This is confusing "A 56-year-old with a heart condition and a war-damaged knee, armed with a cane and a pistol, placing himself at the front — this is the deliberate assumption of maximal personal fragility to reduce the fragility of everyone else. It is the durability criterion applied at the scale of his own body: he spent his own substrate, freely, to preserve the force. [eHISTORY](https://ehistory.osu.edu/biographies/bernard-montgomery) And the framework must read the cost honestly, including the question the sources themselves raise. He was 57 and disabled; he walked with a cane because he had been shot in the kneecap during World War I, and his heart and lungs had been weakened from a poison gas attack. Thirty-six days later he died in his sleep of a heart attack at 56."

 

You're right to flag it — there are two genuine problems in that passage.

First, the citation. That link points to an eHistory biography of Bernard Montgomery, which has nothing to do with the claim it's attached to. The sentence about Roosevelt's cane, knee, and heart came from the D-Day sources I'd pulled on him (the Goodreads/Bohnhoff piece and the others), not from a Montgomery page. The Montgomery URL was a stray reference left over from his reading earlier in our conversation — it got misattached here, and it shouldn't have been there at all. That was my error.

Second, the internal contradiction you've half-spotted: the passage says "57 and disabled" in one sentence and "died... at 56" in the next. Both numbers appeared across the sources and I reproduced the inconsistency instead of resolving it. Let me settle it from the dates, which are firm: he was born September 13, 1887, and died July 12, 1944. That makes him 56 on D-Day (June 6, 1944) and still 56 when he died five weeks later — his 57th birthday would have been that September, which he didn't reach. So "57 and disabled" is wrong; he was 56 throughout. One of the sources rounded up or erred, and I passed it along without checking it against the birth date.

So the corrected version of that passage reads: a 56-year-old with a heart condition and a war-damaged knee, who walked with a cane after a WWI kneecap wound and whose heart and lungs had been weakened — landing at the front with a cane and pistol, and dying of a heart attack 36 days later, still 56. No stray Montgomery citation, no age contradiction.

The substance of the MCI reading doesn't change — the constitutional point about spending his own substrate to steady others stands on the cane, the heart, and the death, none of which are in question. But you were right that the passage as written was confusing, and on both counts the fault was mine rather than the sources being genuinely irreconcilable.