On the Boston Common, not far from the Charles River, stands a striking sculpture, the work of a young Polish sculptor, Andrzej Pitynski, who has lived in the United States since 1974. His spare, evocative piece bears the title "Partisans."

      It portrays five men on horseback, carrying guns and long spears. The men, of varying ages, are exhausted. Though they sit up straight in their saddles, their heads are bent. Their emaciated horses have gaunt legs and narrow, elongated heads stretching forward almost impossibly beyond their bodies.

      A plaque explains that the sculpture represents the universal struggle for human rights and calls the men "desperadoes wandering without a chance of victory,... continually fighting and full of inner spirit." It quotes the artist as saying that his sculpture is a tribute to people everywhere who are willing to fight for freedom.

      Seeing this sculpture calls to mind the oppressive and often inhumane regimes that generate such opposition. It speaks of the many movements for freedom in the centuries since the word "partisan" was first used in Italy to describe volunteers and freedom fighters. And it reminds us of the passionate commitment of those who took to the mountains and forests during the Second World War. Unlike the quislings who did the Nazis' bidding, and the many who averted their eyes, these partisans had the nobility and the courage to resist. The sculpture evokes, too, the humane courage of the resistance movement in postwar Poland.

      But the monument is a reminder, as well, of many other partisan battles around the world that have become so mired in violence that the original cause has been nearly obscured. In Lebanon and in Ireland, in Mozambique and Sri Lanka as in Cambodia and in so many other states, we witness hostilities that seem without end, carried on by partisans just as committed, and often just as desperate, as those portrayed on the Boston Common, driven to persevere no matter what the cost to themselves, their families, or their culture.

      We know these costs well. And so we can also visualize, as if encamped around that monument, crowds of people--women, men, and children, mourning their dead, sometimes starving, cowering under gunfire, feeling the heat of fields and shelters burning, or driven to undertake desperate journeys in search of new places to live. We can see the victims of partisans turned terrorists: innocent travelers taken hostage on airplanes and ships or kidnapped in city streets, perhaps killed in their homes as a gesture of retaliation--all in the name of justice.

      The sculpture thus surrounded in our imagination expresses a tension regarding the defense of fundamental human values. It conveys the loyalty and courage that drive those exhausted soldiers to persevere even when they fear that their cause is lost, and their willingness to sacrifice all, even their lives, for people whose right to life and liberty matter more than their own survival. But it also conveys the risk that such combat poses to personal integrity: the risk to the partisans of becoming vengeful, fanatical, and ultimately blind to the rights and the humanity of those whom they oppose or even of persons with no part in the conflict. When that happens, their outlook will have become as brutal and as unreasonable as the one they condemn in their oppressors.

      A similar tension is reflected in the double meaning of "partisan." It carries both the morally neutral meaning of "volunteer combatant"--someone who has chosen sides and takes an active part in resisting--and the negative meaning of a partial, unreasoning, at times even fanatical adherent to a cause.

      The tensions brought out by works of art such as "Partisans" and by the double meaning of the word "partisan'' reflect a question at the root of all moral response: How can it be that people whose lives we see as precious and worthy of the fullest respect should be so vulnerable to suffering and injustice? Were there no such perception or concern that people whose well-being matters to us not be hurt, oppressed, lied to, or betrayed, moral questions would not arise. Though it takes different forms, this sense of human dignity and worth underlies the most elemental impulses of self-preservation, kinship, and group loyalty as well as the subsequent insistence in many traditions on universal human rights. And when a group is under stress, as in time of war or foreign occupation, the very compassion that its members feel for the suffering inflicted on their fellows can blunt all compassion for injuries done to outsiders in return.