There are some stories that are so true that cynics cannot abide them and will spend countless needless hours—when they could be doing better things, like planting squash or building model battleships—trying to debunk them. Henry Tandey’s story is one of those.

Even if it’s not quite true—it does have factual underpinnings, but not the kind of deeply sunk concrete foundation that its doubters require— it has become a kind of parable, which is a story that tells a higher truth without getting bogged down in footnotes. That may make it even more important.

It’s a simple story. Henry Tandey was an immensely courageous British soldier (The VC, or Victoria Cross, is equivalent to the American Medal of Honor) fighting in the last year of the Great War, in September 1918, near Cambrai, where, only days later, an American engineer battalion would join the Brits in carrying the fight to their German enemy.

It was a German who entered young Tandey’s life that day. Tandey saw him pretty clearly through the gunsight of his Lee-Enfield .303. The fellow was staggering and disoriented and it would have been easy for the young Briton put the young German out of his misery–it looked as if he’d been gassed, after all.

Tandey started to squeeze the trigger and then something interposed. Was it a hymn he’d learned as a little boy? Was it something his grandmother had taught him? It was certainly something he couldn’t articulate at the time. Battlefields don’t lend themselves to thinking in ordered companies of sentences arranged in battalions of persuasive paragraphs.

Tandey let his finger relax and so let the helpless man go.

The German soldier survived the war, as did Tandey, but their paths would cross again, twenty years later, oddly enough and quite indirectly, in Munich, a beautiful city. That’s where the German saw this painting and instantly recognized the soldier in the foreground, in what must have been a customary moment of compassion, carrying a wounded comrade.

“I know that man!” the German veteran exclaimed to his guest, a visitor from Britain. “That’s the man who spared my life!” The veteran asked his British guest, a man of some power, if there was any way he could discover the British soldier’s name.

There was. The guest was, after all, Neville Chamberlain, the Prime Minister. After finding the artist and interviewing him, a young man working for Chamberlain identified the soldier in the painting as Pvt. Henry Tandey.

He was no longer “Pvt. Henry Tandey,” of course. He was a factory policeman working in the Triumph plant in Coventry, a beautiful city noted for its beautiful cathedral.

The delighted German sent a message of thanks to Tandey in Coventry.

Two years later, he bombed Coventry.

Pvt. Henry Tandey, VC, had Adolph Hitler in his gunsights that day in 1918. “I couldn’t shoot a wounded man,” he said in the years after.

“I’m sorry to God I let him go.”

[Edit]

PBS is re-running Ken Burns’s The Roosevelts: An Intimate History and I watched last night the episode that recalls the slide into World War II.

I tend to agree with the historian-commentators who marveled at the dexterity— and the sometime duplicity —with which FDR led Americans in those years. His sights, of course, were set on England, especially when, by the spring of 1940, England was alone against Hitler.

When many advisors, chiefly among them Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, urged the president to stop throwing money and military equipment away on a lost cause—meaning England and meaning FDR’s friend, Churchill—the president bristled. England was our next-to-last line of defense. The last would be our own Atlantic seaboard.

Then, of course, the war came from the opposite direction.

Despite the appeal of wartime drama, I’m thinking less of FDR and more of the First Lady today.

Her life was marked by sadness of immense breadth and depth; denigrated as a child—her nickname was “Granny”— devoted to a father who adored her, but who died an alcoholic, as did her younger brother, Hall. Her marriage was a love match that would come under constant and determined assault by her tyrannical mother-in-law, Sara Delano Roosevelt, because of course Eleanor was not good enough for her darling boy. The darling boy betrayed Eleanor in his love affair with her social secretary, Lucy Mercer.

(The president continued to welcome visits by Lucy, then a married woman, years after their affair had ostensibly ended, which came when Eleanor found Franklin’s cache of love letters. Now, when Eleanor was out of Washington, FDR would invite Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd to quiet dinners at the White House.)

Eleanor was both intensely private—building her own residence at Hyde Park—and yet she was also the administration’s public face. The telecast reminded of this prescient New Yorker cartoon, from 1933.

“Prescient,” because this photo was taken two years later. She is, quite obviously, enjoying herself.

Despite an innate shyness, she worked tirelessly to support the New Deal and then the war effort. She had her own radio program. Americans heard her voice on the night of the Pearl Harbor attack; the president wouldn’t speak until he asked for a declaration of war the next day.

And hers was not a pleasant voice. Like her husband, she had patrician accents, but her delivery was sing-song and she hit unintentional and incongruous high notes that were almost painful to hear. But when the 1940 convention balked at nominating the liberal agriculture secretary Henry Wallace for vice president, the president asked Eleanor to speak—the first time a First Lady addressed a convention. Her speech was brief and as usual a little awkward, but the impact she had was so powerful that Wallace was nominated by acclamation.

The documentary, too, addressed her humanity, her determination, for example, that black defense workers be treated with dignity and some semblance of parity, as well as her hatred of segregation. The old films revealed something else: This patrician felt at home with black Americans.

There was a stubborn and courageous innocence about her, too. She could simply not understand the deliberate cruelty that motivated Jim Crow and she could not tolerate the pain it inflicted, in a representative democracy, on millions of her fellow citizens. Beyond that, segregation was an assault on humanity. Asserting our common humanity would be the underpinning for all the missions she undertook in her long life. It would be, as well, one of he fundamental values my parents instilled in me.

This belief in our common humanity is why she so passionately attacked Executive Order 9066. Franklin finally had to stop her: He was never to hear about Japanese-Americans from Eleanor again. Never. This didn’t stop her from another moment of symbolism: a semi-clandestine visit to the Gila River internment camp, where many of our Arroyo Grande neighbors were confined behind barbed wire, in the spring of 1943.

There is something in this photo of the visit, in the faces of the young women, that suggests her unspoken message. She was among Americans here, and happy, given the bleakness of the camp, to be among them—just as she had been in the CCC camps, in visiting WPA projects or riding in a coal car with Ohio miners.

And then, of course, she became a kind of surrogate mother. This is the Eleanor Roosevelt, with her surrogate sons, that endures the most to me.

Even as the war was winding down, in the wakening realization of what would soon be Franklin’s greatest victory, the president betrayed her. Lucy Rutherfurd was an arm-length away from the president when a cerebral hemorrhage killed him as he did paperwork at a card table, posing for a portrait, at Warm Springs, Georgia, in April 1945. The First Lady took the train down from Washington to begin the final arrangements. After she’d arrived, it was her daughter, Anna, broke the news about Lucy.

Franklin, the documentary pointed out, frequently and effusively praised Eleanor for her energy, her political acumen, and for the intelligence she brought him from her visits to New Deal projects or to military bases. She was, he told his friends and advisors, remarkable. He never said these things to Eleanor.

That secret was, to me, nearly as profound a betrayal as the president’s relationship with Lucy. Eleanor, like most of us, longed for affirmation, but she would not beg for it.

She deserved to know—most especially from the man so central to her life— how truly remarkable she was.

This was how Mr. Neergaard—his name misspelled— of Arroyo Grande learned of his son’s death in France. It’s hard to imagine getting news in so cruel a manner.

But this, of course, had been a cruel war on an epic scale. What ended it was crueler still.

One of the climactic battles of the First World War came at the end of September, 1918, two weeks before the flu took thirty-year-old Harold, on the St. Quentin Canal.

Part of the battle involved Americans, who came into the war so badly equipped (it was the mirror reversal of World War II, when we were the “Arsenal of Democracy”) that our fliers flew obsolete French Nieuports, the Marines at Belleau Wood were casually smoking cigarettes, bewildered German soldiers noted, as they advanced while firing French Chaucat light machine guns from the hip. The heavy machine gun we used was the British Maxim Gun and doughboys were driven into the Meuse-Argonne aboard Renault trucks driven by young men from what would someday be called Vietnam.

At the canal, the American 30th Division, shown in the photo with German POWs (the tanks are British), went into the Bellocourt Tunnel, shown below, and met the Germans in hand-to-hand combat.

The 30th Division prevailed in ways beyond the ferocity with which they fought. At least one historian has suggested that in the confines of the tunnel and in the closeness of the combat, the Americans brought the flu with them, too, and this was a new, far more virulent strain than the one that had struck the combatants earlier that year, in the spring.

The war ended six weeks later in part from sheer mutual exhaustion. The two sides were too sick to fight anymore.

The flu even played a role in the unsatisfactory peace that followed–the one that led to another, more terrible war–in part because the American delegate, Woodrow Wilson, became ill, with a temperature of 103 degrees, with what was quite possibly the flu

(This was 1919, but the flu came back to Arroyo Grande, too, in 1919 and again in February 1920.)

When Wilson recovered, some said, he wasn’t the same man he’d been. (His presidency would be shattered soon after by the stroke that incapacitated him.)

So it would be the vengeful French leader, Georges Clemenceau, who would dominate the peace settlement at Versailles. Which, of course, was not a peace at all. Even the attacks on 9/11 can be traced back to the terrible Versailles Treaty.

I imagine this pandemic might have powerful effects, many now unseen, that will play out decades away from us.

Courtesy of Trevor Noah, here is the president on Fox and Friends two days ago, frantically pushing the Worldview According to Putin:

https://youtu.be/lY1fv-QP1Pw

Courtesy of Anne-Marie Duff as Elizabeth I, the Tilbury Speech, with the Armada approaching in August 1588, when her nation was threatened by enemies both foreign and domestic:

https://youtu.be/fbjj9Nmn6ZU

It’s hard to beat Elizabeth’s contemporary, Shakespeare, for leadership lessons. It’s no wonder that Olivier’s Henry V became an instrument of war in 1944. Agincourt was fought in 1415; the history play was written in 1599. Both events retained their immediacy as Britain and her allies fought just as bitterly—but with far more lethality— as Henry had on the Continent.

Here is the context: An exhausted, disease-ridden and seemingly doomed English army, vastly outnumbered, prepares to meet the cream of French chivalry in Normandy. These are the words Shakespeare puts in Henry’s mouth, and from what I’ve read about the young king—charismatic, implacable and immensely courageous—this is thin fiction indeed:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-yZNMWFqvM

Abraham Lincoln’s devotion to Shakespeare was legendary. For a man whose formal education totaled about seven weeks, it was Shakespeare, the Bible and Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England that formed the fundament of the president’s self-education and the templates for his rhetoric, which no president has matched.

What Henry V might’ve taught Lincoln was the importance of the bond between a leader and his people—Elizabeth clearly understood that bond— a lesson mythologized in this scene from Spielberg’s Lincoln.

The scene is mythic because it never happened. But it’s mythic, too, because myths tell the truth in a way we can understand.

https://youtu.be/xsmgkZ8l2TQ

It’s that bond that’s been broken and it’s truth that we’ve lost today: it’s been so besmirched, just as it was in Southern newspapers in December 1860, that recovering it—and with it, constitutional democracy—may require great sacrifice. It may inflict on us wounds beyond imagining. We are met again on a great battlefield where the enemy includes malignant men, so alien to us and to our traditions, and our countrymen, among them those whom we love the most.