Amazing Tales for Making Men Out of Boys Read online

  Amazing Tales for Making Men Out of Boys

  Neil Oliver

  For Teddy

  Contents

  Introduction

  Holding out for a hero

  The Penlee Lifeboatmen

  A few good men

  John Paul Jones and the Birth of the US Navy

  How curiously the course of one’s life may be turned

  The Demons of Camerone

  The trouble with the truth

  The Battle of Isandlwana

  The heroic age

  D-Day and the Beach Called Omaha

  When Britannia ruled the waves

  The Yangtze Incident

  The loneliness of command

  Josiah Harlan, the Man Who Would Be King

  The luck of the Irish

  Sir Ernest Shackleton and the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition

  In search of a place in the world

  The Flight of the Nez Perces

  First, women and children

  The Birkenhead Drill

  For England’s sake and duty

  The Thin Red Line and the Charge of the Light Brigade

  We’re following the leader

  The Battle of Trafalgar

  A long way from home

  Moonwalkers and Apollo 13

  Enemy at the gates

  Constantinople

  Old age and guile beat youth and enthusiasm

  Dien Bien Phu

  The field of human conflict

  The Siege of the Alamo

  Their finest hour

  Thermopylae

  For the boy

  Further Reading

  Illustration Acknowledgments

  Acknowledgments

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Have you suffered, starved and triumphed, groveled down, yet grasped at glory,

  Grown bigger in the bigness of the whole?

  “Done things” just for the doing, letting babblers tell the story,

  Seeing through the nice veneer the naked soul?

  Have you seen God in his splendors, heard the text that nature renders?

  (You’ll never hear it in the family pew.)

  The simple things, the true things, the silent men who do things—

  Then listen to the Wild—it’s calling you.

  They have cradled you in custom, they have primed you with their preaching,

  They have soaked you in convention through and through,

  They have put you in a showcase; you’re a credit to their teaching,

  But can’t you hear the Wild?—It’s calling you.

  Let us probe the silent places, let us seek what luck betide us,

  Let us journey to a lonely land I know,

  There’s a whisper on the night-wind, there’s a star agleam to guide us,

  And the Wild is calling, calling…let us go.

  From “The Call of the Wild,” by Robert Service

  Introduction

  There was a time not so very long ago when boys were taught to be men. Efforts were made in those just-forgotten days to ensure that certain skills were learned and that there was a clear understanding of what being a man was all about. It was straightforward, unquestioned and it worked.

  Men used to live by the skills of their hands. They made new things and fixed old. They maintained their houses, trucks and snow machines. They knew how to grow food and how to hunt and fish. They dressed like men, talked like men, walked and worked and played like men.

  Their jobs had names that are becoming as unfamiliar to us as callused hands and ingrained dirt. They were fitters, turners and carpenters; blacksmiths and wheelwrights; plowmen and woodsmen; masons and glaziers; tailors and cobblers; riveters and welders. They walked the line. Out of the ground beneath their feet they mined coal and copper, tin and lead, gold and silver. They built bridges and railways, ships and trains, and when they ran out of room in their own back yards they shipped out and did it all over again all over the world.

  If you learned the lore of manhood and managed to pass your Manliness Finals there were all sorts of manly futures to be looked forward to:

  Steam-engine driver

  Engineer

  Miner

  Inventor

  Cowboy

  Explorer

  Sheriff

  Astronaut

  All of these good, old-fashioned, manly jobs and dozens more besides were there for the taking, provided you’d done your manly homework.

  Part of the education of boys came from reading tales of brave and selfless deeds, or hearing from fathers and uncles and grandfathers about how other men had lived their lives, met their challenges, reached their goals, lived their lives and faced their deaths.

  It was simple, honest stuff about standing up straight with your shoulders back and eyes to the front like a soldier. It was about making light of physical hardship and keeping going until the job was done. Being a man was about comradeship and standing by your friends whatever the circumstances. It meant understanding that sometimes it was better to die a hero than live a coward.

  Once upon a time, being an old-fashioned manly man had a lot to do with simple, old-fashioned values. It was about caring whether the streets were clear of refuse; that the walls of our homes and businesses—and of our neighbors’ homes and businesses—were free of graffiti and other needless damage; it was about keeping the yard tidy and the woodwork and railings freshly painted; it was about firm handshakes, stiff upper lips and never, ever crying in public. It meant looking out for friends and neighbors; coming together to lend a hand when it was needed—without needing to be asked. Sometimes it was as simple as making sure to always have a clean handkerchief in case a lady needed to wipe her nose. It was about keeping on swinging the bat, no matter the score; it was about cheering on the underdog. And when there was nothing else for it, it was about “fix bayonets, boys, and die like good soldiers do.”

  It definitely wasn’t about wanting to be noticed. It was about doing the right thing because manly behavior was its own reward. Middlemarch, written by George Eliot in 1871, ends with these lines:

  …for the growing good of the world is partly dependent upon unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

  Hidden lives and unvisited tombs: that’s a big lesson to learn as well. A manly man doesn’t expect recognition—he does what he does because it’s the right thing to do. And that’s enough.

  The men and boys of the 29th Infantry Division who fought their way onto the beach at Omaha on July 6, 1944, didn’t go in search of medals or glory; instead they were citizen soldiers from a democracy determined to see good prevail for its own sake. Their victory began and ended with their clear-eyed willingness to step off their landing crafts and face whatever might be waiting for them…

  …when a handful of men chose to stay behind at the Alamo, and give their lives for the greater good of all Texans, they knew they wouldn’t be taking part in any victory parades. Not for them the glory of being carried shoulder high through the streets of their hometowns, basking in the warm glow of a grateful nation. They readied themselves to fight and die because it was right, as they saw it…

  …when John Paul Jones, father of the United States Navy, cared not in the least whether his actions would cost him his life. He set himself on a path and he followed it, unblinking, to the bitter end. He turned and faced every foe and stared down every challenge because he cared more about his honor and his dignity than his life…

  …when
the Wild cried out—but only to those with ears to hear. Josiah Harlan, a Pennsylvania Quaker who left behind all the comforts of home to seek his fortune beyond the Hindu Kush in the middle years of the 19th century, made and followed his own rules. Finding his old world too small to give space to his dreams, he turned his back on all he had known and let adventure take him where it would. Here then was a man who would be king…

  Nowadays we’re in danger of forgetting—or just plain discarding—the value and importance of men like these. Somehow that whole way of being has been ridiculed, eroded and discouraged. Being an old-fashioned man in the time-honored way is becoming outdated, outmoded and forgotten.

  Manly men—of the sort who traveled to these shores and carved out a nation from the wilderness—have been hunted to near-extinction. They’re all but gone now, along with all the other wild creatures that once roamed the quiet places of the land—the bear, the boar, the wolf. There’s always talk of bringing back the Wild—reintroducing the beasts we’ve lost. No one talks about bringing back the sort of men who once roamed the world, who lived defiant lives and damn the consequences.

  But the urge to be a man like men once were is a primal thing and lives still in the unformed hearts of boys.

  Some of what’s required to get back on track is to know once more what manhood is about, to hear the old tales and to learn what men are for and what men can do. Whenever I hear these stories I imagine a scene I’ve only ever witnessed in the movies: it’s the one where a grand old gent, white of hair and stout of girth, is holding court after an ample dinner. With fat cigar clamped between the teeth and the port within reach he is using salt and pepper shakers and assorted pieces of fruit to represent himself, his men and many foes on a hastily cleared tabletop that has become the field of some well remembered battle.

  Boys will be boys, but boys want to be men. It’s what I always wanted to be when I grew up.

  It’s hard knowing which stories to tell them. What’s encouraging for the future of mankind is that there are so many to choose from. All of them demonstrate the qualities you’d want in your heroes—selflessness, devotion to the brotherhood, stubborn resourcefulness and refusal to quit regardless of the circumstances.

  And behind them all is one story that has always stood out for me. It’s the beginning and the end of what I’ve tried to understand about the making of manly men. It’s a story about one man, his team and their grand adventure, and it depicts the ways of manly men more completely than any other. It forms the backbone—the ramrod straight backbone—for all the rest.

  It’s a long story and takes a while to tell. I may be some time.

  Holding out for a hero

  Kathleen Bruce was 29 years old and had her heart set on a career as a sculptor when she attended a lunch party in an elegant house in London’s Westminster Palace Gardens in 1907. Given how eager she was to establish herself among the capital’s creative and artistic types, she must have been pleased to note, as she walked into the dining room, that her fellow guests included the playwright J. M. Barrie, the novelist Henry James and the esteemed theater critic Max Beerbohm.

  The youngest of a family of 11, she had lost both her parents before her 16th birthday. She’d been taken in then by her granduncle, William Forbes Skene, historiographer of Scotland, and there in his Edinburgh home she had grown into a woman of the sort de scribed, in those far-off days, as being “of independent spirit.” Later she enrolled at London’s Slade School of Art, and by the age of 21 she was in Paris, studying at the Académie Colarossi and every inch the art student. She knew Auguste Rodin, and it was while working for him in his studio that she met and made friends with the American dancer Isadora Duncan. She had lived and worked in Florence as well, and by the time of the lunch party in London she had been back in England for just a year.

  It certainly was a glamorous gathering. She was introduced to the young would-be actor Ernest Thesiger, a grandson of the 1st Baron Chelmsford and a relative of the late Lieutenant General Frederic Thesiger, 2nd Baron Chelmsford and commander of the British forces during the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879. It was while making polite conversation with the younger Thesiger that she noticed, seated between Mr. Barrie and Mr. Beerbohm, “a simple and austere naval officer.”

  Ernest was being quite persistent, however, and after the briefest of glances at the other man, who seemed somehow out of place in such company, she resumed the business of being charmed. Ernest had been enrolled at the Slade and had had early ambitions of being a painter. He had quickly switched his attention to drama, though, and in 1907 was just two years away from the debut of a long and successful acting career.

  Then, as Kathleen later noted in her diary, “all of a sudden and I did not know how,” she found herself face to face with the uniformed man. As he introduced himself she saw that he was of medium height, with broad shoulders, slim waist and thinning hair. “He was not very young,” she wrote, “perhaps 40, not very good-looking but healthy and alert.” More promisingly, he had “a rare smile and…eyes of a quite unusually dark blue, almost purple. I had never seen their like.”

  Kathleen Bruce’s scrutiny of this middle-aged man was anything but casual. As well as making her name as a sculptor, she had another quite different creative ambition. Now, as she approached her 30th birthday, still without a husband, it was always at the back of her mind. While still in Paris she had told at least one girlfriend she was determined to have a son.

  “A son,” she said, “is the only thing I do quite surely and always want.”

  Kathleen was not a beautiful woman—handsome would be nearer the mark. In photographs her features are certainly clearly defined and strong. There’s a prominent nose and chin. Her dark hair is long and uncut. How do women describe that Edwardian style of piling hair into a roll on the back of the head…a chignon, maybe? Her eyes were blue and set off by the only piece of jewelry she liked to wear—a pendant made from a single blue stone.

  Anything she lacked in the looks department, though, she made up for in charm and presence. She certainly wasn’t without male admirers. But when her girlfriends bothered to point out that she should have no difficulty in getting what she wanted, Kathleen replied that no one she had met so far was worthy of being the father of her son. The way she spoke about the business of breeding made the whole thing sound more like a mission—a destiny perhaps—than any mere desire.

  As Kathleen looked into the near-purple eyes of this naval officer, she began all at once to wonder if she was meeting the gaze of her Mr. Right, “the father of my son for whom I had been searching.” She wasn’t certain—and seemed rather to be asking herself the question in an air of mild disbelief. “Is this really him?”

  What Kathleen either didn’t know at that moment—or hadn’t admitted to herself—was that she was looking for a hero, a manly man. Heroes are hard to find, and step out into the daylight when they are needed rather than when they are sought.

  Heroes and manly men don’t conform to a look or a style and they have come from all classes and every race. They are a rare breed and, most inconvenient of all, they don’t know they are heroes and so cannot identify, far less introduce themselves as such. Like beauty, heroism is in the eye of the beholder. It is up to us lesser mortals to spot our heroes, and they are to be found in the strangest places, even lunch parties in southwest London.

  The man Kathleen Bruce was talking to quite awkwardly in the dining room of the house at 32 Westminster Palace Gardens was Captain Robert Falcon Scott—Scott of the Antarctic. She had recognized him, of course—he had already made his name as an Antarctic explorer, and in an age when military men and explorers were among the A-list “stars,” this naval captain was shining brightly.

  But was he a hero, or even a manly man? He didn’t think so, not always at any rate. In fact, from the age of 20 he had been confessing to his diary what he saw as his shortcomings as a man, far less a manly man.

  He didn’t even look the part. Average height, a
verage build, no oil painting as far as his looks went—losing his hair by his middle years and definitely balding well before the end. When he was a young boy his family considered him to be on the soft side—frail and delicate, with a weak chest and a tendency to be knocked down by any passing chill or virus. Like Oscar Wilde, it seems, he was susceptible to draughts. He was also absentminded, shy and apt to become squeamish at the sight of blood or the suffering of animals. He may have inherited his delicate constitution from his father, John. John Scott certainly never went to sea. When Grandfather Robert Scott retired, he went into the brewery business with his brother Edward. Young John was kept safe at home, to train as a brewer.

  A Navy doctor who examined Scott before he joined the service reported that he didn’t have a robust enough physique. A later biographer described him as “shy and diffident, small and weakly for his age, lethargic, backward and above all, dreamy.”