“In times of crisis, the lesson would be to do something … don’t just stand by and watch.” So said Anthony Sadler, one of the men who prevented what François Hollande called “veritable carnage” on a French train on Friday evening. He and his two friends Spencer Stone and Alek Skarlatos, and a British businessman called Chris Norman, have all received the Légion d’honneur for their actions. So too will a passenger who was shot, and a French citizen who also tackled the gunman and wants to remain anonymous.
The honour is well deserved. Their heroism is unambiguous, real and uncomplicated. They acted with no thought for their own safety and saved lives. It is not yet known what the motives of the gunman were, though he has denied mounting a jihadi attack. However, in a time when terror works exactly by inducing in most of us nothing but terrible imaginings and a resigned powerlessness, this story offers something else. We mostly do just stand and watch, I am afraid, because every day we are bombarded with imagery and information and security alerts about “terror” and have no idea at all about what we can do about it besides carry on. Many people tell me they no longer watch the news, not because they are callous but because they find it unbearable.
To hear last week that another hero, the 82-year-old Khaled al-Asaad, the keeper of Palymra’s artefacts and possibly its last secrets had been brutally murdered united everyone in condemnation. Now Isis has blown up the ancient temple of Baal Shamin, there is just more numb disbelief, a sense that nothing can be done. Those who would do these things will kill us on a sunlounger or in a supermarket. We cannot stop them.
This is why the instinctive reaction of the guys on the train in France is so courageous and worth celebrating. They tackled a heavily armed man and won. Chris Norman described standing up and seeing a man with a machine gun, and said that his “first reaction was to sit down and hide”. But he didn’t. He decided to help to try to take the man down.
Spencer Stone was asleep when he heard his friend Alek say “Let’s go”. He ran forward and tackled Ayoud El-Khazzani and wrestled him to the ground, but El-Khazzani kept taking out more weapons, including a hand gun and a box cutter. Stone – whose thumb was, by this time, almost severed – then went to aid another man who had tried to stop the gunman and been shot in the neck. He tried to stem the bleeding with his shirt, “but I realised that wasn’t going to work so I just stuck two of my fingers into the hole, found what I thought to be the artery, pushed down and the bleeding stopped”.
What presence of mind, what bravery, what extraordinary things people can do when they decide to act. The men named here, and those who do not want to be named, remind us – at a time when we too often feel like detached witnesses to senseless brutality – that resistance is possible.
It is possible even in dark and dangerous times to be more than a bystander. That these men proved that is cause for necessary hope.
