"We am make a catalogue of the moral qualities of the greatest captains but we cannot exhaust them. First there will be courage, not merely the physical kind which is happily not uncommon, but the rarer thing, the moral courage which Washington showed in the dark days at Valley Forge, and which we call fortitude — the power of enduring when hope is gone, the power of taking upon one's self a crushing responsibility and daring all, when weaker souls would play for safety. There must be the capacity for self-sacrifice, the willingness to let worldly interests and even reputation and honour perish, if only the task be accomplished. The man who is concerned with his own prestige will never move mountains. There must be patience, supreme patience under misunderstanding and set-backs, and the muddles and interferences of others, and the soldier of a democracy especially needs this. There must be resilience under defeat, a tough vitality and a manly optimism, which looks at the facts in all their bleakness and yet dares to be confident. There must be the sense of the eternal continuity of a great cause, so that failure and even death will not seem the end, and a man sees himself as only a part in a predestined purpose."
Homilies and Recreations by John Buchan 1926
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