Cowardice is underrated

This isn't true, but it is "true"

Note: I don't actually have an ancestor who surrendered to the Germans in World War I.  I only wish I did.

To my surprise, I recently found out that one of my distant relatives served in the Canadian army during the First World War.  That in itself isn't surprising - my family has deep roots in this sour-pussed, whinging pseudo-Scotland - and it is natural for this ancestor of mine to have served in the army of the day.  Everybody was in the army back then.  For four years, they walked face-first into bullets as their heads went "Gazpacho!"

Gazpacho!

Evidently, it occurred to precisely no one that anything other than a full-frontal infantry assault was possible.  The tactic was akin to attacking a refrigerator with a raw pork chop:  very messy; not very effective.

But that's not the point.

This ancestor of mine turned out to be a very committed socialist, and was one of the very few who continued to have no love for his masters even after their masters in England declared war.  While the rest of the proletariat was jumping off the socialist bandwagon and onto the nationalist firewagon, my ancestor decided he wasn't going to turn the inside of his skull into gazpacho.  He went through the drills, saluted his officers, learned to shoot his gun, sailed to England and then to France, settled in the trenches, and at the first opportunity he crawled solo across no-man's land and surrendered to the Germans.

What is bravery, really?  He could easily have been killed making his way across the festering mud-and-gut swamp, sniped or blown up or trampled.  He was convinced, however, that if he stayed in his trench and followed the orders being given by his social betters, he would definitely die.  Weighing the options, he chose to be what in those days was called a "coward".

He managed to successfully surrender to the dreaded Huns, whose prisoner of war camps were a hell of a lot nicer than the trenches.  My ancestor reasoned, quite rightly, that he didn't want to fight, at least not for whatever his betters were fighting for:  some kind of Austrian duke, from what he could understand, and the freedom of Belgium (which wasn't a real country and never should have been).  He found the only people in the entire world who were more than happy to let him not fight - in fact, they wanted him to sit in a camp far away from the fighting and do nothing at all – were the Germans.  It was an easy calculation:  hero, die; coward, live.

In this day and age, that kind of commitment is everywhere.  People today will refuse to fight for just about everything.  But my ancestor, I like to think, was a real pioneer.