Everybody Finishes

I learned more about leadership in one week of winter, at seventeen, than in the thirty-odd years since. The week was an endurance march across the Highveld, the high dry plateau in the middle of South Africa.

I was a conscript on officer training at Middelburg, in Personnel Services, which kept the Army’s people paid, recorded and within the law. The Army was training boys to lead it through a year it did not fully understand. Nelson Mandela had been released from prison five months earlier. National service had been cut from two years to one the previous December. The country’s leaders were sitting down with the people they had banned for thirty years, and nobody on our parade ground knew what we were being prepared for.

July is midwinter on the Highveld, dry and cold. The plateau around Middelburg sits higher than most villages in the Swiss Alps, and it is not flat. The march was long hills and the valleys between them, with the next ridge always in view. The grass is the colour of a lion, the sky stays clear for weeks, and the frost sits on the ground until the sun has been up for an hour. At night the temperature falls below zero and the cold comes up through the groundsheet.

Our instructor was Corporal Dries Jansen van Vuuren. Everyone called him “Fires”. He worked harder than anyone he trained, he was fair, and he spoke to seventeen-year-olds as though they were men, which in that Army was rare enough that we noticed.

“Vasbyt” is Afrikaans for biting down and holding on, and it was the name the Army gave to the march that ended every leadership course. Ours was a platoon of thirty-two, 120 kilometres over about four days, in full kit of around sixty kilograms. Before we left, Fires gave us the rule. There was just one condition for success:

Everybody finishes.

Strong or weak, fast or slow, injured or whole, the group crosses the line with every man in it. Then he walked every step of it with us and said nothing. I only understood that years later.

At the start, leadership looked obvious. Two men stood out, and I will call them Botha and Smit. I have changed their names. They were strong, confident and quick to decide. If you had asked any of us on the first morning who would carry the group home, we would have named them.

Then the Vasbyt did what it was built to do. It took away everything that makes leadership look easy. Sleep went first, then the feet, then the ability to think in a straight line, because a tired man does not reason the way a rested one does. The cold was worst at the halts, when the sweat cooled and the wind amplified it.

By the last day, Botha and Smit could not walk. They had given the group everything they had, and it was gone. We put them on stretchers.

The men who had looked strongest on the first morning were now being carried by the men they had led. Nothing had changed except that the strength was used up, and I think strength was most of what we had been calling leadership.

Then we got lost. By the time anyone admitted it, we were about fifteen kilometres off course, with two men on stretchers and the rest of us not far from joining them.

On the fourth day, under sixty kilograms, fifteen kilometres is the difference between finishing and not.

Our obvious leaders did not have the answer. They were on the stretchers. The answer came from Marais (another changed name), and on the first morning I would not have picked him. He did not dominate a conversation or carry himself as though we were waiting for his instructions. But he had grown up on a farm. He could read the veld, the open grassland we were crossing, the way the rest of us read a road sign, and when we were lost that was worth more than confidence, strength or rank.

Marais worked out where we had gone wrong and walked us back onto the line. It cost another seven kilometres. For those hours, he led. Nobody appointed him. The problem did.

Once we were back on course the problem changed again. Somebody had to take the back of a stretcher. Somebody had to lift weight out of a failing man’s pack. The pace had to be one the slowest man could hold, and somebody had to notice when the next man was about to go.

Whoever could do the next thing did it, and the next thing changed by the hour until we crossed the line. I suspect every one of us led for a stretch of it.

That week broke a comfortable idea I had carried into the Army, which is that leadership belongs to leaders. We point at the captain or the manager and say, there is the leader, as though leadership were stored inside them like fuel. Rank is stored like that, and so is authority. Leadership is not. It appears when someone gives the group what it needs at that moment, and the moment decides what that is. Sometimes that is courage, sometimes it is knowing the terrain, and sometimes it is carrying the man who led the day before.

None of us finished alone. The man who crossed the line on his own feet needed Marais. Marais needed the man carrying the water. And the strongest men of all needed to be carried.

Fires was beside us the whole way. He was there when the stretchers came out and he was there when we were lost. He could have put us back on the line with one sentence or set the pace himself, and he did neither. He had given us the one rule that counted and then let the group find out, hour by hour, who it needed. Letting us find that out was the training.

He could have done all of it himself. He told me this week that he was shy at school and no leader at all. In the Army he worked until it came naturally. He made himself fitter than anyone he trained and learned his subject better than anyone around him, and on his own Vasbyt he carried his teammates’ kit and, when the blisters came, piggybacked the men who could not walk. He expected of us only what he could do himself. He did not expect the impossible (his words, in Afrikaans).

A poor leader has to be the source of every answer. Fires recognised when someone else had it and got out of the way, and he did that as a corporal in an organisation that mostly rewarded the opposite.

He chose me, later, as his co-instructor for the next intake. I have never been sure what he saw. What I took from him is that the most useful thing the person with the rank can do is decide what everybody must achieve, and then get out of the way of whoever can do the next thing. I did not have that language at seventeen. We were trying to finish.