You march together, walking in exactly the same way. You sing together, sounding the same way. And you do great and impossible things together. You run difficult obstacle courses and eventually you win battles.
But my army wasn't going to have a chance to win any battles, not until the Mongols arrived. This wouldn't be like a modem war that lasts for five years and gives you a chance to blood your troops before the final conflict. The war with the Mongols would be won in two months if it was going to be won at all.
I needed something else to give the troops that magic feeling of invincibility, and I had two ideas. One was that notion of fire-walking.
Various primitive tribes and the crazy people in California practice fire-walking, or at least walking on a hot bed of coals. If I could show them that they could now walk naked through fire, they would believe that they were unstoppable. And no one will run if he truly believes that he will win.
The other is a curious optical phenomenon, called the glory. If you are on a high place early on a clear morning, and the valley below is very foggy, if everything is right, when you look at your shadow on the fog below, you see around your head beams of light radiating outward. It only shows up around your head and no one else's, at least from your perspective. They, of course, see it only around their own heads. I read about this in Scientific American, but their explanation for it was unconvincing.
Yet one morning, when I was running the troops through the obstacle course, looking down to my left I saw this very same phenomenon. It was spooky, as though I was wearing some sort of halo!
If I could show the men that they wore halos, that they were individually blessed by God, they would be true believers, absolute fanatics, the kind of crazy people who win wars.
I changed the course of the morning run and made that spot off-limits, saying it was a holy place. Yet I went back there other mornings and three-quarters of the time I could see the same strange effect. I would definitely make it a part of the graduation ceremony!
Chapter Twenty
FROM THE DIARY OF PIOTR KULCZYNSKI
After three months, there were less than half of us left. Eleven men had died, a dozen more were crippled for life, and others simply could not stand the strain of the training, but I was still there.
Lady Richeza started teaching a course on Saturday afternoons. She taught courtesy, and dancing on Saturday nights. Young ladies were brought in to assist her and it was all very carefully supervised. It was astounding to see female human beings again. Three months with none but male company does strange things to a young man's thoughts. Yet when the ladies were introduced, we grunts were all remarkably shy, and had to be ordered to associate with them! I never have understood my own feelings here.
The next three months were equally rough, and we lost almost two dozen more grunts, but after that the drop-out rate fell off, and the only losses we had were due to injuries. It wasn't that the course became any easier. It didn't. But those of us who were left were the sort who could survive anything. Climbing a rope higher than a church steeple didn't bother us in the least. We did it every day before breakfast! Going up or down a cliff twice that high was child's play, and we got to enjoying it. Half a day with double-weight weapons? We could do it!
Soon, we were issued plate armor of the sort that Sir Conrad wore, and we learned to do all our exercises while wearing it, no easy thing at first! We lost a few men on the cliffs when they misjudged their balance or the strength of rocks, but the rest of us learned the necessary reflexes.
Then we got our first guns. Sir Conrad said that guns could be made of any size, but that the larger ones were useful only to attack cities and castles. Our opponents would all be horsemen, and our guns were therefore fairly small. He called them swivel guns, for they were mounted on swivels that enabled them to be easily pointed in any direction. They were as long as I was tall and had a bore that was bigger than my thumb. They could shoot six times farther than a crossbow, and one of the bullets could go through four pigs and four sets of armor. I know, for I did the shooting and helped to eat the pigs afterward.
Six of these guns were mounted on a war cart that carried, besides the guns and ammunition, the weapons and supplies needed by forty-three men. That is to say, six squads of six men each, plus six squad leaders and a cart commander. The carts were large, six yards long, two wide and a yard and a half high, in addition to being a yard and a half off the ground. There were four huge wheels, and these were mounted on casters that could be locked in any of four positions. In transport, the wheels were locked so that they faced forward and back, and then pulled the long way. In combat, the casters were locked sideways, and the cart was pulled sideways so that all six guns could face the enemy.