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Article Excerpt
For the longest time the captain (Latin caput-capitis from which chief, chef, capital, decapitate, capitation and on and on) was the officer upon whom devolved the burden of battle, the officer in charge of that entity among the host most commonly found in combat: the company, the century, the compagnie, that "hundred" (or so) men who bore the brunt of fighting, small enough to be intimate still, human still, yet large enough to require deployment, tactical thought. The captain, if you will, is the last officer in the hierarchy to serve, to fight, to die in earshot of the troops.
In the Army, in armies a gulf separates the captain, last of the company-grade officers as they are known, from the field-grade officers, the "colonel" or officer in charge of a whole "column" and later on in military evolution the "major," too, a personage interposed between colonel and captain, both of whom have broader, more abstract responsibilities, who command--if they command at all--larger troop components at greater remove, and who rarely enough see that "field" from which their condition derives its name. The captain is the last officer still to know the names of his men, yet the first to glimpse even a modicum of that big picture we hear so much of Like all transitional figures, he is alone. And like all transitional figures, he is doomed!
But a culture as well as a hierarchy separates the captain from other officers, that separates the troops from staff and support personnel, a culture of which they alternately complain and boast, a culture that exposes them to the risk of combat, of wounds, of death but also to the assumption of glory, of fraternity, and--a word captains use more than soldiers themselves--of honor. Achilles was a lochagos, a captain or small unit, subordinate unit leader (of course, he spent much of his time insubordinate); he was not a wanax or strategos, a general or commander. In Christopher Logue's free translation of The Iliad, the cultural differential surfaces with a certain vigor permitted a translator merely summarizing other translations and not actually rendering the Greek. Achilles, spitting mad at Agamemnon, whose vanity inflicts suffering on the soldiers among whom he does not live but among whom Achilles does, identifies "what Greeks require of Greeks":
To worship God: to cherish honor: to fight courageously,...
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