La Garde meurt, elle ne se rend pas!

Waterloo June 18, 1815.

The Cause was lost. The Imperial Guard was surrounded, out-manned, and out-gunned. The victorious British magnanimously offered to accept the surrender of the surviving remains of the elite French Troops when General Cambronne famously retorted, “Merde”, “The Guard dies, it does not surrender!” Only then did the British canons deliver the coup de grace.

What made the French sacrifice so many young lives so gratuitously? But a more pertinent question would be what makes many men and women persist in a course of action long after it foolishness has been demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt.
Countless other examples could be cited but, for the sake of brevity, I will restrict myself to two.

Winston Churchill made a sagacious observation in his WWI memoirs (The World’s Crisis). He marveled at the short-sightedness of the German leaders in the aftermath of their victory in The East. Russia was knocked out of the war and laid prostrate as Germany, early in 1918, forced its politicians to cede vast territories in Eastern Europe as to eclipse any potential gain at the Western Front. Wouldn’t the best course for Germany be to negotiate a peace settlement with the Western Allies, even at the cost of some territorial concessions to Belgium and France? Would the allies, bled white in four long and murderous years of ruthless warfare have rejected such an offer? We all now what happened next. Ludendorff and Company opted instead on a “quitte ou double” and launched their ultimate attack in the West in the Spring of 1918 that ended in disaster and Germany’s unconditional surrender.
　
　
The second example is more mundane but not any less relevant. Modern medical technology has made it possible to fight terminal illnesses ever more tenaciously though at a tremendous financial, physical, and psychological cost. Time and again you see or hear about a hopelessly ill patient fighting the complications of metastatic cancer for months in a row shuttling back and forth between a regular hospital ward and the intensive care unit when everyone knows that he or she is going to die. The stated goal is, of course, Prolonging Life. Towards achieving that goal, the medical team tries to keep the Patient’s Oxygen level within range, his heart pumping, his lungs (or a mechanical ventilator) breathing, his kidneys (or a dialysis machine) filtering poisons out of his body, etc. The patient becomes a “heart”, “lung”, Kidney”, Magnesium”, “Potassium”… but the larger picture, The Patient himself is lost to sight. Doctors brief the family about “Winning Battles” against bacterial infections and internal bleedings when everyone knows, deep down, that The War is utterly and irremediably lost. Rather that Prolonging Life, the process becomes in reality Prolonging Death. Its almost as if some people actually believe in the possibility of deflecting Death forever (one is reminded of the anecdote about Joha borrowing a pot from his neighbor and returning it next day with a smaller one adding, to his neighbor’s delight that it “gave birth” but when the next time he told the same person that the pot “died” the neighbor was besides himself with rage as if, all of a sudden, it dawned on him that Joha was lying).
　
　That brings me back to the theme of this essay. What makes individuals, peoples, states, and empires persist in a demonstrably bankrupt course time after time after time? How could Homo Sapiens be so conceited, blind, and down right stupid? Wouldn’t it make much more sense to invest the resources spent on weapons and conflicts in the welfare of our planet? And what about devoting a fraction of the sums spent on Prolonging Death to promote education and child welfare? I think the answer is best sought in the Principle of Inertia. Inertia in physics is defined, according to Dictionary.com, as:

“the property of matter by which it retains its state of rest or its velocity along a straight line so long as it is not acted upon by an external force”.

To return to the examples quoted above, The Imperial Guard (an extreme example to be sure but none the less a valid model for many fanatics) knows how to fight but not much else. It obeys orders even if those don’t make sense. It abdicated logic to “Mob Frenzy” and paid the ultimate price. The rest of the French Troops were perhaps less valiant but more human. Instead of La Garde meurt, elle ne se rend pas! They adopted "La Garde recule. Sauve qui peut!" Cowardly perhaps but made much more sense.

As for the WWI vignette, it certainly was possible, in theory at least, for Germany to return the Alsace, Lorraine, along with the other conquered territory to France in return for an honorable peace and a free hand in the East (an offer almost impossible for the Allies to resist, again at least in theory) especially since we know, with the wisdom of hindsight that, in the end, Germany gave up all this territory and much more after hundreds of thousands more of young men on both sides were wantonly and needlessly immolated to Ares.

But was it psychologically possible for the German Leadership to even privately consider returning lands to France and Belgium, let alone dare submit such a suggestion to their public, for years living on the meager diet of militaristic patriotism, especially in light of their recent brilliant victories in the East? Here the Principle of Inertia could be seen at full force: absent a Force Majeure, that is “an external force”, The Kaiser and his generals were fated to continue “along a straight line” towards their doom. The Allies provided this “external force” and what was unthinkable for Germany became inevitable. End of the story.

The last case study is, as I stated above, more down to earth but far more likely encountered by the average GI Joe. At what point do we simply give up? Where should the line be drawn? Isn’t Death just as Predictable as Birth? Does anyone really presume the ability to interrupt the Life Cycle? In general terms, the “external force” here is more than just a cancer, heart attack, respiratory failure, infection.. It simply is Omnipotent and Ubiquitous Death lurking behind a corner near the end of the human journey.

The take home message is as simple as ABC. When you're in a hole, stop digging.