Piers Young posted this wonderful poem by Miroslav Holub “immortalising a bizarre incident that happened to a group of soldiers on military manoeuvres”
“The young lieutenant of a small Hungarian detachment in the Alps
sent a reconnaissance unit out onto the icy wasteland.
It began to snow
immediately
snowed for two days and the unit
did not return.
The lieutenant suffered:
he had dispatched
his own people to death.
But the third day the unit came back.
Where had they been? How had they made their way?
Yes they said we considered ourselves
lost and waited for the end. And then one of us
found a map in his pocket. That calmed us down.
We pitched camp, lasted out the snowstorm and then with the map
we discovered our bearings.
And here we are.
The lieutenant borrowed this remarkable map
and had a good look at it. It was not a map of the Alps
but of the Pyrenees”
Miroslav Holub, Brief Thoughts on Maps. TLS, Feb 4, ’77
Piers says, “Perhaps good information gets too good a press?”
Tragedy or comedy?
Chris Corrigan interprets it as a tragic allegory of how people become dependent on external authority and lose a sense of their own resources.
I see Chris’ point and I find it very thought provoking – although I was a bit startled by it at first. My own response is to focus more on the men’s intuitive success rather than the falseness of the pretext. And I do find his argument thought provoking.
I think as humans we often tell the tale of our lives as if they are logical and explicit. Occasionally, an incident like this jars that illusion. I find those incidents sometimes funny, sometimes awe-inspiring. I believe that the way human beings collaborate together and make stuff happen is a wonderful mystery that can never be fully captured in the complicated rationalisations of experts. Indeed, so great is that will to “go on together” that it has enabled many organisations to do quite well, even though their leaders and their gurus weigh them down with complicated rules and models. There will always be experts taking the credit for things that I believe happen despite, not because of, their efforts.
Truth or fiction?
Ton Zijlstra, in a comment at Piers’ site, wonders if the story is a “urban legend”. Not very urban I suppose, but let’s say it is a legend. Then I ask: whether or not it’s true, what is it about this story that makes us want it to be true and want to repeat it? I think because it speaks to the part of us that knows intuitively there is a lot more to life than the dull, logical tale we are sometimes told…
