Command responsibility and the cost of bad decisions

Command responsibility and the cost of bad decisions is a recurring moral problem in Richard Cantwell’s account of war: decisions are not abstract errors but choices whose consequences fall on soldiers, units, and the officers left to remember them. His reflections hold personal accountability beside the pressure of orders from above, refusing both easy absolution and a simple division between villains and victims.

The Weight of a Decision

In a conversation with Renata, Richard Cantwell acknowledges that he has made wrong decisions and that too many men died because of them. He does not present the record as an endless list: three mistakes, he says, are enough in his profession, and he made all three. Their timing spans the beginning, middle, and end of his career, suggesting that responsibility was not confined to one phase or one isolated crisis. He declines to narrate the decisions in detail, explaining that remembering them is already punishment enough for him and that their account would burden an outsider.

When Renata asks to share in the painful side of his profession, his answer distinguishes between hearing about a decision and paying its cost. The decisions have been made, he says in effect, and their consequences cannot be paid off. This insistence gives command responsibility a lasting dimension: the officer may continue living after the action, but cannot undo what followed from his judgment. His reserve is not indifference. It marks the difficulty of turning experience that has repeatedly injured its bearer into an account for someone else.

Judgment, Casualties, and the Enemy

The cost of command also appears in Richard Cantwell’s recollection of a winter of attacks. He describes killing enemy soldiers who came forward under bombardment, while insisting that he neither hated them nor felt personal hostility toward them. His attention instead falls on the work of keeping a defense functioning: after shelling, commanders had to count quickly to discover how many riflemen remained. He says he taught his men to shoot and to look directly at the advancing enemy. Combat is thus presented as a sequence of practical judgments under pressure, with survival depending on accurate assessment as well as discipline.

He gives his own tally as 122 confirmed kills, excluding uncertain possibilities. Set beside that number, his claim that kindness becomes possible after killing so many carries a deliberate moral tension. The enemy can be treated humanely without the violence being erased, and the ability to distinguish an opponent from an object of hatred does not absolve the commander of the consequences of combat. His recollection makes the same point from another angle: wounds that seemed minor had helped him feel personally invulnerable, until a later, decisive wound ended that confidence. The loss of imagined immunity echoes the broader loss of control that accompanies command: survival and outcome cannot be secured by certainty alone.

Orders and the Loss of a Regiment

Richard Cantwell’s account of losing a regiment shows how responsibility is divided across a chain of command. He received the regiment after a younger officer, whom he had known since the officer was eighteen, was relieved because the command had proved too much for him. Cantwell calls it the regiment he had hoped for, until he lost it, and immediately qualifies the loss as occurring under orders. That qualification does not remove the loss; it identifies the system in which the decision was made.

He describes an approach toward high ground where, in his view, a flag might have opened negotiations with professional German soldiers. Instead, a telephone order from higher headquarters required the town to be taken by assault, an imperative he links to the town’s appearance in a newspaper. The account places a potentially negotiable military objective against the machinery of command and public attention. The order may have come through several levels, but the attack still had to be carried out by the men on the ground. Cantwell’s narration therefore neither treats obedience as innocence nor assigns the whole disaster to a single individual.

The same tension sharpens when he recalls an attack planned with three elements in line and nothing in reserve. Unit patches had been removed far back from the front to conceal who would attack, but an order to commit a regiment before the assault made that concealment futile: a captured soldier could identify the unit. Cantwell expected the wooded ground to become, in his phrase, a battlefield like Passchendaele with tree bursts; conditions on the neighboring front had already offered warning of what the woods might be like. The regiment was destroyed. He rejects the idea that its commander was to blame, describing him as someone with whom he would willingly share hardship. The episode leaves responsibility distributed but not dissolved: the order, the foreseeable conditions, and the outcome remain linked.

Command at a Distance

Cantwell’s memories also reach beyond the regiment to decisions made by distant commanders. Recalling an earlier defensive winter, he considers how artillery was shifted back ahead of an attack. Had the defense fallen to the Sile River, he believes the guns might have been moved farther back to lines that could not hold; he argues that they should instead have been brought close enough to support the defense continuously. He is relieved that the decision-makers did not carry out the more destructive course he imagines. His judgment turns on practical consequences: where the guns were placed could decide whether troops could resist the attack.

In another recollection, the front section of the “Valhalla Express” drops colored smoke over German positions before the following sections bomb them. The prisoners taken afterward, members of the Sixth Parachute Division, are described as shaking uncontrollably. Cantwell calls the bombing successful, but the sequence complicates the language of success: a target is marked, force is delivered, and the surviving prisoners embody its human aftermath. The account offers no detached calculation of the operation’s necessity or proportionality; instead, the contrast between its claimed effectiveness and the prisoners’ condition leaves the moral cost visible.

His private complaint about cavalry extends the same scrutiny to military plans. He imagines the commanding officer not knowing where the cavalry is, while the cavalry itself is uncertain of its position and mission. The point is not simply that a plan can fail, but that command depends on accurate knowledge and responsibility at every level. When those in authority cannot account for the forces assigned to them, the consequences are borne elsewhere.

Repetition, Love, and the Cost of Error

Cantwell connects military loss to intimate loss through a repeated pattern of error and consequence. He thinks of having lost three battalions and three women, and of now having a fourth woman he loves. He describes losing women as resembling the loss of battalions: through errors of judgment, impossible orders, impossible conditions, and brutality. The comparison does not make the losses equivalent. It reveals how war has furnished him with the terms through which he understands damage in his private life, while the repetition of loss makes the current relationship feel vulnerable to the same history.

His imagined appeal to a general for the whereabouts of the cavalry interrupts this reflection with the language of a staff discussion. That shift brings private grief and military frustration into the same frame: both turn on uncertainty, failed judgment, and the question of who must bear the outcome. Across these recollections, command is neither pure authority nor a shield from blame. It is the obligation to decide amid incomplete knowledge, the exposure of others to those decisions, and the memory that remains when an order has been carried out and cannot be recalled.