Chapter 1
A Little Learning
I HAVE NOT been in a battle; not near one, nor heard one from afar, nor seen the aftermath. I have questioned people who have been in battle – my father and father-in-law among them; have walked over battlefields, here in England, in Belgium, in France and in America; have often turned up small relics of the fighting – a slab of German 5·9 howitzer shell on the roadside by Polygon Wood at Ypres, a rusted anti-tank projectile in the orchard hedge at Gavrus in Normandy, left there in June 1944 by some highlander of the 2nd Argyll and Sutherlands; and have sometimes brought my more portable finds home with me (a Minié bullet from Shiloh and a shrapnel ball from Hill 60 lie among the cotton-reels in a painted papier-maché box on my drawing-room mantelpiece). I have read about battles, of course, have talked about battles, have been lectured about battles and, in the last four or five years, have watched battles in progress, or apparently in progress, on the television screen. I have seen a good deal of other, earlier battles of this century on newsreel, some of it convincingly authentic, as well as much dramatized feature film and countless static images of battle: photographs and paintings and sculpture of a varying degree of realism. But I have never been in a battle. And I grow increasingly convinced that I have very little idea of what a battle can be like.
Neither of these statements and none of this experience is in the least remarkable. For very, very few Europeans of my generation – I was born in 1934 – have learned at first hand that knowledge of battle which marked the lives of millions of their fathers and grandfathers. Indeed, apart from the four or five thousand Frenchmen who, with their German, Spanish and Slav comrades of the Foreign Legion, survived Dien Bien Phu, and the slightly larger contingents of Britons who took part in the campaign in central Korea in 1950–51, I cannot identify any group of people, under forty, in the Old World, who have been through a battle as combatants. My use of the words ‘battle’ and ‘combatants’ will indicate that I am making some fairly careful exceptions to this generalization, most obviously in the case of all those continental Europeans who were children during the Second World War and over whose homes the tide of battle flowed, often more than once, between 1939 and 1945; but also in the case of the thousands of British and French soldiers who carried arms in Africa and south-east Asia during the era of decolonization, to whose number I ought to add the Portuguese conscripts still campaigning in Mozambique and Angola, and the British regulars policing the cities and countryside of Ulster.
The first group exclude themselves from my generalization because none of them was old enough to have had combatant experience of the Second World War; the second because their experience of soldiering, though often dangerous and sometimes violent – perhaps very violent if they were French and served in Algeria – was not an experience in and of battle. For there is a fundamental difference between the sort of sporadic, small-scale fighting which is the small change of soldiering and the sort we characterize as a battle. A battle must obey the dramatic unities of time, place and action. And although battles in modern wars have tended to obey the first two of those unities less and less exactly, becoming increasingly protracted and geographically extensive as the numbers and means available to commanders have grown, the action of battle – which is directed towards securing a decision by and through those means, on the battlefield and within a fairly strict time-limit – has remained a constant. In Europe’s wars of decolonization, the object of ‘the other side’ has, of course, been to avoid facing a decision at any given time or place, rightly presuming the likelihood of its defeat in such circumstances; and ‘the other side’, whether consciously fighting a war of evasion and delay, as were the communist guerrillas in Malaya or the nationalist partisans in Algeria, or merely conducting a campaign of raiding and subversion because they implicitly recognized their inability to risk anything else, as did the Mau Mau in Kenya, has accordingly shunned battle. I do not think therefore that my Oxford contemporaries of the 1950s, who had spent their late teens combing the jungles of Johore or searching the forests on the slopes of Mount Kenya, will hold it against me if I suggest that, though they have been soldiers and I have not and though they have seen active service besides, yet they remain as innocent as I do of the facts of battle.
But what, it might be fairly asked at this stage, is the point of my re-emphasizing how little, if at all, unusual is my ignorance of battle? Ignorance has been bliss in Europe for nearly thirty years now, and in the United States there has been little thanks given for the lessons its young men have been forced to learn at Pleiku and Khe San. The point is, I had better admit, a personal one – not so personal that it cannot be revealed but one which, over the years, has grown to something of the dimensions of a Guilty Secret. For I have spent many of those years, fourteen of them – which is almost the whole of my working life – describing and analysing battles to officer cadets under training at Sandhurst; class after class of young men, all of whom stand a much better chance than I do of finding out whether what I have to say on the subject is or is not true. The inherent falsity of my position should be obvious. It has always been clear to me, but at Sandhurst, which carries almost to extremes the English cult of good manners, the cadets I have taught have always connived at the pretence that I and they are on a master-and-pupil footing and not, as I know and they must guess, all down together in the infant class. I for my part, anxious not to overtax their politeness, have generally avoided making any close tactical analysis of battle, entailing as that would my passing judgment on the behaviour of men under circumstances I have not had to meet, and have concentrated the weight of my teaching on such subjects as strategic theory, national defence policy, economicmobilization, military sociology and the like – subjects which, vital though they are to an understanding of modern war, nevertheless skate what, for a young man training to be a professional soldier, is the central question: what is it like to be in a battle?
That this – or its subjective supplementary, ‘How would I behave in a battle?’ – is indeed the central question reveals itself when it is raised in a roomful of cadets – and probably at any gathering of young men anywhere – in a number of unmistakeable ways: by a marked rise in the emotional temperature, in the pitch of voices, and in what a sociologist might call ‘the rate and volume of inter-cadet exchanges’; by signs of obvious physical tenseness in the ways cadets sit or gesticulate – unless they assume, as some do, a deliberately nonchalant attitude; and by the content of what they have to say – a noisy mixture of slightly unconvincing bombast, frank admissions of uncertainty and anxiety, bold declarations of false cowardice, friendly and not-so-friendly jibes, frequent appeal to fathers’ and uncles’ experience of ‘what a battle is really like’ and heated argument over the how and why of killing human beings, ranging over the whole ethical spectrum from the view that ‘the only good one is a dead one’ to very civilized expressions of reluctance at the prospect of shedding human blood at all. The discussion, in short, takes on many of the characteristics of a group therapy session, an analogy which will not, I know, commend itself to many professional soldiers but which I think none the less apt. For the sensations and emotions with which the participants are grappling, though they relate to a situation which lies in a distant and perhaps never-to-be-realized future rather than in a disturbed and immediate present, are real enough, a very powerful, if dormant, part of every human being’s make-up and likely therefore, even when artificially stimulated, to affect the novice officer’s composure to an abnormal and exaggerated extent. These feelings, after all, are the product of some of man’s deepest fears: fear of wounds, fear of death, fear of putting into danger the lives of those for whose well-being one is responsible. They touch too upon some of man’s most violent passions; hatred, rage and the urge to kill. Little wonder that the officer cadet, who, if he is one day to quell those fears and direct those passions, must come to terms with their presence in his make-up, should display classic signs of agitation when the subject of battle and its realities is raised. Little wonder either that my soldier colleagues regard their ‘leadership’ lectures, in which the psychological problems of controlling oneself and one’s men in battle are explicitly reviewed, as the most taxing of their assignments in the military training programme. Few of them, I know, would think that they handle the subject satisfactorily. Most, I suspect, would agree that it is only an exceptional man who can.
Of course, the atmosphere and surroundings of Sandhurst are not conducive to a realistic treatment of war. Perhaps they never are in any military academy. But Sandhurst is a studiedly unmilitary place. Its grounds are serenely park-like, ornamentally watered and planted and landscaped, its buildings those of an English ducal mansion, fronted by nearly a square mile of impeccably mown playing-field, on which it is difficult to imagine anything more warlike being won than a hard-fought game of hockey. And the bearing and appearance of the students helps to foster the country-house illusion; as often to be seen in plain clothes as in uniform, for they are encouraged from the outset to adopt the British officer’s custom of resuming his civilian identity as soon as he goes off duty, they unfailingly remind me, with their tidy hair and tweed jackets, of the undergraduate throng I joined when I went up to Oxford in 1953. It is a reminder which strikes all the more vividly those who teach in universities today. ‘They look’, exclaimed an Oxford professor whom I had brought down to lecture, ‘like the people I was in college with before the war.’
‘Before the war’; the pun is a little too adventitious to stand very much elaboration. But ‘before the war’ is, after all, the spiritual state in which the pupils of a military academy exist. For however strong their motivation towards the military life, however high their combative spirit, however large the proportion who are themselves the sons, sometimes the grandsons and great-grandsons of soldiers – and the proportion at Sandhurst, as at St-Cyr, remains suprisingly large – their knowledge of war is theoretical, anticipatory and second-hand. What is more, one detects in one’s own attitudes, and in those of one’s colleagues, in those who know and in those who don’t, in the tough-minded almost as much as in the tender-hearted, an implicit agreement to preserve their ignorance, to shield the cadets from the worst that war can bring. In part, this agreement stems from an aesthetic reflex, a civilized distaste for the discussion of what might shock or disgust; in part too, it reflects a moral inhibition, an unwillingness to give scandal to the innocent. And it may also be a manifestation of a peculiarly English reticence. French officers, certainly, show a readiness, in reminiscing over the wars in Indo-China or Algeria, to dwell on the numbers of deaths their units have suffered or inflicted – usually inflicted – which I have seen bring physical revulsion to the faces of British veterans, and which I do not think can be wholly explained in terms of the much greater ferocity of the French than the British army’s most recent campaigns.
But Sandhurst and St-Cyr would agree over a quite different justification for the de-sensitized treatment of war which in practice characterizes instruction at both academies, and at all others of which I have any knowledge. And that is that the deliberate injection of emotion into an already highly emotive subject will seriously hinder, if not indeed altogether defeat, the aim of officer-training. That aim, which Western armies have achieved with remarkably consistent success during the two hundred years in which formal military education has been carried on, is to reduce the conduct of war to a set of rules and a system of procedures – and thereby to make orderly and rational what is essentially chaotic and instinctive. It is an aim analogous to that – though I would not wish to push the analogy too far – pursued by medical schools in their fostering among students of a detached attitude to pain and distress in their patients, particularly victims of accidents.
The most obvious manifestation of the procedural approach to war is in the rote-learning and repeated practice of standard drills, by which one does not only mean the manual of arms practised by warriors since time immemorial to perfect their individual skills, but a very much more extended range of procedures which have as their object the assimilation of almost all of an officer’s professional activities to a corporate standard, and a common form. Hence he learns ‘military writing’ and ‘voice procedure’ which teach him to describe events and situations in terms of an instantly recognizable and universally comprehensible vocabulary, and to arrange what he has to say about them in a highly formalized sequence of ‘observations’, ‘conclusions’ and ‘intentions’. He learns to interpret a map in exactly the same way as every other officer will interpret it (the celebrated story of Schlieffen’s reply to his adjutant, who had drawn to his attention a vista of the River Pregel – ‘an inconsiderable obstacle, Captain’ – was only an exaggeration of a reflex response to the accidents of geography which military academies devote much effort to producing in their pupils). Personal, or personnel, relationships are book-taught too: he learns ‘rights’ and ‘wrongs’ in the treatment of prisoners, whether of his own petty defaulters or of enemy captives, by reference to simplified manuals of military and international law – and to ensure that he will get his decisions straight he watches and eventually takes part in a series of ‘playlets’ in which the more common military offences and submissions are simulated. Simulated for him also, of course (both in the classroom and on the ground), are the most frequently encountered combat problems, which he is asked to analyse and, on the basis of his analysis, to solve, usually only on paper, but sometimes by taking command of a group of fellow cadets or occasionally even of ‘real’ soldiers borrowed for the exercise. His analysis, solution and mistakes are then criticized by reference to the ‘school solution’ (called in the British army ‘the pink’, from the colour of the paper on which it is always mimeographed), which he is only then allowed to see (and not allowed to argue about).
Officer-training indeed makes use of simulation techniques to a far greater extent than that for any other profession; and the justification, which is a sound justification, for the time and effort and thought put into these not very exciting routines is that it is only thus that an army can be sure – hopeful would be more accurate – of its machinery operating smoothly under extreme stress. But besides the achievement of this functional and corporate aim, the rote-learning and repetitive form and the categorical, reductive quality of officer-training has an important and intended – if subordinate – psychological effect. Anti-militarists would call it de-personalizing and even de-humanizing. But given – even if they would not give – that battles are going to happen, it is powerfully beneficial. For by teaching the young officer to organize his intake of sensations, to reduce the events of combat to as few and as easily recognizable a set of elements as possible, to categorize under manageable headings the noise, blast, passage of missiles and confusion of human movement which will assail him on the battlefield, so that they can be described – to his men, to his superiors, to himself – as ‘incoming fire’, ‘outgoing fire’, ‘airstrike’, ‘company-strength attack’, one is helping him to avert the onset of fear or, worse, of panic and to perceive a face of battle which, if not familiar, and certainly not friendly, need not, in the event, prove wholly petrifying.
The Usefulness of Military History
History, too, can be pressed into the service of familiarizing the young officer with the unknown. One does not mean here the history of myth, of the Legion at Camerone or the Fusiliers at Albuera, though Moltke, the great nineteenth-century Chief of the German General Staff and himself an academic historian of distinction, ‘held it “a duty of piety and patriotism” not to destroy certain traditional accounts’ if they could be used for an inspirational end, as indeed they can; one is thinking rather of a sort of history, to the launching of which Moltke gave a weighty shove, usually known as ‘Official’ or ‘General Staff’ history. Official history can be bad and good. At its best, modern British, and even more so American official history is a model of what conscientious and at times inspired scholarship can be. But the General Staff variety of official history often took in the past, and still can take, a peculiarly desiccated and didactic form, dedicated to demonstrating, at the cost if necessary of dreadful injury to the facts, that all battles fall into one of perhaps seven or eight types: battles of encounter, battles of attrition, battles of envelopment, battles of breakthrough and so on. Now there is no doubt a certain brutal reality in this approach, just as there is a certain rough-and-ready applicability about the seven or eight or nine ‘immutable and fundamental’ Principles of War (Concentration, Offensive Action, Maintenance of the Aim, etc.) which derive from it by another route and which military academies used to, as some in the ex-colonial countries working off out-of-date training-manuals still do, teach to their students.
But it is not a reality that the university-trained historian can grant more than the shakiest foundation. He, after all, has been trained to detect what is different and particular about events, about individuals and institutions and the character of their relationships. He cannot easily accept therefore, as the typical survey-course text of Military History from Hannibal to Hitler might ask him to, that the battle of Cannae, 216 B.C., and the Battle of Ramillies, A.D. 1706, still less the Battle of the Falaise Gap, 1944, are all the same sort of battle because each culminated in an encirclement of one army by the other. He may admire the painstakingly reconstructed and often beautifully drawn maps which accompany these texts, usually embellished with neat, conventional NATO symbols (infantry division symbol equals a Roman legion; armoured brigade symbol equals cavalry of the Maison du Roi) but he ought not to be persuaded that, because the course of battles fought two thousand years apart in time can be represented in the same cartographic shorthand, the victor in each case was obeying, even if unwittingly, the rules of some universal Higher Logic of War. He will, or should, want to know a great deal more about many things – arms, equipment, logistics, morale, organization, current strategic assumptions – than the General Staff text will tell him, before he will feel able to generalize about anything with the confidence that its author displays about everything.
No doubt, however, he will – as I have done frequently – adopt the General Staff approach and make use of its material. But he will do so with the mental reservation that once off the nursery slopes, he will introduce his pupils to the real thing, the hard stuff. ‘Let them get hold of the distinction between strategy and tactics’ (a distinction as elusive as it is artificial) he may say to himself, ‘and then we’ll get down to some really serious discussion of the Schlieffen Plan, look at the documents, scrutinize the railway time-tables, mobilization schedules, read some Nietzsche, talk about Social Darwinism’… but in the meantime, ‘Gentlemen, I want you to think about these two maps of the German invasions of France in 1914 and 1940 which I’m going to project on the screen. Notice the similarities between …’ He may reconcile this rough-and-readiness to himself, as do a thousand American professors who silently – or audibly – curse World Civilization XP49 but teach it all the same, with the thought that no economic historian would consider discussing the pre-market economy with a class which did not understand the law of supply and demand; no social anthropologist bother embarking on an analysis of the master-man relationship for the benefit of students who did not grasp that there had once been a world without class-structures. And he would be right to do so. We all have to begin somewhere.
There are, however, two obstacles, one minor, one major, to a military historian making with his pupils the intellectual transition from the nursery slopes to the slalom piste which the economic historian or social anthropologist can always look forward to achieving with his (even if he does not get them that far). The first, and lesser, is that the student-officer, and it is he we are discussing, for almost no one else systematically studies military history, is simultaneously undergoing two processes of education, each with a dissimilar object. The one, highly vocational as we have seen and best described by the French word formation, aims if not to close his mind to unorthodox or difficult ideas, at least to stop it down to a fairly short focal length, to exclude from his field of vision everything that is irrelevant to his professional function, and to define all that he ought to see in a highly formal manner. Hence, as he is to begin his career as leader of a small unit of professional soldiers, it is at leadership and small-unit morale that he is asked to look; and, as he may later become a general, then let him also study generalship, strategy, logistics; no matter in either case whether the raw material of his study is culled from the Crusades or the Crimea. The difference between warfare then and now is in a sense unimportant, for it will be his task to bring his enemies to battle on his own terms and force them to fight by his rules, not theirs.
But the other process of education the student-officer undergoes is the normal, ‘academic’ one, which aims to offer the student not a single but a variety of angles of vision; which asks him to adopt in his study of war the standpoint not only of an officer, but also of a private soldier, a non-combatant, a neutral observer, a casualty; or of a statesman, a civil servant, an industrialist, a diplomat, a relief worker, a professional pacifist – all valid, all documented points of view. It will be obvious that any of these viewpoints, adoptable readily enough by the schoolboy or undergraduate, are reconciled much less easily by the student-officer with the stern, professional, monocular outlook he is learning to bring to bear on the phenomena of war.
However it is by no means the case that all, or even many regular officers find it difficult to talk or think about war from an unprofessional point of view. We are most of us capable of compartmenting our minds, would find the living of our lives impossible if we could not, and flee the company of those who can’t or won’t: zealots, monomaniacs, hypochondriacs, insurance salesmen, the love-sick, the compulsively argumentative. One of the pleasures of mixing in military society is the certainty that one will meet there no representatives of most of these categories and few of the rest. The military zealot is, in particular, a rare bird, at least among British officers, who deliberately cultivate a relaxed and undogmatic attitude to the life of Grandeur and Servitude. Indeed the frankness and lack of hypocrisy with which they, having as it were declared by their choice of career where they stand over the ethics of violence and the role of force, are able to discuss these questions makes much mess conversation a great deal more incisive, direct and ultimately illuminating than that of club bars or university common-rooms.
‘Of course, killing people never bothered me,’ I remember a grey-haired infantry officer saying to me, by way of explaining how he had three times won the Military Cross in the Second World War. In black and white it looks a horrifying remark; but to the ear his tone implied, as it was meant to imply, not merely that the act of killing people might legitimately be expected to upset others but that it ought also to have upset him; that, through his failure to suffer immediate shock or lasting trauma, he was forced to recognize some deficiency in his own character or, if not that, then, regrettably, in human nature itself. Both were topics he was prepared to pursue, as we did then and many times afterwards. He was, perhaps, an unusual figure, but not an uncommon one. Fiction knows him well, of course, a great deal of Romantic literature having as its theme the man-of-violence who is also the man of self-knowledge, self-control, compassion, Weltanschauung. He certainly exists in real life also, and as often in the army as elsewhere, as the memoirs of many professional soldiers – though few successful generals – will testify. Perhaps – it is only an impression – he is more typically a French or British than a German or American figure, the horizons of the Sahara or the North-West Frontier encouraging a breadth of outlook denied to the Hauptmann or the First Lieutenant on dreary garrison duty in Arizona or Lorraine. And although there is a German ‘literary’ literature of military life, it is very much more a literature of leadership, as in Bloem’s Vormarsch, or of the exaltation of violence, as in Jünger’s Kampf als innere Erlebnis, than of adventure, exploration, ethnography, social – sometimes even spiritual – fulfilment, the themes which characterize the novels of Ernest Psiachari or F. Yeats-Brown, or the memoirs of Lyautey, Ian Hamilton, Lord Belhaven, Meinertzhagen and a host of other major and minor servants of British and French imperialism in this century and the last who, by design or good luck, chose soldiering as a way of life and found their minds enlarged by it.
If literature of this latter sort reinforces, as I think it does, my personal view that there exists in the military mind neither a psychological barrier nor an institutional taboo against free discussion of the profession of arms, its ethics, dimensions, rewards, shortcomings, if military society is, as I have found it to be, a great deal more open than its enemies will admit or recognize, what then is this other and more important obstacle which I have suggested stands in the way of an intellectual transition from the superficial and easy to the difficult and profound in the study of war – or more particularly of battle-which lies at its heart? If the student-officer can pigeon-hole at will the highly polarized view of combat which his military training gives him, in which people are either ‘enemy’ (to be fought), ‘friend’ (to be led, obeyed or supported as rank and orders prescribe), ‘casualties’ (to be evacuated), ‘prisoners’ (to be interrogated and escorted to the rear), ‘non-combatants’ (to be protected where possible and ignored where not) or ‘dead’ (to be buried when time permits); if he can set aside this stark, two-dimensional picture of battle and prepare to look at it in the same light as a liberal-arts student might, or a professional historian, or a strategic scientist, or a member of that enormous general readership of military history which has come into being in the last twenty years, what difficulty will prevent his – and their – seeing what they want to see and being shown what they ought?
The Deficiencies of Military History
The difficulty, in a sentence, is with ‘military history’ itself. Military history is many things. It is, and for many writers past and present is not very much more than, the study of generals and generalship, an approach to the subject which can sometimes yield remarkable results – the American historian Jac Weller’s three modern studies of Wellington in India, the Peninsula and at Waterloo, for example, convey a powerful sense of character and are informed by a deep and humane understanding of the nature of early nineteenth-century warfare at every level from the general’s to the private soldier’s – but which, by its choice of focus, automatically distorts perspective and too often dissolves into sycophancy or hero-worship, culminating in the odd case in a bizarre sort of identification by the author with his subject – an outcome common and understandable enough in literary or artistic biography but tasteless and even mildly alarming when the Ego is a man of blood and iron, his Alter someone of scholarly meekness and suburban physique.
Military history is also the study of weapons and weapon systems, of cavalry, of artillery, of castles and fortifications, of the musket, the longbow, the armoured knight, of the ironclad battleship, of the strategic bomber. The strategic bombing campaign against Germany, its costs and benefits, its rights and wrongs, engages the energies of some of the most powerful minds at work in the field of military history today and has fomented one of the subject’s few real intellectual antagonisms, comparable in the intensity and the scholarly rigour with which it is carried on to that sustained by seventeenth-century historians over the Rise or Decline of the Gentry; like those exercised by that long-running feud, its initiates seek constantly to widen the arena of their private conflict and to add to the list of combatants, so that all manner of passers-by – mild strategic-theorists, visiting demographers and uncommitted economic historians en route between a pre- and post-war Index of Gross National Product – find themselves challenged to stand and declare their colours over the ethics of area bombing or the practicability of bottleneck targeting. Tiresome though this faction-fighting can be, it justifies itself, quite apart from the importance of the moral issues at stake, by the high level of scholarship at which it is conducted and by the network of connections its participants, unlike so many other kinds of military historian, maintain with the wider world of historical (principally economic historical) inquiry.
Strongly economic in flavour too is a great deal of naval history, built as it must be around the study of weapon systems, of the big-gun battleship of the First World War and the aircraft carrier of the Second. And very precise, from the professional point of view very satisfying, history it can be. For modern naval warfare is, as correspondents with the Eighth Army were fond of reporting of the Desert campaign, very nearly ‘pure’ warfare, a war without civilians (on the whole) and one in which the common sailor cannot, as the common soldier can, by running away or sitting tight, easily confound his commander’s wishes. All being in the same boat, a ship’s company generally does as its captain directs, until all are sunk together; fleets, by extension, until beaten, move as their admirals order. And since naval orders must be transmitted mechanically and are logged as sent and received, navies accumulate archives whose contents are pure historical gold-dust: precisely noted changes of course, the weather reports of trained meteorologists, damage-control reports by professional engineers, accurately timed sightings of friendly and enemy units, hard nuggets of fact about visibility, casualties, sinkings, fall of shot, sea conditions, facts of a density and volume to crush the spirit and blind the imagination of all but the most inspired and dedicated scholar. For inexplicable reasons, it is American rather than British historians who have triumphed in the long-distance event that the writing of naval history is, and this although, by the majority vote of historical events, it is the doings of Royal rather than U.S. Navy which has compelled their attention. (One of them at least, Professor Arthur Marder, has achieved in his study of the British navy in the First World War standards of archival research and organization of material which defy betterment.)
Military history furthermore is the study of institutions, of regiments, general staffs, staff colleges, of armies and navies in the round, of the strategic doctrines by which they fight and of the ethos by which they are informed. At the most elevated level, this branch of the subject shades off, through the history of strategic doctrine, into the broader field of the history of ideas, and in another direction, through the study of ‘civil-military’ relations, into political science. ‘Elevated’ should of course be understood here in a very relative sense, for though academic interest in civil–military relations, particularly in those between the German army and the German state, has produced a large, satisfying and in parts distinctly exciting literature, it is elsewhere prone to clothe itself in the drab garments of sociology at its most introspective; while the history of strategic doctrine, with some notable exceptions, of which Jay Luvaas’s Military Legacy of the Civil War is a glittering example, suffers markedly from that weakness endemic to the study of ideas, the failure to demonstrate connection between thought and action.
That weakness is not, however, peculiar to this sub-branch of military history. Action is essentially destructive of all institutional studies; just as it compromises the purity of doctrines, it damages the integrity of structures, upsets the balance of relationships, interrupts the network of communication which the institutional historian struggles to identify and, having identified, to crystallize. War, the good quartermaster’s opportunity, the bad quartermaster’s bane, is the institutional military historian’s irritant. It forces him, whose urge is to generalize and dissect, to qualify and particularize and above all to combine analysis with narrative – the most difficult of all the historian’s arts. Hence his preference, paradoxically, for the study of armed forces in peacetime. And excellent many works of that sort turn out to be. But, as Mr Michael Howard concluded at the end of a long, very painstaking and generally warm review, ‘the trouble with this sort of book is that it loses sight of what armies are for.’ Armies, he implied, are for fighting. Military history, we may infer, must in the last resort be about battle.
That certainly reflects Clausewitz’s view. In an economic analogy, which delighted Engels and has helped to ensure this Prussian (admittedly vaguely Hegelian) general an unobtrusive niche in the Marxist Temple du Génie, he suggested that ‘fighting is to war’, (the paraphrase is Engel’s) ‘what cash payment is to trade, for however rarely it may be necessary for it actually to occur, everything is directed towards it, and eventually it must take place all the same and must be decisive.’ Battle history, or campaign history, deserves a similar primacy over all other branches of military historiography. It is in fact the oldest historical form, its subject matter is of commanding importance, and its treatment demands the most scrupulous historical care. For it is not through what armies arebut by what they do that the lives of nations and of individuals are changed. In either case, the engine of change is the same; the infliction of human suffering through violence. And the right to inflict suffering must always be purchased by, or at the risk of, combat – ultimately of combat corps à corps.
Combat corps à corps is not of course a subject which historians, any more than other sorts of writer, can be accused of ignoring. The ‘battle piece’, as a historical construction, is as old as Herodotus; as a subject of myth and saga it is even more antique. It is an everyday theme of modern journalistic reportage and it presents a literary challenge which some of the world’s masters have taken up. Stendhal, Thackeray and Hugo each offer us a version of the battle of Waterloo – as seen through the eyes of a shell-shocked survivor, of a distracted bystander, of a stern and unrelenting Republican deity; while Tolstoy, in his reconstruction of the battle of Borodino, which had for nineteenth-century Russians the same historical centrality as Waterloo for contemporary western Europeans, not only brought off one of the most spectacular set pieces in the development of the novel-form, but also opened the modern case for the prosecution against the Great Man theory of historical explanation.
Imagination and sentiment, which quite properly delimit the dimensions of the novelist’s realm, are a dangerous medium, however, through which to approach the subject of battle. Indeed, in that sub-world of imaginative writing which Gillian Freeman has called the undergrowth of literature, calculated indulgence in imagination and sentiment have produced, and regrettably continue to produce, some very nasty stuff indeed, which at its Zap-Blatt-Banzai-Gott in Himmel-Bayonet in the Guts worst may justifiably be condemned by that overworked phrase, ‘pornography of violence’.
Historians, traditionally and rightly, are expected to ride their feelings on a tighter rein than the man of letters can allow himself. One school of historians at least, the compilers of the British Official History of the First World War, have achieved the remarkable feat of writing an exhaustive account of one of the world’s greatest tragedies without the display of any emotion at all. A brief, and wholly typical, extract will convey the flavour; it describes a minor trench-to-trench attack by infantry, supported by artillery, on August 8th, 1916 at Guillemont, in the second month of the Battle of the Somme:
Some confusion arose on the left brigade front, where the 166th Brigade (Brigadier-General L. F. Green Wilkinson) was replacing the 164th – a very difficult relief – and although the 1/10th King’s (Liverpool Scottish), keeping close behind the barrage, approached the German wire, it lost very heavily in two desperate but unavailing attempts to close with the enemy. Nearly all the officers were hit, including Lieutenant-Colonel J. R. Davidson who was wounded. Next on the left, the 1/5th Loyal North Lancashire (also 155th Brigade) was late through no fault of its own; starting after the barrage had lifted, it stood no chance of success. Subsequently the 1/7th King’s attacked from the position won by its own brigade (the 165th) on the previous day, but could make no headway.
Agreed that this is technical history; that it is intended as a chronological record of military incident to provide, among other things, material for Staff College lectures and authoritative source references for other historians to work from. But is this featureless prose appropriate to the description of what we may devine was something very nasty indeed that happened that morning at Guillemont fifty-eight years ago to those 3,000 Englishmen, in particular to those of the 1/10th Battalion of the King’s Regiment?2 That it was something very nasty is revealed by a footnote: ‘The Victoria Cross was awarded to the medical officer of the 1/10th King’s, Captain N. C. Chavasse, for his exceptionally gallant work in rescuing wounded under heavy fire.’ For most of us know, even if nothing else about the British army, that the Victoria Cross can be won, and then very rarely, only at the risk, often at the cost, of death. If we also know that Chavasse is but one of three men ever to have won the Cross twice, his second being a posthumous award, and that his battalion was a Kitchener unit, composed of enthusiastic but half-trained volunteers; if we guess that ‘could make no headway’ and ‘stood no chance of success’ mean that its neighbouring battalions returned precipitately to their trenches or did not leave them, then we can glimpse, in this episode in no-man’s-land at Guillemont on August 8th, 1916, a picture in miniature of the First World War at, for those compelled to fight it, almost its very worst.
But if we may conclude that the official historians’ decision to deal with the emotive difficulty in military historiography by denying themselves any explicit emotional outlet whatsoever was unsatisfactory, and that some exploration of the combatants’ emotions, if not the indulgence of our own, is essential to the truthful writing of military history, we are still left with the problem of how it is to be done. ‘Allowing the combatants to speak for themselves’ is not merely a permissible but, when and where possible, an essential ingredient of battle narrative and battle analysis. The almost universal illiteracy, however, of the common soldier of any century before the nineteenth makes it a technique difficult to employ. Dr Christopher Duffy, by heroic labour among little-known Prussian and Austrian archives, has pushed use of the technique backwards into the eighteenth century; but it is not until the coming of the wars of the French Revolution that we find any extensive deposit even of officers’ memoirs and not until the First World War that we hear the voice of the common man (though infant murmurs can be detected during the American Civil War). Robert Rhodes-James, who is one of a handful of historians to have discussed the technical difficulties of writing military history, holds strongly to the view that battles ought to be and are best described through the words of participants; and in Gallipoli he gave a master’s demonstration of how it may be done.
There are, however, objections to general dependence on the technique and not wholly those concerned with the paucity or absence of material from which to work. One, well known to all scholars, is the danger of reconstructing events solely or largely on the evidence of those whose reputations may gain or lose by the account they give; even if it is only a warrior’s self-esteem which he feels to be at stake, he is liable to inflate his achievements – what we might call ‘the Bullfrog Effect’ – and old warriors, particularly if surrounded by Old Comrades who will endorse his yarn while waiting the chance to spin their own on a reciprocal basis, are notoriously prone to do so. Contemporary letters and even more so, genuinely private diaries (if such exist) are a much more reliable source; but they must be used in the right way. Too often they are not. At worst, they are mined for ‘interest’, to produce anthologies of ‘eye-witness accounts’ in series with titles like Everyman at War (The Historian as Copy-typist would be altogether more frank); at best, they serve as the raw material for what is not much more than anecdotal history, yielding a narrative with a great deal of pungency and a high surface shimmer but without any of that intense particularity or energetic and confident generalization which are the trademarks of the historical maître-ouvrier.
Anecdote should certainly not be despised, let alone rejected by the historian. But it is only one of the stones to his hand. Others – reports, accounts, statistics, map-tracings, pictures and photographs and a mass of other impersonal material – will have to be coaxed to speak, and he ought also to get away from papers and walk about his subject wherever he can find traces of it on the ground. A great pioneer military historian, Hans Delbrück in Germany in the last century, demonstrated that it was possible to prove many traditional accounts of military operations pure nonsense by mere intelligent inspection of the terrain, and an English follower of his, Lt-Colonel A. H. Burne, proposed the applicability of a principle he had tested on every major English battlefield (Inherent Military Probability) and which, used with circumspection, is a rewarding as well as intriguing concept.3 I would also argue that military historians should spend as much time as they can with soldiers, not on the grounds that ‘armies always remain the same at heart’, a notion which any historian with a sense of professional self-preservation would dismiss out of hand, but because the quite chance observation of trivial incidents may illuminate his private understanding of all sorts of problems from the past which will otherwise almost certainly remain obscured.
Christopher Duffy, who was lucky enough to spend some weeks teaching Yugoslav militia the elements of Napoleonic drill for a film enactment of War and Peace, described to me the thrill of comprehension he experienced in failing to manœuvre his troops successfully across country ‘in line’ and of the comparative ease with which he managed it ‘in column’, thus proving to his own satisfaction that Napoleon preferred the latter formation to the former not because it more effectively harnessed the revolutionary ardour of his troops (the traditional ‘glamorous’ explanation) but because anything more complicated was simply impracticable. I myself recall a similar archaeological pang in catching a glimpse of a Guards sergeant marching backwards before his squad who were learning the slow-march on the Sandhurst drill-square; the angle of his outstretched arms and upraised stick, his perfectly practised disregard for any obstacle in his backward path, the exhortatory rictus of his expression exactly mirrored the image, sketched from life by Rowlandson, of a Guards sergeant drilling his recruits on Horse Guards parade a hundred and seventy years before; and through that reflection I suddenly understood the function – choreographic, ritualistic, perhaps even aesthetic, certainly much more than tactical – which drill plays in the life of long-service armies. The insight which intimacy with soldiers at this level can bring to the military historian enormously enhances his surety of touch in feeling his way through the inanimate landscape of documents and objects with which he must work. It will, I think, rob him of patience for much that passes as military history; it will diminish his interest in much of the ‘higher’ study of war – of strategic theory, of generalship, of grand strategic debate, of the machine-warfare waged by air forces and navies. And that, perhaps, is a pity. But if it leads him to question – as I have found it does me – the traditional approach to writing about combat corps à corps, to decide that, after he has read the survivors’ letters and diaries, the generals’ memoirs, the staff officers’ dispatches, that there is yet another element which he must add to anything he writes – an element compounded of affection for the soldiers he knows, a perception of the hostilities as well as the loyalties which animate a society founded on comradeship, some appreciation of the limits of leadership and obedience, a glimpse of the far shores of courage, a recognition of the principle of self-preservation ever present in even the best soldier’s nature, incredulity that flesh and blood can stand the fears with which battle will confront it and which his own deeply felt timidity will highlight – if, in short, he can learn to make up his mind about the facts of battle in the light of what all, and not merely some, of the participants felt about their predicament, then he will have taken the first and most important step in understanding battle ‘as it actually was’.
For if to propagate understanding of, not merely knowledge about, the past is the historian’s highest duty, making up his own mind is the essential precondition to that end. Making up one’s mind about anything, let alone a large and complicated body of material, is always a difficult and often painful task but it is one which many military historians would seem to shun altogether. The anecdotal historian avoids it, since he has already decided that his only responsibility is to entertain the reader and he can therefore discard whatever material he judges will not. The anthologist historian avoids it absolutely, usually justifying this abdication of his function by the plea that he prefers to let the reader make up his mind for himself – as if someone he impropriates of only a fraction of the record is thereby put in any position to do so. The ‘General Staff’ historian also avoids the responsibility, for his mind is made up for him by prevailing staff doctrine about the proper conduct of war and he will accordingly select whatever facts endorse that view, while manhandling those which offer resistance. The technological, the economic, the strategic, the biographic historians will all in their turn approach the subject of battle with their attitudes somewhat pre-cast, though they are usually well trained enough to advise the reader of their bias from the outset. But even the all-round military historian tends, in my experience, however perceptive, innovative, forthright, even downright disrespectful he is in his discussion of staffwork, leadership, strategic decision and the like, to shy away from the challenge of planting the impress of his own mind on his battle descriptions. One would certainly not suggest that he does so consciously, nor that the battle pieces he writes are not the fruit of careful research and skilful organization. But the trouble precisely is that what most military historians write about battle are indeed ‘battle pieces’, that is to say essays in a highly traditional form, which no amount of labour to fill out with new information will materially alter so long as the historian accepts the conventions within which he is working. To suggest that most military historians do accept those conventions is not to accuse them of that beginner’s error, the transmission of traditional accounts (‘For want of a nail the kingdom was lost …’); nor is it to impugn them of unreflectingly adopting the modes of thought of this or that great historian of the past. It is rather to argue that what has been called the ‘rhetoric of history’ – that inventory of assumptions, and usages through which the historian makes his professional approach to the past – is not only, as it pertains to the writing of battle history, much more strong and inflexible than the rhetoric of almost all other sorts of history, but is so strong, so inflexible and above all so time-hallowed that it exerts virtual powers of dictatorship over the military historian’s mind.
The ‘Battle Piece’
What do I mean by the ‘rhetoric of battle history’? And what are its usages and assumptions? They are demonstrated in an extreme form in a passage which, though I have already dismissed it as ‘myth history’, is so famous and so striking an example of the ‘battle piece’ that I cannot resist reproducing it. It is General Sir William Napier’s account of the advance of the Fusilier Brigade (7th Royal and 23rd Royal Welch Fusiliers) at the battle of Albuera, May 16th, 1811, generally regarded as the crucial moment of the battle (of which Napier was not an eye-witness, having been wounded at Fuentes d’Onoro a fortnight before) :
Such a gallant line, issuing from the midst of the smoke and rapidly separating itself from the confused and broken multitude, startled the enemy’s masses, then augmenting and pressing forward as to an assured victory; they wavered, hesitated and, vomiting forth a storm of fire, hastily endeavoured to enlarge their front, while a fearful discharge of grape from all their artillery whistled through the British ranks. Myers was killed, Cole, the three colonels, Ellis, Blakeney and Hawkshawe, fell wounded, and the fusilier battalions, struck by the iron tempest, reeled and staggered like sinking ships: but suddenly and sternly recovering, they closed on their terrible enemies, and then was seen with what strength and majesty the British soldier fights. In vain did Soult with voice and gesture animate the Frenchmen; in vain did the hardiest veterans, breaking from the crowded columns, sacrifice their lives to gain time for the mass to open out on such a fair field; in vain did the mass itself bear up, and fiercely striving fire indiscriminately upon friends and foes, while the horsemen hovering on the flank threatened to charge the advancing line. Nothing could stop that astonishing infantry. No sudden burst of undisciplined valour, no nervous enthusiasm weakened the stability of their order, their flashing eyes were bent on the dark columns in their front, their measured tread shook the ground, their dreadful volleys swept away the head of every formation, their deafening shouts overpowered the dissonant cries that broke from all parts of the tumultuous crowd, as slowly and with a horrid carnage it was pushed by the incessant vigour of the attack to the farthest edge of the height. There the French reserve, mixing with the struggling multitude, endeavoured to restore the fight but only augmented the irremediable disorder, and the mighty mass, giving way like a loosened cliff went headlong down the steep: the rain flowed after in streams discoloured with blood, and eighteen hundred unwounded men, the remnant of six thousand unconquerable British soldiers, stood triumphant on the fatal hill.
Now as romantic prose passages go, this is clearly a very remarkable achievement, rich in imagery, thunderous in rhythm and immensely powerful in emotional effect; it almost vibrates on the page, towards its climax threatens indeed to loosen the reader’s hold on the book. Quite understandably it has become one of the most frequently quoted of all descriptive accounts of the British army’s battles in the Peninsula and a firm favourite with compilers of military anthologies. But ‘descriptive’ begs, of course, an important, not to say vital question. Just what does it tell us about the Fusiliers’ advance; and is what it tells us credible?
Well, we would probably all accept that ‘their measured tread shook the ground’ is merely metaphor and that the difference between the British soldiers’ ‘deafening shouts’ and the French soldiers’ ‘dissonant cries’ is a literary sound-effect – as ‘streams discoloured with blood’ is probably a visual one; ‘reeled and staggered like sinking ships’ is a variation on a traditional simile, no more to be taken au pied de la lettre than is ‘vomited forth a storm of fire’. But when we have made allowances for permissible over-writing, when we have stripped away the verbal superstructure of the passage, we are still left with a picture of events to which it is difficult wholly to lend credence. Am I alone in wondering whether a body of men, admittedly trained soldiers, but of whom two out of three were to suffer wounds or death as a consequence of their acts, really advanced uphill under heavy fire without once showing ‘nervous enthusiasm’ or indeed anything but ‘disciplined valour’ and ‘stability’ and ‘order’? And how exactly, to ask another sort of question, was the ‘loosened cliff’ of the French mass thrust down the ‘steep’; by weight of superior numbers, by hand-to-hand brawling, by push of bayonet, by the sudden onset of panic in their own ranks? These are only some of a large number of uncertainties which one would like to have one’s mind set straight upon but which Napier, having successfully aroused, leaves frustratingly unresolved. It may be that the episode was as extraordinary as he makes out – by comparison at once with everyday human behaviour and by the norms of military performance. But if so, and he as a veteran was in a position to say, he owed it to the reader, one may think, to make that clear. As it is, he seems to suggest that it is by no means abnormal (‘Then was seen with what strength and majesty the British soldier fights’) that a leaderless brigade of infantry (the brigadier and his three colonels had been disabled) should overcome, at the cost of over half its number, a very much stronger combined force of infantry, cavalry and artillery led by one of the foremost soldiers of the age (Soult was already a marshal).
It may be thought that the evidence in the case against the ‘battle piece’ is being stacked by adduction of so over-written an example of the form. There are, however, besides the extravagance of his language, other elements in Napier’s account of the Fusiliers’ advance which deserve attention because we will find them recurring in the work of other much more sober, much more ‘scientific’ historians. The first is the extreme uniformity of human behaviour which he portrays: the British are all attacking and all with equal intensity (‘no sudden burst of undisciplined valour … ’); the French likewise are all resisting (though some admittedly super-energetically – ‘the hardiest veterans, breaking from the crowded columns, sacrifice their lives …’); no individual turns tail and runs, drops down to sham dead or stands thunder-struck at the indescribable horror of it all. Second, there is the very abrupt, indeed quite discontinuous movement of the piece: the British advance, they and the French exchange volleys, ‘carnage’ ensues, and then suddenly the French are over the steep. Third, there is a ruthlessly stratified characterization; the British soldiers are either ‘fusiliers’ or one of five named people, all senior officers; the French, except for Soult and the ‘hardiest veterans’ (a surprisingly short-lived bunch for old soldiers) are members either of ‘crowded columns’, a ‘tumultuous crowd’, a ‘struggling multitude’, a ‘mighty mass’, or, a most unsoldierly formation, that ‘loosened cliff’. This traffic in collective images, approbatory as applied to the British (‘gallant line’), pejorative in the case of the French (‘dark columns’), reveals a fourth, and the most important element, in Napier’s approach: a highly oversimplified depiction of human behaviour on the battlefield. Implicit rather than explicit in his prose, it is clearly discernible none the less, and amounts to an absoute division of all present into ‘leaders’ and ‘led’, who conduct themselves accordingly: for the whole point of the passage is that the French, despite the exhortations of Soult and the exemplary self-sacrifice of the ‘hardiest veterans’, do not prevail against the British fusiliers who, even though they have been deprived of their senior commanders, nevertheless fight heroically and bring the advance to a successful conclusion. Finally, though this does not exhaust the list of noteworthy elements in the passage, there is no explanation of what happened to the dead and wounded; nor surely is it facetious to seek one. Men advancing in close order across a constricted space against an enemy with whom they exchange effective fire will have to step over the bodies first of their own dead and wounded comrades, then over those of the enemy; would not that have interrupted – it is only a quibble – the Fusiliers’ ‘measured tread’? And what did the wounded – combatant beings no longer but none the less, indeed perhaps all the more, sentient for that – do with themselves while the struggle raged round them? In Napier’s account, the dead and wounded apparently dematerialize as soon as struck down, exactly the contrary of what was supposed to happen in the Norse paradise – where warriors killed in combat instantly sprang up to resume the fight – but equally as puzzling.
The length and tone of this critique may be thought unfair to Napier who was merely trying, in a limited space and for an audience unaccustomed to thinking of private soldiers as individuals worthy of mention by name, to describe what by any reckoning was one of the high points of the British effort in the wars against Napoleon-which had, for Englishmen of his own time and class, the same quality of national epic as did the struggle to overthrow Hitler for their descendants five generations later. Churlishly, it fails to pay tribute to the pioneering quality of his work. No Englishman before him had written such energetic, many-sided, informative and explicative military history; even a century after its publication, its standard could prompt a doyen of English academic historians to describe British Battles and Sieges as ‘the finest military history in English and perhaps in any language’. Moreover, none of this taking-to-task is orginal. Napier, by his own admission, was psychologically a hero-worshipper and artistically a big-production man (‘It is the business of the historian … to bring the exploits of the hero into broad daylight … the multitude must be told where to stop and wonder and to make them do so, the historian must have recourse to all the power of words’); while it was a perceptive contemporary critic who charged that he ‘sacrificed to the general grand effect all minor and apparently trifling things’.
In short, I am being unfair; and, since historians of the modern school have long been taught that the sacrifice of the ‘general grand effect’ is a necessary preliminary to the achievement of anything professionally worthwhile, I also appear to be labouring a point. But am I? Modern military historians have certainly shown themselves to be as keen as the next man in pursuit of the ‘minor and apparently trifling’, at least as far as the non-combatant aspects of their subject are concerned; one has only to think of a book like Quimby’s Background to Napoleonic Warfare, which dissects the pre-Revolutionary French drill regulations with Thomist rigour, or S. P. G. Ward’s Wellington’s Headquarters, which might almost be used as a text in an enlightened school of management studies, to be satisfied on that score – and to be filled with a sense of humility at one’s own scholarly shortcomings. But when one turns from drill and logistics to the battle descriptions of even the best trained modern historians, it is to find Napierism as alive as ever; less sonorous to the ear, perhaps, certainly less xenophobic, but still trading in his limited stock of assumptions and assertions about the behaviour of human beings in extreme-stress situations. Here are three passages, all the work of distinguished English historians trained in the Oxford school of Modern History.
The first, from The British Army 1642–1970 by Brigadier Peter Young, D.S.O., M.C., describes the charge of the British Heavy Brigade of cavalry against the Russians at Balaclava, October 25th, 1854. This successful action just preceded the disastrous charge of the Light Brigade:
As the Royals passed the vineyard they saw the Greys ahead of them, hacking their way through the main body of the Russians, while other squadrons threatened to envelop them. An ancient friendship existed between the Greys and the Royals, and a voice from the latter was heard to cry, ‘By God, the Greys are cut off. Gallop. Gallop.’ The regiment gave a cheer, the trumpets sounded, and with ranks imperfectly formed fell upon the flank and rear of the wheeling Russian squadrons, catching the outer troops as they tried to face outwards and routing them utterly. The Royals pressed on into the enemy mass, but Colonel Yorke had a grip of his men and, before more than a few had galloped off in pursuit of the enemy, halted and reformed them … The 4th Dragoon Guards had also made themselves felt, and by this time the Russians were galloping rearwards, broken and disordered, followed by a few of the ‘Heavies’ and sped on their way by the Horse Artillery. In this splendid charge ten squadrons routed some 3,000 men for the loss of some eighty casualties.
The second passage by David Chandler is from his exhaustive study of The Campaigns of Napoleon and describes the charge of the French Reserve Cavalry against the Russians at Eylau, February 8th, 1807:
In marvellous fettle, eighty squadrons of splendidly accoutred horsemen swept forward over the intervening 2,500 yards. It was one of the greatest cavalry charges in history. Leading the attack rode Dahlmann at the head of six squadrons of chasseurs, followed by Murat and the cavalry reserve, supported in due course by Bessières with the Cavalry of the Guard. The troopers of Grouchy, d’Hautpol, Klein and Milhaud swept forward in turn. First, Murat’s men swept through the remnants of the Russian force retiring from Eylau, before dividing into two wings, one ploughing into the flank of the Russian cavalry force attacking St Hilaire’s embattled division, the other sabering its way through the troops surrounding the square of dead men at the 14th Regiment’s last stand. Even then the impetus of this fantastic charge did not slacken. Driving forward, the two cavalry wings crashed through the serried ranks of Sacken’s centre, pierced them, reformed into a single column once more in the Russian rear and then plunged back the way they had come through the disordered Russian units to cut down the gunners who had done so much harm to Augereau’s men. As the stunned Russians attempted to reform their line, a relieved Napoleon ordered forward the Cavalry of the Guard to cause more disorder and thus cover the safe retirement of Murat’s weary but elated squadrons … For the loss of 1,500 men, Murat had won Napoleon a vital respite.
The third, from Michael Howard’s Franco-Prussian War, describes the attack of the infantry of the Prussian Guard against the French positions at St-Privat, August 18th, 1870:
So the skirmishing lines of the Guard, with thick columns behind them, extended themselves over the bare fields below St-Privat and began to make their way up the slopes in the face of the French fire … The result was a massacre. The field officers on their horses were the first casualties. The men on foot struggled forward against the chassepot fire, as if into a hailstorm, shoulders hunched, heads bowed, directed only by the shouts of their leaders and the discordant noise of their regimental bugles and drums. All formations disintegrated; the men broke up their columns into a single thick and ragged skirmishing line and inched their way forward up the bare glacis of the fields until they were within some six hundred yards of St-Privat. There they stopped. No more urging could get the survivors forward. They could only crouch in firing positions and wait for the attack of the Saxons, which they had so disastrously anticipated, to develop on their left flank. The casualty returns were to reveal over 8,000 officers and men killed and wounded, mostly in twenty minutes; more than a quarter of the entire corps strength. If anything was needed to vindicate the French faith in the chassepot, it was the aristocratic corpses which so thickly strewed the fields between St-Privat and St-Marie-les-Chênes.
Stylistically, of course, these three pieces differ considerably from each other. Brigadier Young’s is a jolly genre scene, the violence he portrays no more hurtful than the knocks exchanged in a Dutch ‘Low Life’ painting of a beerhouse brawl; David Chandler’s is Second Empire Salon School, a large canvas, highly coloured and animated by a great deal of apparent movement but conveying no real sense of action; Michael Howard’s is Neo-Classical, severe in mood, sombre in tone, his subjects frozen in the attitudes of tragedy to which fate, deaf to appeals of compassion, has consigned them.
They differ too in the demands they make on the reader’s credulity. Brigadier Young is content to be very vague about what actually passed between the Heavy Brigade and their Russian adversaries, perhaps because he has been in too many battles himself to think that this or any other can be explained in simple terms. Nevertheless, the factors he isolates as significant – the ‘ancient friendship’, the voice from the ranks and the chance which caught the Russian squadrons wheeling as they were struck by the charge – do not of themselves supply a sufficient explanation of how so small a force came to rout so large a one at such little cost.
David Chandler tells us a good deal more; the exact number of squadrons committed to the charge, the distance they covered, how many lines of resistance they broke and more besides. He is also quite specific how the French manœuvred during this episode: after an initial sweep forward, they divided into two wings, each of which fought a separate running battle before jointly breaking through a densely packed Russian formation, after which they reformed into a single column, turned about, passed once more through the Russians, attacked with their swords a fourth enemy body and only then withdrew from action. It sounds unbelievably complicated; indeed, it reads like something from a military Kama Sutra, exciting, intriguing, but likely to have proved a good deal more difficult in practice than it reads on the printed page. And to fortify one’s doubt about whether all went as smoothly as the narrative depicts it to have done are the questions which the presence of the Russians raise. What, in the path of a manœuvre which would have been regarded as a tour de force if executed on a peacetime parade-ground, were all those thousands of Russians doing with themselves? The narrative implies that they stood their ground, neither falling beneath nor running clear of the French onslaught. But fallen or run the Russians must have, for otherwise the French could not have passed from in front of their formations to the other side. In falling, however, must they not have brought down numbers of French horses and riders, either by acting as stumbling-blocks or by causing collisions as horses swerved to avoid them? Both things certainly happen on the far side of a big jump in a steeplechase (for horses, even when frightened or excited, never like to tread on a living object or bump into one). And would running really have done much to clear the course? A man cannot out-distance a horse – unless, of course, he is given a considerable headstart. But if one supposes a headstart long enough to clear the French path of obstacles, then sentences like ‘the two cavalry wings crashed through the serried ranks of Sacken’s centre’ lose much of their meaning. It is all very baffling. And to say that is not to imply disbelief that the episode happened, nor that it happened much as described. It is only to say that one does not see how.
Michael Howard’s description of the advance of the Prussian Guard leaves one with no such list of unanswered ‘hows’. He sets out, as he makes clear, to give a straightforward description of a straightforward massacre and he does so in prose which is one of the many gifts serving to elevate his work above that of all other contemporary military historians. He leaves us nevertheless with a mighty ‘why’. Why did the Guard not turn and flee before that terrible fire? He, having himself been decorated for bravery in leading Guardsmen of his own against the enemy – possibly, it is not completely fanciful, against great-grandsons of men killed at St-Privat – may feel no need to ask himself that question and in consequence does not seek to answer it for the reader. The question, which a less successful evocation of mood might not have posed, stands none the less. And with it a number of supplementaries. Did the whole lot, every last Grenadier and Fusilier, stick where they crouched on the open hillside? Were the bonds of discipline and group loyalty so strong that no one made a bolt for the rear, or burrowed for cover between the corpses of his comrades? We know from many other accounts that large bodies of men can display a sheeplike docility under heavy fire, often for hours at a time – the infantry of Ostermann-Tolstoi’s corps are reported to have stood for two hours under pointblank artillery fire at Borodino ‘during which the only movement was the stirring in the lines caused by falling bodies – but the temporary extinction of the survival instinct that behaviour of this sort implies is beyond the ordinary reader’s comprehension. Unless it is faced square by the author, and some attempt made to discuss it, his reader, fairly or unfairly, is going to feel that something more than the ‘minor and trifling’ has been ‘sacrificed to the general grand effect’.
That something has been sacrificed in these passages their three authors would probably all concede, for sacrifice is a necessary exercise for the historian, who would befuddle himself and his audience if he tried to write down everything he could find out about an episode from the past. But they would probably also seek to justify it on particular grounds: Brigadier Young, that limitations of space precluded his attempting anything more than an atmospheric sketch of the Heavy Brigade’s charge; David Chandler, that he was writing a military life of Napoleon and that it was the thought-processes of the master, not the acts of his men that he had contracted to describe; Michael Howard, that he was writing a political and strategic history of the war of 1870 and hence that it was its influence on the political and military future of Europe, rather than on the lives of combatants, that he sought to portray. All, if this accurately anticipates the sense of their rejoinders, would in short be arguing that the events and character of a battle are subordinate in importance to its outcome; that, for the development of the British army, for the fulfilment of Napoleon’s strategy, for the settlement of French and Prussian rivalry over European primacy, it was the results of Balaclava, of Eylau, of Gravelotte-St-Privat which counted, not the experience of those who took part, which becomes, therefore, of marginal relevance. Arguing at that historical level and in those terms, it would indeed be difficult to frame a reasonable opposition case.
‘Killing No Murder?’
An opposition case can nevertheless be framed by asking why, if a historian is interested only in the outcome of a battle, he should trouble to provide any sort of narrative at all? The answer, at one level, would be that battles are deliberate, not chance happenings; commanders plan battles and must pit their wits against each other to make their plans succeed. Exactly how they manœuvre their men around the constricted arena of a battlefield, in the race against time which the limits of daylight, of human resilience, and of available material will measure them out, is therefore of obvious importance to an understanding of the success of one commander and the failure of the other – or of both, if the battle ends, as it so often does, in stalemate. But at another level that answer will not do. For the ‘outcome’ approach to military history, like the time-honoured but outmoded ‘causes and results’ approach to general history, pre-judges the terms in which the narrative can be cast. That is so because ‘win’ or ‘lose’ – the concepts through which a commander and his chronicler approach a battle – are by no means the same as those through which his men will view their own involvement in it. Their view, like that of all human beings confronted with the threat or reality of extreme personal danger, will be a much simpler one: it will centre on the issue of personal survival, to which the commander’s ‘win/lose’ system of values may be, indeed often proves, irrelevant or directly hostile.
But the soldier’s view will also be much more complicated than the commander’s. The latter fights his battle in a comparatively stable environment – that of his headquarters, peopled by staff officers who will, because for efficiency’s sake they must, retain a rational calm; and he visualizes the events of and parties to the battle, again because for efficiency’s sake he must, in fairly abstract terms: of ‘attack’ and ‘counter-attack’, of the ‘Heavy Brigade’, of the ‘Guard Corps’ – large, intellectually manageable blocks of human beings going here or there and doing, or failing to do, as he directs. The soldier is vouchsafed no such well-ordered and clear-cut vision. Battle, for him, takes place in a wildly unstable physical and emotional environment; he may spend much of his time in combat as a mildly apprehensive spectator, granted, by some freak of events, a comparatively danger-free grandstand view of others fighting; then he may suddenly be able to see nothing but the clods on which he has flung himself for safety, there to crouch – he cannot anticipate – for minutes or for hours; he may feel in turn boredom, exultation, panic, anger, sorrow, bewilderment, even that sublime emotion we call courage. And his perception of community with his fellow-soldiers will fluctuate in equal measure. Something like the Guard Corps, an important reality for the German commander-in-chief at St-Privat, whether he could see it or not, would probably have ceased to have much meaning for the ordinary Guardsman once it had deployed beyond the boundaries of his vision; but he may still have felt some sense of belonging, possibly to his battalion, probably to his company, until confronted by some dramatic personal threat; then it must only have been the circle of his most immediate comrades which would have retained for him any extra-personal identity and only their survival, so much bound up with his own, for which he would have striven.
In circumstances of extreme personal danger, in short, the wishes of the commander, which the individual soldier apprehends only in the most abbreviated sense – ‘Forward!’ or ‘Form square!’ or ‘Fire at will!’ – (though conforming to a ‘win/lose’ programme of events at his superior’s level) will influence his behaviour to only a marginal extent; and the commander’s ‘win/lose’ conceptions will have no relevance to his personal predicament. ‘Battle’, for the ordinary soldier, is a very small-scale situation which will throw up its own leaders and will be fought by its own rules – alas, often by its own ethics.
I am not, of course, claiming personal experience as verification of these statements; as I began by saying, I have not been in a battle. I have, however, picked up haphazardly in the course of a great deal of reading about battle a large reference-stock of incidents which seem to me to bear out the points I have been making above. Those quoted below have been chosen because each concerns the conduct of the one army I know well, the British, whose norms of behaviour and code of training I can therefore use to measure the ‘rightness’, ‘wrongness’ and military utility of the incidents described.
The first passage – from the remarkably frank Australian Official History of the Great War – describes an episode in the middle stages of the Third Battle of Ypres (Paschendaele). The fighting by that time had resolved itself into a struggle for possession of a belt of German pillboxes, which commanded the surrounding desolation almost completely. The witness is an Australian officer, Lt W. P. Joynt, who was later to win the Victoria Cross. On September 20th, 1917, he came upon
a wide circle of troops of his brigade surrounding a two-storied pillbox, and firing at a loophole in the upper story from which shots were coming. One man, coolly standing close below and firing up at it, fell back killed but the Germans in the lower chamber soon after surrendered. The circle of Australians at once assumed easy attitudes, and the prisoners were coming out when shots were fired, killing an Australian. The shot came from the upper storey, whose inmates knew nothing of the surrender of the men below; but the surrounding troops were much too heated to realise this. To them the deed appeared to be the vilest treachery, and they forthwith bayoneted the prisoners. One [Australian], about to bayonet a German, found that his own bayonet was not on his rifle. While the wretched man implored him for mercy, he grimly fixed it and then bayoneted the man.
‘The Germans in this case’, the official historian platitudinously continues, ‘were entirely innocent, but such incidents are inevitable in the heat of battle, and any blame for them lies with those who make wars, not with those who fight them.’
The second incident is narrated by Professor Guy Chapman, at the time in question a young officer in a Kitchener battalion which had just taken part in one of the attacks which formed part of the Battle of the Somme in 1916.
Blake’s face was slack and haggard, but not from weariness. He greeted me moodily, and then sat silent, abstracted in some distant perplexity. ‘What’s the matter, Terence?’ I asked.
‘Oh, I don’t know. Nothing – at least. Look here, we took a lot of prisoners in those trenches yesterday morning. Just as we got into their line, an officer came out of a dugout. He’d got one hand above his head, and a pair of field glasses in the other. He held his glasses out to S …, you know, the ex-sailor with the Messina earthquake medal – and said, “Here you are, Sergeant, I surrender.” S … said, “Thank you, sir,” and took the glasses with his left hand. At the same moment, he tucked the butt of his rifle under his arm, and shot the officer straight through the head. What the hell ought I to do?’ … ‘I don’t see that you can do anything,’ I answered slowly. ‘What can you do? Besides, I don’t see that S —— is really to blame. He must have been half mad with excitement when he got into the trench. I don’t suppose he even thought what he was doing. If you start a man killing, you can’t turn him off again like an engine. After all, he is a good man. He was probably half off his head.’
‘It wan’t only him: another did exactly the same thing.’
‘Anyhow, it’s too late to do anything now. I suppose you ought to have shot both on the spot. The best thing is to forget it.’
The third extract is from the History of the Irish Guards in the Second World War. The battalion was fighting in a mountainous region of Italy in 1943. A company officer is relating his experience:
We ran straight into a large body of Germans and, after a few bursts of Bren and Tommy gun fire, about forty ran out with their hands up. Elated by this, we proceeded to winkle them out at a great pace. Wheeling round the next corner, Lance-Sergeant Weir led his section in a charge against another group of Germans. These Germans were ready for them and met them with long bursts of fire … Weir was shot through the shoulder, but the bullet only stopped him for a moment, while he recovered his balance. He led his men full tilt into the Germans and they killed those who delayed their surrender with the traditional comment, ‘Too late, chum.’ [Italics supplied.]
Now what does all this add up to? In each case, what is described is ‘improper violence’ – unqualifiably improper in the case of the Australians, circumstantially excusable in the case of the ‘Sergeant with the Messina earthquake medal’, just barely licit by a pretty rough-and-ready code of justice in the case of the Irish Guardsmen. These, at any rate, are the verdicts which a dispassionate reader might reasonably be expected to enter. By the army’s official code, however, all would be categorized as offences and dealt with accordingly. Indeed, Guy Chapman’s piece of dialogue – a reconstruction, but by an author whose reputation guarantees its veracity – might be lifted straight into one of those training playlets, described earlier, in which are dramatized for subsequent discussion by officer cadets issues of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ behaviour. And it is almost possible to predict word for word the conclusion that the ‘Directing Staff’s Solution’ would come to: ‘Incidents of this sort will not occur if soldiers are properly briefed and kept under strict control by their officers. If a soldier does unlawfully kill a prisoner, he should at once be placed under close arrest and evacuated for psychiatric examination; if found fit to plead, he will be dealt with under Section …’ For to the army, quite as much as to the courts, hard cases make bad law. It wants dependable and conformist junior leaders, men who will neither fight private battles by local rules – as did the Australians at Ypres; nor seek, like Guy Chapman and his comrade, to ‘understand’ the behaviour of soldiers who break the Geneva convention; nor, when a beaten enemy proves momentarily uncooperative, revert, like the Irish Guardsmen, to the grim traditions of a mercenary past.
It would be pleasing to think that the British army takes the view it does for reasons of humanity; and my judgment would in passing be that it does cultivate an admirably humane attitude to the use of violence, notably by its propagation of the doctrine of ‘minimum necessary force’ which, though it applies most strictly to its role as an arm of the civil power in domestic disorder, also colours its attitude to battlefield action. But it would be more realistic to recognize that the army seeks to instil in its leaders the attitudes it does because experience has taught it that its mechanisms of command and control can only be kept functioning under stress if officers will scrupulously obey the rules of procedure. Those rules allot fixed values to all individuals and groups on the battlefield – ‘friend’, ‘enemy’, ‘prisoner’, ‘casualty’ – and impose strict limits upon which can be offered violence, and in what circumstances. Hence the impropriety – by military as well as humanitarian standards – of these three lethal encounters.
Their propriety or impropriety does not, however, concern the military historian, at least at a professional level. He is a judge of the significance of events, not of their morality or even strictly of their utility. But significance for what, in these cases? That poses an awkward question. In ‘win/lose’ terms, the three incidents are absolutely meaningless. As we saw, the Germans done to death either had given their surrender or were on the point of doing so; and in that sense each of these particular episodes in the larger set of events we call ‘the battle’ had been ‘won’. How, therefore, should the historian treat them? Undoubtedly, he would find it most convenient, from every point of view, to ignore them. Like a man who finds himself left with a collection of screws and cogs after he has made a watch ‘work’ again, he can tell himself that they are clearly not essential components and slide them into his miscellaneous tray. The fact that his concluding resumé of results – so many ‘killed’ in the battle, so many ‘prisoners’ – will conceal an overlap (some of his ‘killed’ having been momentarily ‘prisoners’) need not be mentioned or can be glossed over by some reference to the ‘uncivilized behaviour of small groups of soldiers’.
The introduction of the concept of ‘small groups’, however, deals a body blow to the assumptions underlying the ‘win/lose’ approach. For if one once admits that the behaviour of a group of soldiers on any part of the battlefield ought to be understood in terms of their corporate mood, or of the conditions there prevailing at the time, indeed in terms of anything but their willingness to do as duty, discipline and orders demand, then the whole idea of the outcome of a battle being determined by one commander’s defter manipulation of his masses against his opponent’s crumbles. Students of generalship will object that this is an overstatement; and so of course it is. But because the decisions and acts of a commander apparently contribute more to the outcome of a battle than the decisions and acts of any single group of his subordinates, it does not follow that what he does is more important than what all his subordinates do, nor that his behaviour is a more valid subject of study than theirs. On the contrary; their relative importance is an unresolved question, and since we appear to know a great deal more about generalship than we do about how and why ordinary soldiers fight, a diversion of historical effort from the rear to the front of the battlefield would seem considerably overdue. All the more does it seem desirable in the light of what little reliable information we do have about what goes on at the place soldiers call ‘the sharp end’. Most of it we owe to the American army historical service which, during the Second World War, undertook the first systematic study of human behaviour in combat, a study which yielded remarkable results.
Foremost among them was the revelation that ordinary soldiers do not think of themselves, in life and death situations, as subordinate members of whatever formal military organization it is to which authority has assigned them, but as equals within a very tiny group – perhaps no more than six or seven men. They are not exact equals, of course, because at least one of them will hold junior military rank and he – through perhaps another, naturally stronger character – will be looked to for leadership. But it will not be because of his or anyone else’s leadership that the group members will begin to fight and continue to fight. It will be, on the one hand, for personal survival, which individuals will recognize to be bound up with group survival, and on the other, for fear of incurring by cowardly conduct the group’s contempt. The American army, and subsequently the British, has taken the findings of the U.S. army’s historical teams very much to heart, trying as far as possible to adjust the internal organization of their fighting units to a pattern which will take advantage of what they now know of ‘small group dynamics’. Each, as a result, has tended to find itself speaking with two voices about the problem of human behaviour in battle: with a newly found private voice, which admits that everything ultimately rests with the ordinary soldier’s ‘motivation to combat’; and with a traditional public voice, the one heard in military academy leadership lectures, which continues to emphasize the primary role of discipline and command. There is no real inconsistency in this duality of attitude. It merely marks an acceptance by the armies concerned that combat is as complicated and multiform as any other sort of human activity, and given the stakes at issue more so than most.
But, it is not unreasonable to inquire, if soldiers themselves have come to recognize that what they would like to happen on a battlefield is by no means the same thing as what does happen, why do so many military historians continue to write as if generalship and the big battalions were their only proper study? This question would be a great deal easier to answer if military historiography – using the word in its alternative meaning of ‘the history of military history writing’ – were a properly developed subject as, given the centrality which historians have accorded to war since the earliest times, one might expect it to be. Alas, one’s expectations would be false. Although general historians have long recognized that what a historian will see as significant in his chosen subject, and how he will write about it, is almost always heavily influenced by the view that other historians have already taken, and although even the most casual dipper into history books is aware that there are schools of historians – he will certainly have heard of Marxist historians, probably of Freudian historians, perhaps of Whig historians – not even the beginnings of an attempt have been made by military historians to plot the intellectual landmarks and boundary stones of their own field of operations. This makes any sketch of military historiography – which I must attempt here – a matter of guesswork.
The History of Military History
It might seem a safe first guess that the figure who bestrides the military historian’s landscape is the great nineteenth-century Prussian, Hans Delbrück, a pupil of pupils of Ranke, the first Rankeian to concern himself with military history and therefore the pioneer of the modern ‘scientific’ and ‘universal’ approach to the subject. And immensely influential he undoubtedly was – with other Germans. In the highly militarized Second Reich, however, anything to do with war was so intertwined with national policy and national myth that no study of it could reasonably hope to achieve either the autonomy of an academic discipline or the aesthetic freedom of genuine literature. Military history was too loaded a subject, loaded with questions of national unity, of national survival, of dynastic prestige, for any German to feel ultimate detachment about it; and without a measure of intellectual detachment, of course, any historian is bound to become either an obscurantist or a publicist. Delbrück became the latter, and achieved enormous standing thereby, ending the life he had begun as tutor to the Kaiser’s grandson as strategic schoolmaster of the German nation. It was not, at the finish, a job anyone would have envied him, for having spent four years teaching his countrymen in monthly articles how Germany ought to win, he found himself in 1918 landed with the responsibility of explaining to the Reichstag why she had lost. Inevitably, if unfairly – for he had almost always talked sense – his reputation was ruined. He remains none the less a significant figure, if not as a historian, then as the honorary colonel of that monstrous modern regiment, the academic strategists. Herman Kahn is but Hans Delbrück writ large.
The great nineteenth-century school of French historians fails equally to yield us an example of a seminal mind. In that often defeated country, too, a genuinely objective approach to military history always risked incurring the slur of carrying comfort to the enemy, and its development was further hindered by the endemic national neurosis of Napoleon-worship. One or two names – Palat and Colin – stand out, but both were soldiers, their intellectual credentials accordingly widely suspect in that divided society, and their genuine talents without influence or recognition outside professional and ‘patriotic’ circles.
It is really only in the English-speaking countries, whose land campaigns, with the exception of those of the American Civil War, have all been waged outside the national territory, that military history has been able to acquire the status of a humane study with a wide, general readership among informed minds. The reasons for that are obvious; our defeats have never threatened our national survival, our wars in consequence have never deeply divided our countries (Vietnam may – but probably will not – prove a lasting exception) and we have never therefore demanded scapegoats (like Bazaine, the ‘traitor’ of 1870) or Titans (like Hindenburg). In that vein, it is significant that the only cult general in the English-speaking world – Robert E. Lee – was the paladin of its only component community ever to suffer military catastrophe, the Confederacy. For the privileged majority of our world, land warfare during the last hundred and fifty years – the period which coincides with the emergence of modern historical scholarship – has been in the last resort a spectator activity. Hence our demand for, and pleasure in, well-written and intelligent commentary. Hence too our limited conception of military-historical controversy, which does not extend much further than the discussion of whether Montgomery let Rommel slip through his fingers by negligence after Alamein or whether Patton ought or ought not to have slapped the face of a shell-shocked soldier. It does not comprehend questions about whether or not, by better military judgment, we might still govern ourselves from our national capital – as it does for the Germans; whether or not we might have avoided four years of foreign occupation – as it does for the French; whether or not we might have saved the lives of twenty millions of our fellow-countrymen – as it does for the Russians. Had we to face questions like that, were not military history for us a success story, our military historiography would doubtless bear all the marks of circumscription, over-technicality, bombast, personal vilification, narrow xenophobia and inelegant style which, separately or in combination, disfigure-to our eyes-the work of French, German and Russian writers.
But there is another reason which explains why continental scholarship, as represented by Delbrück, has failed to influence the way in which military history as a humane study has developed in the English-speaking world. It is not that Delbrück remains untranslated; nor is it that his idiosyncratic critical method – what he called Sachkritik – renders the rest of his work suspect to Anglo-Saxon minds; nor is it even that his ‘philosophy of history’ carries too thorough-going a Prussian flavour for liberal Western taste. Chronological considerations apart, the latter might well indeed have been the factor which embargoed the export of his ideas and methods, for though, unlike Treitschke, he does not exalt warfare and exult in violence, he accepts the normality of both with a readiness which few American or British scholars could find it in themselves to do. One of the main objects of his work, after all, was to demonstrate that every political system is, if not actually determined by, then in a symbiotic relationship with its own form of military organization; and, to citizens of countries which had always ridden their armies on a very tight political rein (without necessarily perceiving that it was the all-, or almost all-, surrounding sea which allowed them to do so), that proposition alone might have been enough to brand him as a bad as well as a dangerous thinker. But it is, in the last resort, none of these things which serves to disprove Delbrück’s formative influence on British and American military historiography. The chronological factor is decisive for, fifty years before Delbrück began to publish, England had already produced her own philosopher of war.
He was, characteristically, an amateur historian, an Etonian barrister, ultimately to become Chief Justice of Ceylon, who was merely interrupting his legal career to hold a chair of history at London University at the time he published the book for which he is chiefly remembered. It is not, to be frank, a book whose title trips readily off the tongue of many modern historians, nor one which they commonly put on their reading-lists, but there can be few who have not, at one time or other, had it in their hands or nodded at it on the shelf. For Sir Edward Creasy’s Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World was one of the great Victorian best-sellers, rivalling Darwin’s Origin of Species in the frequency with which it was republished – thirty-eight times in the forty-three years between 1851 and 1894 – and Samuel Smiles’ Self-Help in the approbation it won from parents and schoolteachers. Its success is easily explained. It resolved a great Victorian dilemma, of the same sort which Darwin and Smiles resolved, and by the same method. Darwin, whatever cats he released in spiritual dovecotes, at least persuaded many Victorians that the tide of competition which had sprung up to sweep through their society was the manifestation of a natural order of things. Smiles, through his doctrine of self-help, further showed that competition, for all its harsh impact on the lives of individuals, might have a morally good and socially useful result by its stimulation of effort and thrift even among the very poor. Creasy, whose book had appeared eight years before either of theirs (both, by chance, were published in 1859) was quite as attuned as any Victorian to the difficulty of reconciling Christian compassion and a belief in Progress with the inhumanity of a getting-and-spending world. But unlike Smiles, who saw the issue defined principally in terms of class-struggle, Creasy confronted, and sought to outface, the issue of conflict in a yet more extreme form, that of war itself.
‘It is’, he wrote in his preface, ‘an honourable characteristic of the Spirit of this Age that projects of violence and warfare are regarded among civilised states with gradually increasing aversion’ – a faultlessly Victorian sentiment, not least in its delicate allusion to the fact that such things undoubtedly go on and that large numbers of people are deeply if secretly interested by them. And he hastens to explain that he is not pandering to debased instincts in bringing such projects before the public. It would be evidence, he says, of ‘strange weakness or depravity of mind for a writer … of the present day to choose battles for his favourite topic merely because they were battles … and so many hundreds or thousands of human beings stabbed, hewed or shot each other to death during them’; nor does the display of human courage or of the intellectual talents of command associated with battle furnish an excuse, for such ‘qualities … are to be found in the basest as well as the noblest of mankind.’ No; if we are to study battles – and the logic of his argument implies that it can be only some battles we may read about – it is because ‘independent of the moral worth of the combatants’ some battles ‘have helped to make us what we are … [For] the interests of many states are often involved in the collisions of but a few … and … the effect of these collisions is not limited to a single age, but may give an impulse which will sway the fortunes of mankind.’
He does not claim the originality of this idea for himself, which he ascribes to his contemporary Henry Hallam, but he appears to have been the first systematically to develop it. He does so in a way one can only describe as the ‘Whig interpretation of history writ in blood’, the gist of his argument being that everything admirable to the Victorian world – Greek wisdom, Roman virtue, Saxon bravery, Norman centralism, Christian faith in a specifically Protestant form, English liberty and French democracy – had each been saved from extinction by some brilliant military exploit; and that such threats to that world as remained, notably Russian autocracy, might equally have been extinguished had fortune favoured the good on this battlefield or that.
It is not, by any reckoning, a particularly sophisticated philosophy of history. Creasy, indeed, was too talented a writer for it to have been likely that he took it very seriously himself, his main energy in the writing of the book clearly having been devoted to making it a jolly good read. And a jolly good read it remains. But, whatever his philosophical intentions or literary achievements, he had launched, through the book’s eye-catching title and runaway commercial success, an immensely powerful idea into the English historical vocabulary. And it is one which has never lost its impetus. Almost as soon as Creasy was dead, Malleson, the historian of the Indian Mutiny, had published his Decisive Battles of India (1883); four years later, the American Thomas Knox publishedDecisive Battles since Waterloo (the last of Creasy’s ‘Fifteen’), which had as ‘its … purpose the idea of presenting an outline survey of the history of the Nineteenth Century, considered from the point of view of its chief military events’ – a slightly less emphatic restatement of Creasy’s approach, but a restatement all the same, not least in its assumption that the nineteenth century was a high moment in the history of man. The end of the First World War, which had yielded a new crop of Decisive Battles, impelled Colonel Whitton to produce the Decisive Battles of Modern Times (1922) which was followed in 1929 by Liddell Hart’s Decisive Wars of History and in 1939 by his great rival J. F. C. Fuller’s first attempt at a major reworking of Creasy’s idea, Decisive Battles of the World (From Salamis to Madrid in its pre-war two-volume version, From Salamis to Leyte Gulf in three volumes after 1945). The post-war period has seen the American official historians won over to Creasy’s method, Command Decisions (1960) being an epitome of their multi-volume history of the Second World War, and its best-selling item; while, by an ironic stroke, the Germans themselves have succumbed to him, two of their best-known post-mortems on their defeat being The Fatal Decisions (1956) and The Decisive Battles of the Second World War (1965) while at some comparatively recent moment Entscheidungschlacht has replaced Hauptschlacht in the German military vocabulary to convey the idea of a crucial engagement.
There have been a number of popular variations on, even whole series devoted to the theme. But it is the attention which serious military historians, like Liddell Hart and Fuller, have given to the idea which reveals its importance. And that surely lies, whatever disclaimers Creasy made to the contrary, in the moral freedom of action it conferred on historians reared upon and working within the Western tradition. For whether or not an individual historian accepts the Christian ethic which supplies that tradition with its dynamic, the Christian revulsion from war hedges about any humane intellectual approach to the subject with formidable difficulties. War, in Christian theology, is a sinful activity, unless carried on within a framework of rules which few commanders are in practice able to obey; in particular those which demand that he shall have a just aim and a reasonable expectation of victory. Any objective study quickly reveals, however, that most wars are begun for reasons which have nothing to do with justice, have results quite different from those proclaimed as their objects, if indeed they have any clear-cut result at all, and visit during their course a great deal of casual suffering on the innocent. Western historians, whether monastic chroniclers or Gibbonian sceptics, had always therefore tended to depict war as a calamity, a scourge, or a foolishness, unless it could be represented as a crusade (always a Just War in Christian terms) or be used to exemplify the life and exploits of great men. Great national triumphs, like Waterloo, always found their epic-writers; but serious historians, though compelled to write about war, were generally unanimous in deprecating the necessity. The intellectual movements of the nineteenth century heightened scholarly uncertainties about the ethics and role of warfare. On the one hand, the school of Ranke advanced a view of history which looked for much deeper and more complicated explanations of historical change than surface events like military victory or defeat could supply. On the other, the economic school, which Marx was about to capture outright, argued that it was in the dynamic relationship between capital and labour that the explanation of human conduct lay, and to this armies and their doings were an irrelevance. Parallel to these ideas, and not inconsistent with either, lay that of Progress itself, one of the most potent that the nineteenth century was to produce, so powerful that, though terribly wounded, it is still with us today. A belief in Progress was indeed already promising to supplant a belief in God. And the phenomenon of war offers, if anything, greater offence to the former than the latter. For Christians have always accepted that Man, whether individually or en masse, can and will behave badly, cruelly, and violently. The vision of the future which the idea of Progress holds out, however, demands much greater optimism about human nature. How, in these intellectual and moral circumstances, were scholars to justify to themselves or their readers any discussion of war which did not condemn it outright as an aberration on the face of human history?
Creasy supplied the formula. War had a purpose; it had made the nineteenth century. Moreover the study of war is also a study of human free will:
I am aware [he wrote] that … the reproach of Fatalism is justly incurred by those, who, like the writers of a certain school in a neighbouring country, recognise in history nothing more than a series of necessary phenomena, which follow inevitably one upon the other. But when, in this work, I speak of probabilities, I speak of human probabilities only. And the occurrence of war in the past in no way determined the recurrence of war in the future: In closing our observations in this the last of the Decisive Battles of the World [Waterloo], it is pleasing to contrast the year which it signalized with the year that is now passing over our heads. We have not (and long may we be without) the stern excitement of martial strife, and we see no captive standards of our European neighbours brought in triumph to our shrines. But we behold an infinitely prouder spectacle. We see the banners of every civilized nation waving over the arena of our competition with each other, in the arts that minister to our race’s support and happiness, and not to its suffering and destruction. ‘Peace hath her victories/No less renowned than War;’ and no battle-field ever witnessed a victory more noble than that which England, under her Sovereign Lady and her Royal Prince, is now teaching the peoples of the earth to achieve over selfish prejudices and international feuds, in the great cause of the general promotion of the industry and welfare of mankind.
The delicate hypocrisy of Creasy’s formula provided every historian who wished to write about battles with the excuse he needed. Battles are important. They decide things. They improve things. Exactly what, and how, are questions that the individual historian is left free by Creasy’s nihil obstat, his grant of moral approval, to judge for himself. It is a dispensation which whole squads of modern military historians have seized on to justify an endless, repetitive examination of battles which by no stretch of the imagination can be said to have done anything but make the world worse; to justify their ascription to strategically piffling, pointless bloodbaths of the cachet ‘decisive’ on the grounds that they must have decided something, even if what exactly that might have been escapes elucidation; to wallow in battles for battles’ sake; and to evade any really inquisitive discussion of what battles might be like by recourse to the easy argument that one must stick to the point, which is decision, results, winning or losing. Against the power and simplicity of that argument, any other – poor old Delbrück’s advocacy, for example, of the notion that battle is warp to the weft of a whole social fabric – makes slow headway in the competition for a public hearing. A minority have heard him: Michael Howard, whose interweaving of diplomatic with military events is always a tour de force; in a different vein, Alistair Horne; and, though the sheer bulk of their enterprise overshadows its guiding theme, the American official historians. But for the majority it is the Decisive Battle idea which persists, because it is more dramatic, more clear-cut, simpler – both for reader and writer. Hence the form which almost all modern writing about battle takes.
The Narrative Tradition
The aim which the majority pursues does not serve to explain, however, the peculiar narrative style in which most battle writing, the typical ‘battle piece’, with its reduction of soldiers to pawns, its discontinuous rhythm, its conventional imagery, its selective incident and its high focus on leadership, is cast. To explain that, one must look beyond Creasy – since it is already so highly developed in the work of Napier – to another source. Modern historiography, like modern warfare, began with the Renaissance. And it is obvious that the writings of the Ancients, which served as models for the writing of all modern history from the Renaissance onwards, must have done so for military history too. The question is, which classical writers? A great deal of controversy has flowed round the issue of exactly how influential classical writers were on Renaissance military affairs. Vegetius, a late Roman author, is known to have been widely read. But F. L. Taylor, historian of The Art of Warfare in Italy 1494–1529, came to the conclusion, after reviewing what authors the Condottieri might have studied, that ‘the influence of classical history and literature was mainly academic. We view the warfare of the Renaissance through the academic medium of contemporary historians and teachers and are consequently apt to form an exaggerated opinion of the effect of theoretical writings on military operations.’ Michael Mallet, a modern expert and the author of a brilliant, many-sided study of mercenary warfare, concurs.
The fifteenth-century captain learnt the art of war as an apprentice to an established condottiere, not from books. He may have been gratified to learn from one of the humanists in his entourage that his tactics resembled those of Caesar in Gaul, but it is unlikely that he consciously intended it to be so. It was not a study of the Roman republican army which produced a revived interest in infantry but the practical necessities of fifteenth-century warfare.
For our purpose, however, what the soldiers did or did not read is irrelevant. For, if soldiers did not learn to fight their battles from reading books, neither is it likely that military historians learnt to write their books from watching battles. Battles are extremely confusing; and confronted with the need to make sense of something he does not understand, even the cleverest, indeed pre-eminently the cleverest man, realizing his need for a language and metaphor he does not possess, will turn to look at what someone else has already made of a similar set of events as a guide for his own pen. To whom might he have turned? Caesar has just been mentioned. And although Caesar’s Commentaries had only recently been rediscovered, they had achieved a wide popularity in fifteenth-century Italy and were being translated into other European languages by the beginning of the sixteenth (French, 1488; German, 1507; English, 1530). A bibliographer would no doubt be able to show by what routes his ideas and methods percolated thereafter into European historiography; though, to my knowledge, it has not been done for military historiography. It is, however, usually claimed that two of the most important military reformers of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Maurice of Nassau and Gustavus Adolphus, were consciously influenced in the making of their armies by what they had learnt about the Roman Legion from Caesar’s Gallic Wars, about which, thanks to his writing, ‘we know more … than any other military operation of the Ancient World’. And it is obvious, in a much more general way, that from the seventeenth century onwards, it is Roman military practices – drill, discipline, uniformity of dress – and Roman military ideas – of intellectual leadership, automatic valour, unquestioning obedience, self-abnegation, loyalty to unit – which are dominant in the European soldier’s world. By the end of the eighteenth century, the neo-classical revival had made fashionable an outward assumption of Roman symbols, to express an attitude which was already internalized: the Frenchmen whom the Fusiliers drove off the hill at Albuera marched, after all, behind Eagles which were facsimiles of those carried by Caesar’s Legions; the Greys and Royals who charged at Balaclava wore on their uniforms miniature representations of those same Eagles which their ancestors in the regiments had captured at Waterloo – their proudest achievements; the Prussian Guardsmen died at St-Privat in head-dress which mimicked the Legionary helmet. And by this date we know enough of what the leading soldiers studied to be able to demonstrate convincingly that the Roman military authors, Caesar foremost among them, had helped to furnish their minds. The schoolboy Napoleon noted Caesar among his list of books read; Schlieffen, cynosure of Prussian Great General Staff officers, nurtured an obsession with the Roman defeat at Cannae that helped to precipitate the First World War.
There is, however, no need to proceed deductively to the conclusion that because the Romans, and particularly Caesar, were an important influence on post-Renaissance armies, then it was probably Caesar who most influenced the way in which military history was written from the Renaissance onwards. We can reach the same point by a single inductive leap, for the distinctive features of the ‘battle piece’ will all be found in any of Caesar’s narratives of his own victories that one cares to turn up. Take, for example, his description of the defeat of the Nervii, on the River Sambre in modern Belgium, in A.D. 57.
Caesar proceeded, after encouraging the Tenth Legion, to the right wing, where he saw that his men were hard pressed. The soldiers were crowded too closely together to be able to fight easily, because the standards of the Twelfth Legion had been massed in one place. All the centurions of the fourth cohort had been killed, together with its standard-bearer, and its standard had been lost. In the other cohorts almost all the centurions were dead or wounded, and the chief centurion, Sextius Baculus, a very brave man, was so exhausted by the wounds, many and severe, that he had suffered that he could hardly stand up. Caesar also noticed that the rest of the soldiers in this Legion were giving up the fight and that some were leaving the battle to join those in the rear ranks who were already making off. The enemy, though advancing uphill, were maintaining the pressure on their front and at the same time pushing hard on both flanks. Caesar recognised that a crisis was at hand. He had no reserves to commit, so, snatching a shield from one of the soldiers in the rear (he himself having come without one) he put himself in the front rank. Calling to the centurions by name, and shouting encouragements to the rest, he ordered them to advance the standards and deploy into extended order, so that they could use their swords more easily. His appearance brought hope to the soldiers and restored their courage. Under his eye, each man strove his utmost and the enemy’s onset was checked.
Here it all is – disjunctive movement: 1. the Legion is hard pressed, some of the soldiers are slinking away; 2. Caesar arrives and has the standards advanced; 3. the enemy’s attack loses its impetus; uniformity of behaviour: the enemy are all attacking, the legionaries are either resisting feebly or drifting off until Caesar’s arrival makes them all fight with fervour; simplified characterization: only two people are mentioned by name, of whom only one is accorded an important role – the author; simplified motivation: the led have lost the will to fight until the leader restores it to them by some simple orders and words of encouragement.
We now know that Caesar composed his Commentaries for a carefully calculated political end. And intelligent readers, whether so aware or not, have probably always guessed that he overdid the descriptions of his own exploits. Yet, surprisingly and exceptionally, military historians have never seriously questioned the realism of his battle-scenes, viewed as reportage, have indeed generally used his depiction of how his legionaries fought as a truth to which they had to adapt whatever facts they could glean of the battles of their own times. Some may be excused for so doing. The humanists of the Renaissance, groping their way towards critical standards in historiography and unacquainted with legionary-style armies, could all too easily have taken at face value Caesar’s account of the legionary’s pliability and automatism, giving it fresh currency in their own narration of battles, told as they thought they ought to go. But later historians, working to established standards and living in countries garrisoned by disciplined, salaried armed forces, should have known better. All the more is this the case because Antiquity yielded an alternative tradition in military historiography, a great deal richer, more subtle, more psychological, above all more frank in its treatment of how men behave in battle, which, though slower than the Roman tradition to make its way into the stream of modern European scholarship should, once present, have prompted them to a reappraisal of how they might conduct their business. That tradition is the Greek, fathered by Herodotus at the beginning of the fifth century B.C. and already elevated by Thucydides, at the end of that century, to a scientific and artistic level which European historians would not have regained until two hundred years ago.
Here is part of Thucydides’ account of the battle of Mantinea, 418 B.C., between the Lacedaemonians (Spartans) and their allies, and the Argives and theirs:
The Lacedaemonian army looked the largest; though as to putting down the numbers of either host, I could not do so with accuracy … and men are so apt to brag about the forces of their country that the estimate of their opponents were not trusted. The following calculation makes it possible however to estimate the numbers [some scholarly calculations follow]. The armies now being on the eve of engaging, each contingent received some words of encouragement from its own commander. The Mantineans were reminded that they were going to fight for their country and to avoid returning to slavery … the Argives … to punish an enemy and a neighbour for a thousand wrongs … The Lacedaemonians, meanwhile, exhorted each brave comrade to remember what he had learnt before, well aware that … long training … was of more virtue than any brief verbal exhortation.
After this they joined battle, the Argives and their allies advancing with haste and fury, the Lacedaemonians slowly and to the music of many flute-players – a standing institution in their army which has nothing to do with religion, but is meant to make them advance slowly, stepping in time, without breaking their order, as large armies are apt to do in the moment of engaging.
Just before the battle joined, King Agis [of the Lacedaemonians] resolved upon the following manœuvre. All armies are alike in this: on going into action, they get forced out rather on their right wing, and one and the other overlap with this their adversary’s left; because fear makes each man do his best to shelter his unarmed side with the shield of the man next to him on the right, thinking that the closer the shields are locked together the better will he be protected. The man primarily responsible for this is the first upon the right wing who is always striving to withdraw from the enemy his unarmed side; and the same apprehension makes the rest follow him. [The two armies each outflanked the other’s left, so Agis, having more men, ordered some of his to move leftwards. They disobeyed, however, the two responsible leaders, Hipponoidas and Aristocles being ‘afterwards banished from Sparta, as having been guilty of cowardice’, and, while Agis was dealing with this insubordination, the Argives made a sudden attack.] Now it was that the Lacedaemonians, utterly worsted in respect of skill, showed themselves as superior in point of courage. As soon as they came to close quarters with the enemy [they succeeded in beating them].
In fact the account of the action which follows is rather complicated, being full of the names of the two sides’ minor allies, and contains furthermore that deadly, non-explicative phrase, ‘instantly routed them’, that came so easily to Caesar’s pen. But in almost every other respect, how very much superior to Caesar’s is Thucydides’ style of battle narrative. Where Caesar’s soldiers are automatons, Thucydides’ are human beings; where their actions depend on his presence or absence, Thucydides’ are motivated by self-concern (like the ‘man on the right wing’) or by stuffiness (like Hipponoidas and Aristocles); where Caesar can only introduce the position of the standards as an external influence on their behaviour, Thucydides mentions the appeals of music (and, by implication, of religion), patriotism, xenophobia, professional pride; where Caesar’s subordinate figures are cardboard – if Sextius Baculus was not ‘a very valiant man’, which is all he tells us about him, what was he doing as senior centurion? – Thucydides’ are individuals, with wills of their own, who suffer for misemploying them (banishment from Sparta); and where the intervention of the leader in Caesar’s battle sets things to rights, in Thucydides’, King Agis’s change of plan actually makes things worse for his side. Moreover, the general feeling of the two pieces is quite different: Caesar tells us nothing about his army, except that it obeyed his orders; the most interesting thing about it, the narrative implies, is that he was its leader. Thucydides’ army, on the other hand, is one of a species of institutions interesting in themselves, with well-known but by no means uniform patterns of behaviour (‘large armies are apt …’ – meaning that small armies may not be; ‘all armies are alike in this …’ – meaning not necessarily so in other ways) and these patterns of behaviour are the product of human conduct and character at every level. In short, while Caesar is writing particular history, Thucydides is writing general history, by every test a more useful, a more difficult and a more illuminating form of the art.
The objection to this depreciation of Caesar’s historical skills – that he was a no-nonsense soldier whose simplification of issues and motives was the fruit of a successful ruthlessness with concrete military difficulties – cannot be sustained. For Thucydides was also a practising soldier, whose history of the Peloponnesian War was based upon his own experience, eyewitness or collection of first-hand reports. A better objection is that Caesar was describing the operations of armies quite different from those of the Greek city-states; while the latter were part-time militias of free men, his were long-service, regular, mercenary formations, recruited by voluntary enlistment but ruled by the rod and the sword; and if they appeared automatous in their battlefield behaviour, it was because they were trained to be so. This is a good and strong objection. But not a clinching one. Maurice of Nassau and Gustavus Adolphus may have believed that, given money, time and effort, they could recreate armies in the image Caesar had revealed to them. Modern classical scholars, increasingly inclined to fret at the lack of real understanding of the inner life of the Legions which the Ancients have left them, suspect that they were far more complex, fickle and individual in their behaviour than Caesar lets on. If this is so, then Maurice and Gustavus were chasing a chimera. Certainly no military institution of which we have detailed, objective knowledge, has ever been given the monumental, marmoreal, almost monolithic uniformity of character which classical writers conventionally ascribe to the Legions. That being so, we may safely guess that such an ascription was, indeed, a convention, of the same sort which always made priests holy, temples sacred and old men wise.
The difference between Roman and Greek historiography, in the words of Professor Michael Grant, is that the former ‘began with politics and the state’, while the latter ‘sprang from geography and human behaviour’. It was appropriate, therefore, that the Greek historians should have begun to make their influence felt on European historiography at the precise moment when an interest in ‘geography and human behaviour’, an interest whose intellectual and artistic manifestation we call Romanticism, was replacing a dry-as-dust legalistic concern with ‘politics and the state’ as the motive force of historical inquiry. Appropriate, and probably consequential upon; for the foremost practitioner of the new history, Leopold von Ranke, insisted on regarding Thucydides as the greatest of all historians, living or dead. Ranke’s new history or ‘general history’ did not, of course, descend from the Greeks. It was a conception independently arrived at, and under continual development throughout his long life (1795–1886). But because of his championship of the Greeks, something of their spirit – practical, realistic, speculative, witty, humane – in each of those qualities an important corrective to the plodding laboriousness of the German school from which he emerged, made its way through his into the work of lesser, often unacademic historians, some of whom were no doubt quite ignorant of the debt they owed him.
One of these may have been Ardant du Picq, who made in the middle of the nineteenth century a strikingly novel approach to the study of battle via the study of human behaviour. Du Picq was an infantry officer of the French army, a veteran of the Crimea and Algeria, who was to be killed outside Metz in August 1870. In strict fact, his military career was not all that distinguished, and a great deal of what he had to say about armies and battle now looks, or has been made to look by a century of warfare, almost deliberately perverse; he believed, for example, in the necessity of cultivating an officer-aristocracy. Nevertheless, his military-historical method was unique: wishing to get at the ‘truth’ about battle, he circulated among his brother officers a questionnaire soliciting their precise answers to a long list of very detailed inquiries about what had happened to them and their soldiers when in close contact with the enemy. The questionnaire was not a success, most who received it finding its tone impertinent or its completion tedious. But the questions were intelligent and original and, when applied by du Picq (whose rebuff by his brother officers had not extinguished his curiosity) to documentary material, elicited fascinating answers. It was upon the work of the Ancients, particularly Polybius, a follower of Thucydides, that he concentrated, for they, he felt, were franker than moderns about why and how disasters happened in war: why men ran away and what happened when they did. The conclusions to which he came were not wholly original, since Marshal de Saxe for one and Guibert for another, had anticipated him by a century in denying that men run away as a result of ‘shock’. But he much elaborated that denial and had a great deal to say about death on the battlefield and the ‘will to combat’.
Du Picq did not believe in ‘shock’ – the collision of masses of armed men – for two reasons, one good, one less good. The good one was his demonstration, from documentary evidence, that large masses of soldiers do not smash into each other, either because one gives way at the critical moment, or because the attackers during the advance to combat lose their fainthearts and arrive at the point of contact very much inferior in numbers to the mass they are attacking. In either case, the side which turns and runs does so not because it has been physically shaken but because its nerve has given. The less good reason depends upon a more complicated argument: disciplined bodies of ‘civilized’ soldiers, he said, always beat undisciplined bodies of barbarians. Yet barbarians, man for man, are fiercer fighters than civilized soldiers. Therefore, no contact has taken place between a civilized force and the barbarian force which it beats, for if they had actually crossed swords the civilized force would have been beaten.
This argument is less good because he fails to show that barbarians are, mass for mass, better than civilized soldiers in hand-to-hand fighting. But he goes on from his general denial of the reality of shock to demonstrate, convincingly, a more illuminating truth about the nature of battle: that soldiers die in largest numbers when they run, because it is when they turn their backs to the enemy that they are least able to defend themselves. It is their rational acceptance of the danger of running that makes civilized soldiers so formidable, he says, that and the discipline which has them in its bonds. And by discipline he does not mean the operation of an abstract principle but the example and sanctions exercised by the officers of an organized force. Men fight, he says in short, from fear: fear of the consequences first of not fighting (i.e. punishment), then of not fighting well (i.e. slaughter).
Du Picq’s ideas were, after his death, and in an exaggerated and misinterpreted form, adopted by the French army. But they struck their most lasting response as ideas in America, where his proclamation of the dominance of fear over events on the battlefield was welcomed as much for its refreshing frankness as for its apparent truth. Fear is something everyone can understand, and fear was what thousands of American soldiers had patently felt on the battlefields of the Civil War, sometimes at moments inconvenient to their commanders. That war had already produced, by the outbreak of the First World War, a remarkable crop of soldiers’ literature, in which battle had been depicted very much from the private’s rather than the general’s angle of vision, and many of the authors had not disguised how frightened they had been. When, on America’s entry into the Second World War, the United States Army decided to record in detail its war effort – something it had not done for the First – it assembled a group of historians, some soldiers, some not, who decided from the outset that in retailing the history of combat – as opposed to grand strategy or logistics – their approach should be du Picq’s. Since they were Americans of their period – patriotic, populist, self-confident, immensely optimistic – they took it as axiomatic that it was the spirit of armies which determined their success or failure, and that the spirit of America guaranteed the success of its army. The guiding theme of their history would therefore be an examination of how the American soldier overcame his fears to do his duty.
The conclusions to which the American Historical Teams came, as a result of many thousands of interviews with individuals and groups fresh from combat, are now widely known. They form the basis of the magnificent American campaign histories and have been publicized in pungent, capsule form by the leading historian of the European Theatre, General S. L. A. Marshall. Marshall is, in a sense, an American du Picq, in that, although owing to him his idée de base – that the battlefield is a place of terror – he has come to a radically different view of how the soldier’s fears of it should be overcome. Both he and du Picq believe that an army is a genuine social organism, governed by its own social laws, and that formal discipline, imposed from above, is of limited utility in getting men to fight. But du Picq, though he uses a phrase which no doubt caught Marshall’s fancy – that soldiers must develop a ‘mutual acquaintanceship which establishes pride’ – sees the suppression of fear chiefly as the officer’s task. Marshall, in a manner distinctively American, believes it a function which falls upon everyone in the firing line. ‘Whenever one surveys the forces of the battlefield’, he wrote in his masterpiece, Men Against Fire, ‘it is to see that fear is general among men, but to observe further that men are commonly loath that their fear will be expressed in specific acts which their comrades will recognize as cowardice. The majority are unwilling to take extraordinary risks and do not aspire to a hero’s role, but they are equally unwilling that they should be considered the least worthy among those present.’ It is therefore, in Marshall’s view, vital that an army should foster the closest acquaintance among its soldiers, that it should seek to create groups of friends, centred if possible on someone identified as a ‘natural’ fighter, since it is their ‘mutual acquaintanceship’ which will ensure no one flinches or shirks. ‘When a soldier is … known to the men who are around him, he … has reason to fear losing the one thing he is likely to value more highly than life – his reputation as a man among other men.’
Verdict or Truth?
There is more to Marshall’s historical method than an acceptance of the prevalence of fear in the hearts of soldiers on the battlefield. His work with infantrymen fresh from combat, both against the Japanese in the Pacific islands and Germans in Normandy, revealed to him a startling discovery: that, even in ‘highly motivated’ units, and even when hard pressed, no more than about a quarter of all ‘fighting’ soldiers will use their weapons against the enemy. ‘The Army cannot unmake [Western man]’, he wrote in Men Against Fire.
It must reckon with the fact that he comes from a civilisation in which aggression, connected with the taking of life, is prohibited and unacceptable. The teaching and ideals of that civilisation are against killing, against taking advantage. The fear of aggression has been expressed to him so strongly and absorbed by him so deeply and pervadingly – practically with his mother’s milk – that it is part of the normal man’s emotional make-up. This is his greatest handicap when he enters combat. It stays his trigger-finger even though he is hardly conscious that it is a restraint upon him.
It is the underlying effect of these two basic assumptions of Marshall’s – that all men are afraid on the battlefield, yet that most, despite their fear, remain products of their culture and its value-system – which lends to his battle-narratives their original and unmistakeable flavour. It is a flavour we can begin to call distinctively American, for his influence on military historians in his own country, particularly those who learnt their trade in the Army Historical Teams, is becoming marked. It is also appropriately American, for a focus of interest upon the common soldier, rather than upon the commander, upon the acts of the majority, rather than the decisions of a few, accords both with the spirit of American life and with the tradition of American historical scholarship.
But there are limits nevertheless to the usefulness and general applicability of the Marshall method. For his ultimate purpose in writing was not merely to describe and analyse – excellent though his description and analysis is – but to persuade the American army that it was fighting its wars the wrong way. It was his conviction that success in battle depended upon structuring an army correctly; and in arguing his case for a new structure of small groups or ‘fire teams’ centred on a ‘natural fighter’, he was undoubtedly guilty of over-emphasis and special pleading. His arguments were consonantly effective, so that he has had the unusual experience, for a historian, of seeing his message not merely accepted in his own lifetime but translated into practice. But, almost for that reason, they are arguments of which the academic historian, trained not to simplify but to portray the complexity of human affairs, ought to beware. A dose of Marshall is a useful corrective but it is not a cure-all for the ills of military history.
Nor would it be a cure-all to forswear the ‘win/lose’ approach of the Decisive Battlers, or the narrative focus on the doings of generals – ‘strategocentric’ narrative to give it a name if one is needed – bequeathed by Caesar. One clearly has to come to a judgment in writing about battles, as about anything else, and it would be perverse to ignore, or even to minimize, the influence on events of the directing class. Rather, it is over the question of how one should come to a judgment and in what light one should cast the central characters that the crucial touch has to be found. There cannot be any hard and fast rules. But there can be suggestions and useful analogies. The most useful, to my mind, is that of the difference between the English and French judicial systems. In England (and America), the task of the court in criminal cases, which it devolves upon a jury, is to arrive at a verdict of ‘guilty’ or ‘not guilty’ on the evidence presented by prosecuting and defending counsel in turn. Trials are conflicts and verdicts are decisions; the two sides ‘win’ or ‘lose’. In France, and other countries which observe Roman Law, the task of the court in a criminal case is to arrive at the truth, as far as it can be perceived by human eyes, and the business of establishing the outlines of the truth falls not on a jury, which is strictly asked to enter a judgment, but upon a juge d’instruction. This officer of the court, unknown to English law, is accorded very wide powers of interrogation – of the suspect, his family, his associates – and of investigation – of the circumstances and scene of the crime – at which the suspect is often required to participate in a reconstruction. Only when the juge is satisfied that a crime has indeed occurred and that the suspect is responsible will he allow the case to go forward for prosecution.
The character of these two different legal approaches is usually defined as ‘accusatorial’ (English) and ‘inquisitorial’ (French) respectively. And it may well be that the dramatic accusatorial element in the English approach has had its effect – Creasy, after all, was a barrister – on the form in which English and, until recently, American military historiography has been cast. For most British military historians, as we have seen, implicitly put someone or something – a general or an army – in the dock, charge him or it with a crime – defeat if a friend, victory if an enemy – and marshal the evidence to show his or its responsibility. Indeed, given the accusatorial approach, there is not much else a historian can do. The inquisitorial approach, on the other hand, confers – or would confer, one is constrained to say, so infrequently it is adopted – very much greater freedom of action.
It would allow the historian, for example, to discuss battles not necessarily as conflicts for a decision, but as value-free events – for it is as events that they appear to many participants and to most non-combatant spectators – and if one began from their unpartisan stance one might well hit on a clearer view of what real significance it was that a battle held. The inquisitorial approach would also free the historian to discuss, for example, in what sense a given battle, so called, had taken place. The battle of the Marne, it has been pointed out, was not something of which the Germans were aware at the time of fighting, and Telford Taylor has gone a long way in demonstrating that the Battle of Britain, which Churchill had suspected was ‘about to begin’ in June 1940, never, as far as Hitler was concerned, seriously got under way. To pursue the legal theme, the inquisitorial approach might also lead a historian to undertake a true piece of detective work, tracing messages from source to recipient, relating the times of their arrival and departure to the passage of events on the battlefield and so arriving at some balanced judgment of how influential a commander was in the determination of a battle’s outcome. This is something at which the best naval historians are very accomplished and which has also been done, for example, as a study of the battle of the Ardennes, in a regular war-game at the American Command and Staff College. But it is attempted by few military historians, and then sketchily, despite Tolstoy’s provocative denial, in War and Peace, that generals influence the outcome of battles in any way at all.
The inquisitorial approach offers still larger freedoms than these, even though it also imposes wearisome burdens. It offers the freedom to consider, for instance, the long-term effects that a major battle, like any other sudden and violent occurrence, may exert on national and cultural attitudes. Just as the Lisbon earthquake is said to have given a timely stimulus to religious observance in eighteenth-century Europe, it is often adumbrated that the battle of Stalingrad has been the most important single lesson in the education of a democratic Germany. How true is that? The repression of the Paris Commune in 1871 undoubtedly left scars on the psyche of working-class Paris which ache to this day. But what exactly did the battle of France in 1940 do to the psyche of the French nation? The very size of the question ought not to deter the historian from attempting an answer. A few have already had a bite at it. Alistair Horne has tried to demonstrate that the experience of Verdun in 1916 led the French, by way of the building of the Maginot line, to the construction of the fortress of Dien Bien Phu, and its fall to the collapse of their colonial empire. But a real examination requires more room than he had left himself at the end of his book on Verdun, and a very special sort of historical expedition: not so much a plunge into the archives as a voyage through a nation’s literature, from Sartre’s Iron in the Soul via the script of Les Jeux Interdits to the soundtrack of Le Chagrin et la Pitié.
The treatment of battle in fiction is a subject almost untouched by literary critics, but one which the military historian, with his specialized ability to check for veracity and probability, might very well think of tackling. He might think also of relating battles more closely to the social context of their own times. How violent, for example, was the society, and more specifically the class, from which Wellington’s Peninsular scum were recruited? How sacrificial in general was the mood of Europe in 1914, when commanders by the score – it would be simple to compile a list – lost sons and sons-in law in the battles they were directing, yet continued without flinching at their posts? How precisely, rather than in broad terms, did losses – the human result through which battles make their effect – intrude upon the feelings of a locality which suffered them in sudden excess – the Nord and the Pas de Calais, say, after the battle of Morhange in August, 1914, or Belfast after the battle of the Somme-and how abiding was the demographic damage? More positively, how enduring were the bonds which a particular battle forged among the men who survived it and how important for their lives in after years? To have been ‘out’ in 1916 was a necessary passport into political life in independent Ireland and, slightly less obviously, to have been in the 2nd Free French Armoured Division in the battle of Normandy was to draw a ticket in the eventual triumph of Gaullism. But one is also aware that there exists a subtle, unspoken regard for each other, a readiness to protect, if not to further each other’s interests among men who have ‘been through the same show’ – a regard which still, apparently, makes it impossible for anyone of the wartime generation who has not ‘served in the armed forces of the Crown’ to lead the Conservative party – about which it would be very illuminating for the historian to know.
These are only some of the directions in which the study of battle, it seems to me, might be enlarged. I am tempted by many of them, but realize that their dimensions and my limitations put most of them beyond my reach. What I mean to attempt here is something altogether smaller, though still, I think, important: to tackle again the concept of the ‘battle piece’ and to suggest ways in which it might be wrenched out of the stereotype into which it has been set for so long by custom and unreflective imitation. I do not intend to write about generals or generalship, except to discuss how a commander’s physical presence on the field may have influenced his subordinates’ will to combat. I do not intend to say anything of logistics or strategy and very little of tactics in the formal sense. And I do not intend to offer a two-sided picture of events, since what happened to one side in any battle I describe will be enough to convey the features I think are salient. On the other hand, I do intend to discuss wounds and their treatment, the mechanics of being taken prisoner, the nature of leadership at the most junior level, the role of compulsion in getting men to stand their ground, the incidence of accidents as a cause of death in war and, above all, the dimensions of the danger which different varieties of weapons offer to the soldier on the battlefield. Crudely, but I think meaningfully, one may distinguish three sorts of battlefield weapons: the hand weapon – sword or lance; the single-missile weapon – musket or rifle; the multiple-missile weapon – machine-gun or projector of toxic gas particles. I have chosen three battles to describe in detail – Agincourt, Waterloo, the Somme – my basis of choice being availability of evidence, and my purpose to demonstrate, as exactly as possible, what the warfare, respectively, of hand, single-missile and multiple-missile weapons was (and is) like, and to suggest how and why the men who have had (and do have) to face these weapons control their fears, staunch their wounds, go to their deaths. It is a personal attempt to catch a glimpse of the face of battle.
1 ‘Will no one tell me what she sings? Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow For old, unhappy far-off things, And Battles long ago.’ Wordsworth: ‘The Solitary Reaper’.
2 It is revealing to contrast the mealy-mouthedness of the official historians with what Dr Anthony Storr has to say on the language of scholarship: ‘The words we use to describe intellectual effort are aggressive words. We attack problems, or get our teeth into them. We master a subject when we have struggled with and overcome its difficulties. We sharpen our wits, hoping that our mind will develop a keen edge in order that we may better dissect a problem into its component parts.’ Human Aggression (Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, London, 1968). p.x. Dr Storr would be better qualified than I to suggest explanations for military historians’ habitual reluctance to call a spade a spade.
3 The solution of an obscurity by an estimate of what a trained soldier would have done in the circumstances.