-Caveat Lector-
an excerpt from:
Blood Rites - Origins & History of the Passions of War
Barbara Ehrenreich(C)1997
Metropolitan Books
Hennry Holt & Companty
ISBN 0-8050-5077-9
-----
I can not say enough about this book. These excerpts do it little justice. I
strongly recommend reading this book.Well-written and thoughtful; when all is
said and done, the veneer between passions, expectations, propaganda and
thought can be very thin. There are chapters on the warrior elites, the
sacralization of war, the effect of missle(guns/longbow) warfare and war
worship. A very important book.
Om
K
-----
Happy the blest ages that knew not the dread
fury of those devilish engines . . . [which] made
it easy for a base and cowardly arm to take the
life of a gallant gentleman.[1]
--CERVANTES
11
GUNS AND THE
DEMOCRATIZATION
OF GLORY
War, ultimately, has no great affection for the men who love it most. General
Douglas MacArthur might have preferred to combat the enemy one on one, saber
in hand, just as Don Quixote pined for the days before guns, when the joust
had determined everything. But no tradition is so sacred to a warrior elite
that it cannot be swept aside by new and more effective methods of death-
dealing. In the centuries between 1500 and 1800, European warfare changed in
ways that fundamentally challenged the primacy of the old warrior elite, and
eventually, in some times and some places, the very notion of an elite of any
kind. The foot soldier, whose role in medieval warfare had usually been of an
auxiliary and janitorial nature--cleaning up, with axes and pikes, after the
glorious charges of knights--moved to center stage, while the knight sunk to
his present status as the quaint symbol of a romanticized past.
Two "military revolutions" swept Europe between the sixteenth and nineteenth
centuries, the first consisting largely of technological and organizational
changes--in weaponry, in command structures, in the means of raising and
provisioning armies--and the second overlapping with the political revolutions
of the late eighteenth century. The earlier of the military revolutions
reduced the common man to the level of a tiny precision component within that
larger engine of war, the bureaucratized army; the later one invested him with
the kind of glory once reserved for the warrior elite. Readers wanting more on
the purely military side of these changes are referred to the experts I have
relied on.[2 Here we will be more concerned with the accompanying
transformation of the passions of war, which were, in effect, diffusing
downward from the elite to the average soldier and citizen. In the new era,
the sacralization of war would depend less on established religions like
Christianity, and more on the new "religion" of nationalism.
The gun is usually credited with being the weapon which overthrew the old
elite style of fighting, but the change began centuries before the widespread
employment of firepower. A prescient observer would have glimpsed the coming
transformation of European warfare in 1346, at the battle of Crecy, where the
French nobility was mowed down by the arrows of English peasant longbowmen.
The principle, in the case of both the gun and the bow, is of action at a
distance: Where the elite warrior's goal was to close with an individual enemy
and defeat him in single combat, now the bow or the gun propelled inanimate
missiles at an enemy whose features might never be visible. The killer and the
killed could be many yards away from each other, even crouched, unheroically,
behind bushes or rocks.
One crucial feature of the missile-propelling weapons was that they were far
cheaper than the ponderous equipment of the old-time knight. Each peasant
could fashion his own bow, if necessary, and handheld guns became increasingly
affordable at the end of the eighteenth century when mass-production methods
began to be applied to their manufacture. Guns and bows were also far easier
to learn how to use than the knight's complex armamentarium; a knight began
his training in boyhood, but a bowman or a gunner could be readied for combat
in months or weeks. Cheap weapons and cheaply trained men almost guaranteed
that the size of fighting units would rise-- from tens of thousands of men in
the sixteenth century to hundreds of thousands by the eighteenth.
Missile-based warfare favored mass, sub-elite armies in another way, too: It
made killing an impersonal business, requiring little motivation on the part
of the individual gunner or bowman. The missile-bearing foot soldier did not
meet his enemy with a shouted defi, or challenge, in which each announced his
noble lineage; he did not have to meet him at all, since he barely had to see
him to make him a target. The victim might be a nobleman of intimidating
stature and wealth, or he could be a peasant foot soldier like oneself. The
archer or gunman might never know which individual had been doomed by his
arrow or bullet, might never be able to separate the screams of pain his
weapons had occasioned from the general din of battle. 'Would to God," one
French nobleman complained of the gun, that this unhappy weapon had never been
devised, and that so many brave and valiant men had never died by the hands of
those . . . who would not dare look in the face of those whom they lay low
with their wretched bullets.[3
Only slowly, and with great reluctance, did the European warrior elite adapt
to the new regime of killing-at-a-distance. Even after their efficacy had been
repeatedly demonstrated, no knight would think of taking up the bow and arrow,
which had been seen by the European warrior elite as cowards' weapons since
the time of the Trojan War. "Cursed be the first man who became an archer,"
declared one chanson de geste; "he was afraid and did not dare approach."[4
Real warriors, in the knightly tradition, sought the intimacy of close combat,
nobleman on nobleman, and refused to crouch, as archers often did, for cover.
Death and defeat were preferable to the slightest loss of social standing.
No story of elite resistance to technological change is more baffling or
pathetic than that of the French knighthood in the Hundred Years War with
England. As if in a state of collective psychological denial, the French
repeated the disaster of Crecy by riding to their deaths in a hail of arrows
again at Poitiers in 1356 and once more, in 1415, at Agincourt. Their eventual
acceptance of a peasant girl as a military leader is probably best understood
in the context of this technological crisis and the profound demoralization it
occasioned. Since the charge of armored knights, which had been the tactic of
choice for more than five hundred years, no longer seemed to work, Archbishop
Jacques Gelu had advised the king that "God might well have chosen a peasant
girl to save France in order to 'humble the proud' who had failed."[5 Once
ensconced in her command, Joan was able to cut through the technological
conservatism of more experienced warriors in another way: For all her
otherworldliness, she was a pioneer in the use of artillery in battle and
helped establish gunpowder as a routine tool of war.[6
It was the gun that most decisively leveled the killing fields,* {*The
replacement of the bow and arrow by the gun is not as obvious an improvement
as one might think. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, when many
localities were making the conversion, a well-trained archer could shoot far
more rapidly and accurately than a man with an harquebus. One attraction of
the gun, though, was that it took less training (Parker, Military Revolution,
p. 17). But firearms also held a less rational fascination, McNeill suggests,
because of both the noise they made (probably at that time the largest man-
made noise ever) and their sexual symbolism (McNeill, Pursuit of Power, p.
83).} causing warrior elites almost everywhere to hold out against its
explosive power for as long as they could. In Egypt, the elite Mamluk warriors
disdained the gun. In Italy, one sixteenth-century condottiere ordered the
eyes plucked out and the hands cut off of any enemies caught with firearms.[7
Japan went the furthest, with the central government actually banning the gun
a few decades after its introduction by Europeans in 1543. As Noel Perrin has
written, the Japanese warrior elite had been quick to grasp the gun's
potential threat to their entire social system: "It was a shock to everyone to
find out that a farmer with a gun could kill the toughest samurai so
readily."[8
Elite resistance to the gun underscores a contradiction inherent in the very
notion of a warrior elite. The point of war is to win, but elite warriors have
another aim, too, which is to preserve their status as an elite. For long
periods of time, these aims may be completely consistent, since members of
hereditary warrior elites are likely to be the best trained and best suited to
command. In times of technological change, though, the elite's status-
consciousness often takes the form of a deep and fatal conservatism, a
tendency to cling to favored weapons and methods well into their obsolescence.
The Japanese samurai class could indulge themselves in two more centuries of
sword-fighting only because of their geographical isolation. But on the vast
and heterogeneous European land mass, such vainglorious traditionalism could
not be maintained for long. Eventually, the imperative of winning had to
assert itself over the cherished perquisites of class.
The way in which the European warrior elite adapted to missile warfare was by
attempting to forge large numbers of armed men into a single mega-weapon--an
army--which could be effectively wielded by a small number of men at the top.
Medieval wars had been fought not by "armies" in any recognizable, modern
sense but by loose collections of men, often under little or no central
command. The relatively small size of medieval forces--numbering in the
thousands or, at most, tens of thousands of men--made a certain amount of
anarchy tolerable. But one of the first results of missile warfare was to
increase the number of troops assembled at any engagement. The sniper's
occasional well-aimed bullet or arrow would not suffice; a veritable rain of
lethal arrows or bullets was required. As a French observer noted in the late
fifteenth century, "The supreme thing for battles are the archers, but let
them be by the thousands, for in small numbers they are worth nothing."[9
Once one political entity had upped its numbers of troops, others were
required to follow suit. Arguing for an increased military budget, a speaker
in the English Parliament complained in 1733 that "the eighteen thousand men
proposed bears no proportion to the numbers kept up by our neighbors.''[10 By
that time, most European states had gone well beyond the old practice of
recruiting foot soldiers or mercenaries in an ad hoc manner for each war as it
came along. Standing armies' in which thousands of men were kept in combat-
ready condition even in times of peace, became the rule in most places in the
seventeenth century.
The sheer size of the new armies necessitated rigid systems of discipline and
command. For one thing, members of the old military elite could hardly trust a
huge assemblage of lowborn men--all of them probably unwilling conscripts, and
each of them equipped with lethal firepower--unless these troops had been
beaten into a condition of slavish docility. Within the new armies, the old
warrior elite gave up the heroic combat role of the knight and assumed the
bureaucratized leadership role of the officer--whose power of the individual
officer over his men was so absolute that, as historian Hans Delbruck observed
of the Prussian military, "the soldier had to fear his officer more than the
enemy."[11 A seventeenth-century French military manual details the
punishments an officer could apply at his own discretion: Officers down to the
level of sergeant major were entitled to kill recalcitrant underlings with
their swords; captains could strike with the flat of the sword; sergeants
could beat their men with the "shaft of the halberd," though not with the
sword; and so on.[12
But punishment implies a prior breakdown of discipline. There were methods
developed at the end of the sixteenth century to ensure that discipline was so
thoroughly internalized that no one would think of disobeying an order--that,
ideally, no one would think at all. A Dutch prince, Maurice of Nassau, came up
with the idea of the drill. Instead of being trained once and then trusted to
use their skills on the battlefield, troops were to be trained incessantly
from the moment of induction to the very eve of battle. They were to form
ranks, march, and manipulate their weapons, over and over, in any kind of
weather, as a full-time occupation. One point of the drill was to speed up
cumbersome operations like the loading of muskets, which, in a remarkable
foreshadowing of twentieth-century industrial Taylorism, was broken down into
thirty-two separate steps that were to be repeated in unison by those
performing the drill.[13 At the same time the drill also served to eliminate
any "downtime" during which troops could lapse into sedition or brawling, as
well as any vestige of individual initiative. Even as elite a warrior as
Frederick the Great, whose role in the drill was surely a commanding one,
could write home wearily: "I come from drill. I drill. I will drill--that is
all the news I can give you.''[14
Ideally, the resulting "clockwork army," to borrow Manuel de Landa's
phrase,[15 could be rolled out onto the battlefield as if it were a single,
huge instrument of war. Little was required of the human units of this machine
except that they stand their ground and fire on command. Aiming was not
expected[16 or originally even worth the effort, given the inaccuracy of early
firearms like the musket and arquebus. The idea was simply to direct volley
after volley of bullets at the enemy until one or the other side ran out of
men. Thus, for the average soldier, courage was less in order than fatalism
and a kind of stolid passivity. As O'Connell writes:
The system required him to stand imperturbably at pointblank range, disdaining
all cover, and fire methodically into - enemy ranks until either small arms,
cannonball, or cavalry saber cut him down.[17
Needless to say, mortality rates were shockingly high, with probably one out
of four or five soldiers dying in each year of active service. "Enlistment,"
as historian Geoffrey Parker observes, "in effect, had become a sentence of
death."[18
Such high rates of military "wastage" reinforced the need for ever larger
armies. The bigger the army, the greater the need for systematic methods of
discipline and control, and with better methods of discipline and control, the
bigger the army could be. Thanks to a general increase in the European
population, the only limits on this dynamic were the difficulties of paying
and provisioning standing armies that were now often the size of major cities.
By the late eighteenth century, Prussia was spending approximately 90 percent
of its revenue on the military, while France was devoting two thirds of its
budget to its army alone.[19
One consequence of the increase in army size was the emergence of a new form
of social organization: the modern bureaucratic state. In Delbruck's words:
As a prerequisite, or perhaps we should say a side effect, of the great change
in the army, there developed a new administration of the state, a bureaucracy
whose mission was to collect the taxes required to maintain the army.[20
Other factors were also militating toward the formation of bureaucratic
states--most notably, the rise of commerce, which required that there be some
central authority to enforce contracts and impose uniform systems of currency
and weights and measures. But the needs of armies no doubt outweighed the
convenience of merchants. Prussia, for example, as historian Michael Howard
has written, "was not so much a State which possessed an army as an army which
possessed a State," and was created by the Hohenzollern dynasty "primarily to
provide an army to support their power."[21 In the age of mass armies, the
unit of militarism could no longer, obviously, be a small-scale feudal
holding, a duchy or a barony. It had to be a centrally administered land mass
containing sufficient productive resources to feed and lodge tens or hundreds
of thousands of essentially nonproductive males at all times--that is, a
nation-state.
The preeminence of war as a factor leading to the formation of bureaucratic
states is nicely illustrated by an example from a very different time and
place: China in the third century B.C. In ancient China's "military
revolution," aristocratic charioteers gave way to massed infantry armed with
swords and spears. The old style of warfare had involved forces of no more
than ten thousand men per battle, while the new mass armies numbered ten times
that. As a result, Parker notes, the old rough-and-ready style of governance
would no longer do.
Naturally, military changes of this magnitude presented chronic problems of
supply and command which forced the warring states to reshape their political
structure; and so most governments changed from something resembling a large
household, with most important offices in the hands of the ruler's relatives
or leading noblemen, into an autocratic state run on behalf of a despotic
prince by a salaried bureaucracy.[22
Just as the elite style of warfare had called forth feudalism in settings as
different as medieval Europe and Japan, mass armies everywhere led to the
bureaucratic state. The means of destruction, as we have observed, play a
decisive role in the shaping of human cultures.
But the emergence of the nation-state as an administrative unit tells us
nothing about the beliefs or passions of the people who called it their own.
For our purposes, the most important consequence of the mass army was that an
ever larger proportion of the male population was undergoing a wholly new kind
of experience which would lay the basis for a new kind of passion: that of
nationalism.
Well before notions like "France" or "Italy" or "the fatherland" had the power
to stir and uplift people, soldiers in the new mass armies were experiencing
directly what it meant to feel like "part of something larger than oneself."
Armies were still often multinational groupings, bringing together men of
different dialects and languages. But it was in these armies, as George L.
Mosse has written, that "most volunteers, but many conscripts as well . . .
experienced a new kind of community held together by common danger and a
common goal."[23 The spreading imposition of uniforms, along with the
relentless drilling, necessarily helped heighten this new sense of community
in the average soldier. A member of the old warrior elite derived his identity
from his place in a noble lineage of warriors; a soldier in the new armies
derived his from his membership in a living mass of warriors capable of
marching, working, and fighting as one.
This was not, of course, an experience that most men welcomed or sought out.
Given the barbarous discipline and the high chances of dying in battle, men
went to great lengths to avoid conscription or, once conscripted, to escape.
Desertion rates were astronomical by present-day standards; "at certain
times," Parker tells us, "almost an entire army would vanish into thin
air."[24 For a lower class which had not yet experienced the discipline of the
factory, whose members would not ordinarily participate in any collective
endeavor on a scale greater than a harvest, army life must have been a rude
and terrifying ordeal.
But there were also the first stirrings of something else--if not yet
nationalistic fervor, then something far more basic. We have no records of the
feelings and impressions of ordinary soldiers in this period,[25 but William
H. McNeill has drawn on his own experience in World War II to provide a
firsthand insight into the psychological effect of drill. The "movement of the
big muscles in unison," he writes, "rouses echoes of the most primitive level
of sociality known to humankind." A rhythmic bonding of individuals develops,
which, he speculates, is linked to the dance and to the noisy, foot-stamping
confrontations of prehistoric humans with animals.[26
The technical term for this experience is "entrainment": the imposition of
synchronized movements on a number of individuals. Humans voluntarily seek
entrainment by, for example, dancing in circles or lines, participating in
parades and precision marching teams, or, as sports spectators, chanting and
performing synchronized movements like "the wave." So far as I can determine,
psychology has little to say about this desire to achieve rhythmic conformity
with our fellows. But whether sought freely or imposed by a drill sergeant,
entrainment can provide a deeply satisfying, and often uplifting, experience
of "boundary loss," which leads, in its extreme form, to ecstatic trance.[27
Through such forms of "muscular bonding," McNeill conjectures, we catch a
glimpse of the long lost "primary community" of the prehistoric human band.[28
It was not, of course, a fully functioning human community that was being
shaped in the mass army of early modern Europe. Armies do not produce goods or
reproduce human beings; in fact, the despotically controlled armies of the
time could not even feed themselves, since the danger of desertion ruled out
the foot soldier's traditional right to wander off and forage for himself. If
such an army can be analogized to a living thing, it was a huge, slow-moving,
predatory creature that had somehow lost the ability to ingest its own prey.
It was a complex beast, as McNeill writes, with its rigid command structure
serving as "a central nervous system, capable of activating technologically
differentiated claws and teeth,"[29 but a beast whose only function was to
kill.
But this beast, which more and more of Europe's young men were now finding
themselves part of, was still at a very primitive stage of evolution. Its
central nervous system worked in only one direction: from the top down,
general to officer and officer to men, meaning from nobleman to commoner.
Frederick the Great wanted his men to understand that their every act "is the
work of a single man," namely, their commander. Among the rank and file, he
wrote, "no one reasons, everyone executes."[30 In no way, then, was the early
modern mass army designed to exploit the fact that its ultimate sub-units were
themselves sentient beings capable of taking in information and making
decisions for themselves. Not expected to aim and seldom trusted to scout, the
individual soldier hardly needed sense organs at all, just the habits of
repetitive motion established by the drill. The next stage of the mass army's
evolution would initiate a much fuller exploitation of the soldier's human
capacities, including his emotions as well as his skills. But this would
require another, and more far-reaching, kind of revolution.
Revolution from Below
The American Revolution was Europe's first confrontation with an armed force
which had no use for the elite etiquette of war. Rather than standing in
formation and firing on command, the colonists hid behind trees and stone
walls, aiming at carefully selected targets. Mostly farmers, they delighted in
picking off the aristocratic British officers, who, on a European battlefield,
might still have expected to be treated with the deference appropriate to
their class.[31 From the British point of view, the Americans had no notion of
honor at all. They were not above dressing in red coats in order to sneak
behind enemy lines or, on occasion, pretending to surrender only to get close
enough to fire a punishing volley. Whereas the troops commanded by the British
(many of them Hessian mercenaries) had been trained to shoot, the Americans
knew how to kill.
The American advantage derived not only from the rebels' higher morale but, as
O'Connell suggests, from their more direct and primitive relationship to
nonhuman life.[32 Late-eighteenth-century Europe offered the common man little
experience of the hunt; game animals were largely confined to aristocratic
estates, where mounted noblemen pursued them for sport. America, in contrast,
was still relatively rich with game, and the average farmer was a deer stalker
who came to the battlefield armed with a hunting rifle and a hunter's skills.
If he had fought humans before, they were in most cases Indians, who were
themselves in the habit of fighting men as if they were animals: by stalking
and shooting from cover. The Indian warrior became the colonists' tutor. As
one New Englander wrote in 1677:
In our first war with the Indians, God pleased to show us the vanity of our
military skill, in managing our arms, after the European mode. Now we are glad
to learn the skulking way of war.[33
In part, then, the transformation of war-making in the nineteenth century was
spurred by Europe's contact, via the America revolutionaries, with what were
essentially Stone Age methods of killing.
It took more than a decade for the lessons of the American Revolution to be
applied to the European battlefield. The European officer corps was still
overwhelmingly aristocratic, addicted to its rituals and distrustful of its
troops. Historian Alfred Vagts provides a pointed example of the Europeans'
unwillingness to learn from the
Americans:
When it was proposed on the Continent in the 1790's to dull the luster of
firearms [in order to make them less obvious targets], as had been found
advisable in the American war, a military author protested: the soldier would
then have too little to polish, and "lose his point d' honneur of
cleanliness."[34
Before Europe could make use of the new form of warfare pioneered (or, we
might say, rediscovered) in America, a revolution on European soil had to
overthrow the ancient and ossified relationship between noble and commoner or,
as they were known in the new mass armies, officer and enlisted man.
The French Revolution, following on the heels of the American one, had
profound effects at both ends of the military hierarchy. At the lower levels,
it meant that the average soldier no longer saw himself as the subject of a
king but as the citizen of a nation. This sudden elevation of his perceived
status made him less willing to die in the old way, by standing in stiff lines
and firing volley after volley on command. But it also made him more willing
to "give his life," if that was required, because he now had something to give
it for: the nation, conceived as his nation. Before the revolution, according
to Mosse, no effort had been made "to encourage the soldiers to identify with
the aims of [the] war. It was assumed that they had no interest in them."
After the revolution, however, "the soldier no longer fought merely on behalf
of a king, but for an ideal which encompassed the whole nation under the
symbols of the Tricolor and the Marseillaise."[35 As historian J. Christopher
Herrold writes, the soldiers of the revolutionary French army were the first
European soldiers in more than a century who could regard the cause for which
they were fighting as their own, the first commoners permitted to distinguish
themselves by such acts of personal initiative and heroism as until then had
been tolerated only in the nobleborn.[36
At the same time, the effect of the French Revolution was to disperse,
discredit, and destroy the upper levels of the military hierarchy--some of
whom were executed or exiled as royalists while others deserted to the armies
of the European allies who had rushed in to suppress the revolution. With the
old French warrior elite in disarray, the way was open for a ruthless and
brilliant newcomer, Napoleon Bonaparte, to harness the military possibilities
unleashed by both revolutions, American and French.
In contrast to the aristocratic commanders he replaced, Napoleon had only one
objective in war: total victory, meaning the total defeat of his adversaries.
Members of the traditional military elite had always been saddled with the
often conflicting priority of maintaining their power within their own armies
and societies. But Napoleon, an obscure Corsican propelled to power by the
spirit of liberte', e'galite', fraternite', had no conservative social agenda
to distract him from the business of winning. He could dispense, for example,
with the slow-moving supply trains that often literally paralyzed conventional
armies--both because his officers did without the luxuries usually attendant
on officer status (his men even did without tents)[37 and because his troops
could be trusted to run loose and forage for food on their own.[38
Nothing better illustrates the new autonomy and status of the French citizen-
soldier than Napoleon's attitude toward desertion. In the classically precise,
obsessively drilled Prussian army, desertion was to be prevented "by avoiding
camping near a forest; by having the men visited often in their tents; by
having [mounted] hussar patrols ride around the camp . . . by not allowing
soldiers to fall out of ranks . . . by having hussar patrols move along on the
side when the infantry is passing through a wooded area."[39 Prussian
soldiers, in other words, were treated more or less like prisoners of war by
their own officers. Napoleon, in contrast instructed his officers to rely on
peer pressure:
The commanders will urge the soldiers to feel that those men "deserters] are
shameful, for the greatest punishment in a French army for not having
participated in the dangers and the victories is the reproach that is directed
to them by their comrades.[40
It was on the battlefield, though, that the new citizen-soldier proved himself
an irresistible military innovation The revolutionary nobleman Lafayette had
attempted to introduce American tactics to the French military, but credit for
"Americanizing" European warfare goes to Napoleon. His troops did not simply
stand and deliver clockwork volleys like a single giant unit of artillery;
they skirmished, as the American colonists had, overwhelming the relatively
inert armies of their enemies with swarms of self-mobilizing sharpshooters.
Where old-regime armies were slow-moving and, for all practical purposes,
blind beasts whose brains were concentrated entirely in a few top commanders,
Napoleon's army was one that moved fast, fed itself on the ruins of its prey,
and derived its intelligence and sensory input from hundreds of thousands of
individual mobile units. And everywhere Napoleon's ambitions drove
him--throughout Europe, deep into Russia, even south into Egypt--the old-
regime armies gave way before this new and more highly evolved form of
predator beast.
The French and American revolutions are, of course, best known for their
effects in realms unrelated to the business of killing. They shattered the
centuries-old structures of aristocratic and dynastic domination, thereby
opening up an entirely new sense of the possible--not only to the middle-class
(and, in the American case, often wealthy) men who led them, but to the poor
and, eventually, to that perennial lower class, women. The French Revolution
in particular revised the calculus of human hope and despair, convincing some
that real change for the better is within reach, and others that no real
change is ever possible, only a bloody reshuffling of the people on top.
But from a military point of view, the effect of the revolutions was brutally
simple: They made possible, for the first time, the full exploitation of the
killing power of the gun. The potential had always been there, but it could
not be utilized in old-regime societies with their rigidly old-regime armies,
in which the use of the gun had been reduced to a ritual of drill. The promise
(and horrific menace) of the gun could be fulfilled only by a gun bearer who
was capable of seeing and moving and taking aim on his own--and this was the
new revolutionary citizen-soldier.* {*Writing later in the nineteenth century,
Karl Marx expected socialist revolution to bring human social relations into
line with the technological promise of the newly industrialized means of
production. Obviously, human relationships could not remain stuck in, say, the
feudal era, at a time when production was taking place in steam-powered
factories. What Marx did not notice is that the "bourgeois" revolutions,
French and American, had already succeeded in bringing the social relations"
of war into line with "the means of destruction." }
Inevitably, such a drastic change in the practice of war had to affect the
passions men brought to war. In the new era, notions of glory and sacrifice
could no longer be confined to a narrow hereditary class of warriors, because
the new method of fighting made every man a warrior in the old-fashioned
sense. Like the highborn knight or samurai, the citizen-soldier was expected
to display initiative, make lightning judgments, and perform acts of heroism.
At the very least, he in turn could expect to share in the "glory?' of
war--the renown and tangible marks of esteem formerly reserved for valorous
members of the warrior elite. The first step in the crafting of a new, mass
religion of war was, accordingly, what we might call the democratization of
glory: In the American and French revolutionary armies, honors and
distinctions such as medals and stripes were awarded, for the first time, to
ordinary soldiers.[41
The effect of this was to undermine the ancient association between "nobility"
and hereditary wealth. In the medieval hierarchy of values, qualities such as
courage and altruism were almost inseparable from membership in the economic
elite, so that words like "noble" and "base" referred to both character and
social standing. Noblemen, in the economic sense, were expected to be
courageous and self-sacrificing in war, but no one "expected to find moral
qualities in the lower classes who made up the soldiery--neither courage, nor
loyalty, nor group spirit, nor sacrifice, nor self-reliance."[42 The presumed
character defects of the average foot soldier had long been recognized as a
military handicap. In the very first European revolution, that of the English
in 1660, Oliver Cromwell had written to his cousin and fellow revolutionary
John Hampden:
Your troops are mostly old, worn-out serving men, wine bibbers, and similar
riff-raff. On the other hand, the enemy's troops are sons of gentlemen and
young men of position. Do you believe that the courage of such miserable and
common fellows will ever be equal to that of men who have honor, courage, and
resolution in their hearts? You must seek to raise men of a single spirit
and--do not begrudge me what I am saying--of a spirit that is equal to that of
gentlemen.[43
If the mass armies of the early modern period had proletarianized the foot
soldier, reducing him from the status of peasant to that of a cog in a
machine, the revolutionary armies of the late eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries now "noble-ized" him. He too had a shot at glory; he too had "honor"
to defend; and he too possessed what had once been the trappings of the nobly
born--a flag, for example, which now symbolized a vast population rather than
a single dynasty. According to Vagts, "The tricolor [flag of France] gratified
emotions previously enjoyed only by the nobility. In short, the whole nation
had become the nobility."[44
The trade-off for this elevation in status was that the average male now
risked a much higher chance of dying in battle than had his peasant ancestors
in the era of knightly combat. Napoleon was particularly wanton in his
squandering of men as "cannon fodder," expecting them not just to stand and
shoot but to charge fearlessly at the enemy's artillery positions. He fielded
the largest armies Europe had ever seen, numbering in the hundreds of
thousands, and lost a total of 1.3 million to 1.5 million of his own men in
the course of his conquests--enough to leave a lasting dent in the population
of the nation whose interests he supposedly fought to advance.[45 In exchange
for being "noble-ized" by the new revolutionary ethos, the soldier was
expected to more willingly "give" his life; and in exchange for giving his
life, he would be given a share of glory.
But the "democratized glory?' accessible to the average soldier was a
strangely depersonalized version of the glory sought by members of the
traditional warrior elite. The knight or samurai wanted glory for himself as
an individual, or at most for his noble lineage. It was his own name that he
announced in his battlefield challenge to the enemy, his own name that he
hoped would be remembered forever in epics and chansons. But the kind of glory
held out to men in the armies of George Washington, Napoleon Bonaparte, and
all military leaders since their time need have no name attached to it at all.
Democratized glory can be thoroughly anonymous glory, of the kind celebrated
in the peculiar institution of the tomb of the "unknown soldier." As Benedict
Anderson writes:
No more arresting emblems of the modern culture of nationalism exist than
cenotaphs and tombs of Unknown Soldiers. The public ceremonial reverence
accorded these monuments precisely because no one knows who lies inside them,
has no true precedents in earlier times.[46
This new kind of glory attached not to the individual but to a new kind of
entity, the hypothetical collectivity which the French revolutionaries
heralded as la nation. If the revolutionary armies encouraged individual
initiative, they were still mass armies, like those of the old regime.
Revolution may have empowered the individual, but the revolutionary armies
were still a far cry from being collections of knights, each charging off on
his own pursuit of personal glory. Napoleon understood the difference and
reserved the notion of "glory" for the old knightly tradition; modern soldiers
were not to confuse "love of fatherland" with "love of glory."[47 To one of
Napoleon's admirers, the Prussian philosopher Hegel, "true valour" was not
"knightly valour" but, rather, the true valour of civilized nations is their
readiness for sacrifice in the service of the state, so that the individual
merely counts as one among many. Not personal courage, but integration into
the universal is the important factor here.[48
And "the universal," meaning the nation and, for Hegel, even more mystical
entities beyond that, was in the first instance the modern mass army.
pp. 175-193
--[notes--
Chapter 11
1. Cervantes, Miguel de, Don Quixote, trans. John Ormsby (New York: W. W.
Norton & Co., 1981), p.303.
2. On the "early modern military revolution," see especially Delbruck, History
of the Art of War; Parker, The Military Revolution; McNeill, The Pursuit of
Power, chapter 4; O'Connell, Of Arms and Men, chapters 7 and 8.
3. Quoted in O'Connell, Of Arms and Men, p. 114.
4.Quoted in Barber, Richard, The Knight and Chivalry, p. 200.
5.Gies, Joan of Arc, p. 56.
6.Ibid., p. 86.
7.O'Connell, Of Arms and Men, p. 114.
8.Perrin, Giving Up the Gun, p. 25.
9.Phillippe de Comines, quoted in Vagts, A History of Militarism, p. 44.
10.Quoted in ibid., p. 48.
11.Delbruck, p. 258.
12.Frend, The Rise of Christianity, pp.266-7, fn. 41.
13.Parker, pp. 20-21.
14.Quoted in O'Connell, Of Arms and Men, p. 155.
15.De Landa, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines.
16.Parker (p. 148) reports that the drill books of the Prussian army contained
no command for "take aim."
17. O'Connell, Of Arms and Men, p. 154.
18. Parker, p. 53.
19. Rothenberg, The Art of Warfare in the Age of Napoleon, p. 12.
20. Delbruck, p. 224.
21. Howard, The Lessons of History, p. 52.
22. Parker, p. 3.
23. Mosse, Confronting the Nation, p. 15.
24. Parker, p. 57.
25. At least none are cited in the sources I have consulted, and it is hard to
believe that scholars of the caliber, for example, of O'Connell or McNeill
would overlook the journals or letters of ordinary soldiers if such records
were available.
26. McNeill, Pursuit, p. 131; McNeill, Keeping Together in Time, chapter 2.
27. McNeill, Keeping Together, p. 8.
28. McNeill, Pursuit, p. 132.
29. Ibid., p. 124.
30. Quoted in Palmer, R. R., "Frederick the Great, Guibert, Bulow: From
Dynastic to National War,,, in Paret, The Makers of Modern Strategy, p.99.
31. Vagts, p. 95.
32. O'Connell, Of Arms and Men, pp.171-72.
33. Quoted in Keeley, War Before Civilization, p. 74.
34. Vagts, p. 96.
35. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, p. 18.
36. Herrold, The Age of Napoleon, p. 46.
37. Rothenberg, p. 82.
38. Ibid., p. 86.
39. Quoted in Delbruck, p. 413.
40. Quoted in ibid., p. 414.
41. Vagts, p. 100.
42. Palmer, p. 93.
43. Quoted in Delbruck, p. 187.
44. Vagts, p. 107.
45. McNeill, Pursuit, p. 213.
46. Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 9.
47. Herrold, p. 29.
48. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, p. 364.
pp260-261
-----
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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