The Long March
The mind that cannot carry a thousand miles can always carry one step
On the first of April I gave the order that I had dreaded for many months.
The ship was ; the ice had at last broken her back, and she was filling with the sea.
We would the Perseverance and march west across the pack toward the open water beyond.
Each man was permitted two pounds of personal belongings, and no more, and I enforced the rule against myself.
I threw my books upon the ice, and kept a single photograph and the journal you are reading.
The march began, and the march was the hardest thing that any of us had ever done.
We walked, and we walked, and the walking did not end when the day ended.
The surface was not the smooth plain of the poet's imagination, but a chaos of ridges and pits.
We hauled the boats behind us, for we would need them when the ice at last gave out.
A boat that floats is a light thing; a boat dragged across broken ice is a mountain.
Some days we advanced a single mile, and counted even that a victory against the endless white.
I learned that the is a muscle, and that it tires, and that it can be trained.
Each morning I told myself only that I would walk until noon, and think no further ahead.
At noon I told myself that I would walk until the evening halt, and no further than that.
The mind cannot carry a thousand miles, but it can always carry the single step in front of it.
This, I think, is the whole secret of , and I learned it far too late to be proud.
The men fell into a , and the carried them when their reasons for walking failed.
We did not speak of the pole; the pole belonged to the other expedition, the one already dead.
We spoke instead of hot food, of dry beds, of the faces we intended to see again.
Small and human hopes, I found, pull a sledge better than any grand and noble purpose.
A man not die for glory as readily as he live for a cup of tea.
When a man stumbled, another took his harness without a word, and the did not stop.
I have commanded soldiers, and I have never seen discipline to equal that of exhausted, frightened men.
The ice fought us for every yard, and we gave it nothing that we could .
At night we lay in wet bags, listening to the floes grinding, and rose again before we had rested.
I stopped writing of distances, because the distances were , and wrote instead of the men.
Of how they endured; of how they joked; of how they refused, day after day, to lie down.
That was our only weapon, and with it, and nothing else, we walked ourselves toward the sea.