The Art of Manliness - Manvotionals: Timeless Wisdom and Advice on Living the 7 Manly Virtues (17 page)
Authors: Brett McKay
“The block of granite which is an obstacle in the pathway of the weak, becomes a stepping-stone in the pathway of the strong.” —Thomas Carlyle
By Anonymous
Life is a game with a glorious prize,
If we can only play it right.
It is give and take, build and break,
And often it ends in a fight;
But he surely wins who honestly tries
(Regardless of wealth or fame),
He can never despair who plays it fair
How are you playing the game?
Do you wilt and whine, if you fail to win
In the manner you think your due?
Do you sneer at the man in case that he can
And does, do better than you?
Do you take your rebuffs with a knowing grin?
Do you laugh tho’ you pull up lame?
Does your faith hold true when the whole world’s blue?
How are you playing the game?
Get into the thick of it—wade in, boys!
Whatever your cherished goal;
Brace up your will till your pulses thrill,
And you dare to your very soul!
Do something more than make a noise;
Let your purpose leap into flame
As you plunge with a cry, “I shall do or die,”
Then you will be playing the game.
“An acorn is not an oak when it is sprouted. It must go through long summers and fierce winters, and endure all that frost, and snow, and thunder, and storms, and side-striking winds can bring, before it is a full grown oak. So a man is not a man when he is created; he is only begun. His manhood must come with years. He who goes through life prosperous, and comes to his grave without a wrinkle, is not half a man. Difficulties are God’s errands and trainers, and only through them can one come to fullness of manhood.” —Henry Ward Beecher
F
ROM THE SPEECH,
C
ITIZENSHIP IN A
R
EPUBLIC
, 1910
By Theodore Roosevelt
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
“Resolve, resolve, and to be men aspire.
Exert that noblest privilege, alone,
Here to mankind indulged; control desire:
Let god-like reason, from her sovereign throne,
Speak the commanding word ‘I will!’ and it is done.”
—James Thomson
From
We Who Are Alive and Remain: Untold Stories
F
ROM
T
HE
B
AND OF
B
rothers
, 2009
By Marcus Brotherton
The story of the Band of Brothers, World War II’s Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, has in recent times been made famous by historian Stephen Ambrose’s book and the HBO miniseries which chronicled their legendary exploits. It is a story that embodies and speaks to every quality of true manliness; while the men would never call themselves such, they are truly modern-day heroes.
After parachute drops and fighting in D-Day and Operation Market Garden, the men of Easy Company were sent to Mourmelon, France, for some much needed R&R. But less than two weeks later they were called to defend the Belgian town of Bastogne as part of the larger Battle of the Bulge. Having to quickly move out, the men were severely lacking in ammunition, winter clothing, and other supplies. Surrounded by German troops, the men dug in for an intense fight in the bitter cold. Having arrived on December 17, 1945, it would be a long month before Easy Company was pulled off the line and given hot food, showers, and a few days rest.
For Easy Company men like Clancy Lyall, Herb Suerth Jr., and Bill Wingett, Bastogne was the ultimate test of their hardihood and resolve; their experiences put the little annoyances that bother us each day in proper perspective.
We made our defensive perimeter in the Bois Jacques woods. The next day we woke up and a snow was coming down like you never saw. I was wearing my same old green jumpsuit—it wasn’t designed to keep out the cold. I had an M-1 and a bandolier, a few K rations, a field jacket, and a towel around my neck. After a while I was able to find an overcoat. I took one from a dead GI, one of ours, an infantry guy.
To stay warm you got close to each other. You can’t make fires. If you’re lucky enough to have a blanket, it gets wet so it doesn’t do much good. You never take your boots off and leave them off. If you do, your feet freeze up. In the nighttime we went on patrols, so those help you stay warm. You never really sleep; you get two, three cat winks then hear a round and that wakes you up. You got used to going without sleep. After a while you can walk sleeping.
For shelter, we found tree limbs to put over our foxholes. I knew guys who put frozen German corpses over the top of their holes to insulate against the cold. I never did. Your hands got so cold, guys urinated on their hands to warm them up. You did the same thing with your M-1. If your bolt was stuck, it wouldn’t fire. What the hell are you going to have it for then? So guys pissed on their rifles, jacked the bolt back a couple of times, and it was all right.
You couldn’t shower. You were so dirty you smelled a guy from twenty yards away. But everybody smelled the same, so what the hell. There was only one time in my life I smelled worse. Years later, in Korea, I jumped and landed in a rice paddy. They had put human feces in there and I landed in that sonuvabitch. I bathed and I bathed but it took me months to get rid of the smell. It was like a skunk had sprayed me.
One day in Bastogne I got hit. I had no place to go. It was just a graze across my forehead. Maybe a little bit better than a graze—it put a line across my skull. They bandaged me up at an aid station. I got a cup of hot coffee and spent the night. The next day I was back in my foxhole.
Things got a bit shaky around that time. I have to say something at this point: airborne outfits that go into combat are supposed to be relieved within three to five days. But it never happened; not with us, anyway. Normandy was thirty-four days combat. Holland was seventy-four days combat. When we got to Mourmelon, it was right into battle again. By the time we got into Bastogne, we were all flaky to start with. Then we were forty days combat in Bastogne. If it wasn’t for each other, I’m sure a lot of us would have gone crazy. That’s where the cohesion comes in. We were brothers.
Bastogne was the coldest place I’ve ever been in my life. My wife and I have a cabin up in Wisconsin today where we often spend some time in winters, and even now, sitting in the warmth of that cabin, I’ll look out at the snow covered pine trees and shiver. It’s just a reaction.
A lot of the struggle in Bastogne was trying to keep your feet dry and warm. It was a twenty-four-hour-a-day exercise. If you weren’t vigilant you had trench foot within hours. I was a bit lucky because I had been previously issued galoshes, rubber overshoes, with clips. They weren’t perfect. Your feet would sweat in them because they were enclosed, and get wet from the inside out. But they did keep the snow off and keep your feet from being soaked from the outside in. I never wore the burlap bags a lot of the guys put on their feet.
If you changed your socks three to four times a day, you could keep your feet pretty dry. You dried your socks with body heat by putting them in your helmet or wrapping them around your waist. I had six to eight pairs of socks. I kept them with me all the time and never put them back in my personal bag. You wouldn’t wash them—hell, no; you just dried them. It was hard to get water because you had to melt snow to get it, and fires were too dangerous. You couldn’t even keep water in your canteen at night because it froze. One of the things I learned back at the Blue Ridge [in training] was to always have a needle and thread with me to repair gloves. That proved handy at Bastogne because your gloves stuck to the rifle barrels and ripped because of the cold.
I was wounded when an artillery round landed next to me. Both my legs were broken. I spent three months in skeletal traction. They drill a hole through your knee, put a wire through all the bones, then put a U-shaped brace over that. At the end of that brace they hook up a wire. That goes up over the end of the bed and puts weights on it to keep your legs straight. Talk about painful. You’ve got to realize that by now all of us have tremendous leg muscles. We’ve been running, hiking, climbing, exercising—it takes a lot of weight to overcome your thigh muscles so the bones can set properly. If you ever want to interrogate an enemy soldier, just put him in skeletal traction. About the third day he’ll tell you anything you want.
They used maggots on my legs to eat away the dead flesh. I guessed it worked, because I kept my legs. At one point they had talked about amputating them. Altogether, I was in the hospital for eighteen months—three months in traction, then another six months in bed, then months of rehabilitation after that. It took a long time before I could set a foot on the floor. The first day I did, I stood up. The next day after that I walked across the damn hospital floor on a pair of rolling parallel bars. Ten days later I was out on a weekend pass. They fitted me for a set of braces that I wore for about three months after that. I worked at rehab eight hours a day until I finally healed.
Just back from the hospital in Brussels, I pulled into Mourmelon one-and-a-half days before we piled on trucks for Bastogne. We drove for quite a while, we only got off the truck for piss call—I think we only did that twice. I didn’t have hardly any of my equipment. When our guys were coming south when we were coming north, I never hesitated saying, “Hey, I need that.” So I got to Bastogne with a couple of good coats and a rifle, borrowed from the guys who were retreating.
After some time I had to go to the infirmary for my feet because they were frozen. They were shelling the infirmary while I was there. But I was never shot. I was one of the few. Did I ever think I was going to die? I can only remember a couple of times thinking “this might be it.” But I do not remember any time that I felt like hunkering down in a foxhole and covering up my head in fear. Understand this: I’m not a religious person. I believe in God. I’ll say more than that—I
know
there’s a God. And I know that there’s got to be several occasions I displeased God, whatever form He’s in. But I never felt the need to get down on my knees and pray that I wouldn’t die. I don’t think it ever crossed my mind that I wasn’t going home—not while I was in a foxhole, not while sitting on the line somewhere. I always figured tomorrow was coming and I was going to be there. I never had a doubt that I wouldn’t go home.
Early in our training, it could have been Sink, or Sobel, or Winters, somebody said, “Determination is the answer.” I took that to heart. At Bastogne we were cold. We were hungry. But we had to get the job done. A job ought to be done right if you’re going to do it at all.
F
ROM
P
OEMS
, 1842
By Alfred, Lord Tennyson
The Odyssey
, written by the Greek poet Homer, follows the hero Odysseus (Ulysses in Roman myths) as he journeys home after fighting in the Trojan War. After ten years of fighting, Odysseus was determined to return to his family as quickly as possible. But he is thwarted in his quest by obstacles and monsters, and it takes him another decade of traveling to make it back to Ithaca. During that time Odysseus never wavers in his resolve to embrace his family once more.
In “Ulysses,” Tennyson imagines life for Odysseus after the euphoria of his homecoming has waned and life in Ithaca has returned to normal. Odysseus is advanced in years and free from his former hardships, and yet is restless for further challenge and travel on the open seas; he resolves to die living a life of adventure and prepares to set sail once again. Tennyson wrote this poem after learning of the death of his close friend and fellow poet, Arthur Henry Hallam. Devastated by the loss of this companion, Tennyson said the poem “gave my feeling about the need of going forward and braving the struggle of life,” that despite such loss, “still life must be fought out to the end.”