Preface. This is a very profound and wide-ranging book about many aspects of war, the reasons for fighting, what it’s like to be a soldier, women’s roles during wars, the history and future of war, and more, a really outstanding book. What follows are some of my kindle notes, a lazy book review meant to give you an idea of whether you’d like to purchase the book. These fragments are out of context and leave much out. It is especially timely now that Russia has invaded Ukraine and the Great Game – Resource Wars — may be back (especially since world oil production likely peaked in 2018).
Other books about war are in this list: Booklist: War, Limits to Growth, Overpopulation, Collapse, Pollution, Resource depletion, Infrastructure, Peak everything, Transportation
Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Women in ecology Podcasts: WGBH, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity, Index of best energyskeptic posts
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MacMillan M (2020) War: How Conflict Shaped Us. Random House.
War is not an aberration, best forgotten as quickly as possible. Nor is it simply an absence of peace which is really the normal state of affairs. If we fail to grasp how deeply intertwined war and human society are—to the point where we cannot say that one predominates over or causes the other—we are missing an important dimension of the human story. We cannot ignore war and its impact on the development of human society if we hope to understand our world and how we reached this point in history.
Wars have repeatedly changed the course of human history, opening up pathways into the future and closing down others. Imagine what Europe might be like today if Muslim leaders had managed to conquer the whole continent, as they came close to doing on a couple of occasions.
The strong nation-states of today with their centralized governments and organized bureaucracies are the products of centuries of war. Centralized polities, whose people see themselves as part of a shared whole, can wage war on a greater scale and for longer because of their organization, their capacity to use the resources of their societies and their ability to draw on the support of their citizens. The capacity to make war and the evolution of human society are part of the same story.
When we pause to remember war we think of its costs—the waste of human beings and resources—its violence, its unpredictability and the chaos it can leave in its wake. We less often recognize just how organized war is.
The German bombers, with their fighter escorts, were the products of Germany’s war industry, which had mobilized resources from materials to labor and factories in order to get the planes made and into the air. Their crews had been chosen and trained. German intelligence and planners had done their best to select important targets. And the British response was equally organized. The Royal Air Force tracked the incoming planes and did its best to stop them, while on the ground crews manned barrage balloons and searchlights. The BBC had made contingency plans, the fire department came and the work of clearing up started at once.
War is perhaps the most organized of all human activities and in turn it has stimulated further organization of society. Even in peacetime, preparing for war—finding the necessary money and resources—demands that governments assume greater control over society. That has become increasingly true in the modern age because the demands of war have grown with our capacity to make it. In increasing the power of governments, war has also brought progress and change, much of which we would see as beneficial: an end to private armies, greater law and order, in modern times more democracy, social benefits, improved education, changes in the position of women or labor, advances in medicine, science and technology. As we have got better at killing, we have also become less willing to tolerate violence against each other.
The long tradition of seeing war as an evil, productive of nothing but misery, and a sign, perhaps, that we as a species are irredeemably flawed and doomed to play out our fate in violence to the end of history.
In 1803, for example, a thirteen-year-old boy, William Buckley, escaped from an English penal colony in Australia and found refuge among the Aborigines for the next three decades. He later described a world where raids, ambushes, long-running feuds and sudden and violent death were part of the fabric of society. At the other end of the world, in the harsh Arctic landscape, the first explorers and anthropologists found that the local inhabitants, Inuit and Inupiat among them, made weapons including armor from bone and ivory and had a rich oral tradition of stories of past wars. In 1964 Napoleon Chagnon, a young American anthropology student, went to do fieldwork among the Yanomami people in the Brazilian rain forest.
Differences were settled with clubs and spears, and one village would raid another to kill the men and children and abduct the women. In his thirty years of observations, he concluded that a quarter of Yanomami men died as a result of violence.
War involves dozens, hundreds, thousands, even millions rather than one or a few people committing violence on each other. It is a clash between two organized societies which command the adherence of their members and have existed over considerable time, usually in their own territory.
One of the many paradoxes of war is that humans got good at it when they created organized societies. Indeed the two developments have evolved together. War—organized, purposeful violence between two political units—became more elaborate when we developed organized sedentary societies and it helped to make those societies more organized and powerful.
It was only 10,000 years ago—an instant in the much longer human story—when some of us started to settle down and become farmers, that war became more systematic and started to need special training and a warrior class.
With the advent of agriculture humans were more tied to one place and had more worth stealing, and worth defending. And to defend themselves they needed better organization and more resources, which in turn led to groups expanding their territory and growing their populations either peacefully or through conquest.
Others challenge the figures and also point out that war deaths in the twentieth century may amount to 75% of all war deaths in the last 5,000 years. And if you really want to be depressed about the prospects for humanity, studies using mathematical tools at the University of Florence and the University of Colorado claim to show that the trend is for fewer but more deadly wars. Their argument is that the more interconnected societies become the quicker a conflict can spread along the paths of the network—just as computer viruses or forest fires do.
Even if Pinker is right—and the debate goes on—it somehow does not seem very reassuring. Those of us who have enjoyed the Long Peace since 1945 need to reflect that much of the world, including Indochina, Afghanistan, the Great Lakes district in Africa and large parts of the Middle East, has seen and still sees conflict.
The prevalence of violence and war in the past and their persistence in the present raise the awkward question as to whether humans are genetically programmed to fight each other. One avenue of research has been to look at our closest relatives in the animal kingdom: the chimpanzees and the bonobos. Both live in organized groups, have ways of communicating with each other and make primitive tools.
The observers watched as the chimpanzees developed relationships, cared for their young, engaged in play—and killed each other. Male-dominated groups, each fiercely attached to its own territory, waged organized conflict against other chimpanzee groups, often without being provoked. They killed lone chimpanzees who strayed too far out of their own territory and they carried out raids, killing rival males as well as females and infants.
In his The Goodness Paradox the anthropologist Richard Wrangham argues that over the long course of human evolution we have learned to tame our aggressive side, partly by domesticating ourselves as we have domesticated wild animals. He believes that humans working together gradually got rid of the more violent members of their groups by killing them.
Perhaps, as other anthropologists have suggested, sexual preference played a role too as women and their parents looked for peaceable, cooperative mates.
Social and political institutions, including strong central governments, which had a monopoly on violence. So their subjects, unlike the chimpanzees, could no longer maim and kill at will. Yet that did not mean an end to violence; rather organized societies could now use it in an organized and purposive way. The paradox, as Professor Wrangham sees it, is that as humans became nicer, they also got better at killing and on an ever-larger scale.
Hobbes painted a very different picture. In his state of nature, humans lived precariously and struggled against each other to survive. Life, as he said, was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” There was no time and there were no resources left over for making tools, cultivating crops, trade or learning. “No Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death.” Far from the growth of settled societies and large states leading to conflict, the opposite was more the case. The growth of a big and powerful polity—what Hobbes called Leviathan—offered the way to bring violence under control, at least within societies.
Many of us still prefer the Rousseau version of the past and the assumption that humans are by nature innocent and peaceful. The twentieth century was so awful in so many ways that it is not surprising that we keep searching for contemporary societies which are better and gentler than ours.
For a time in the 1920s and 1930s Western intellectuals thought they had found their Garden of Eden in the Soviet Union, until, at last, the evidence of mass starvation and organized murder inflicted by the state became too obvious for most to ignore. In the 1960s Mao’s China became the great hope, partly because so little was known about it. The Cultural Revolution seemed benign at first, with the high-spirited young remaking society into an egalitarian paradise where everyone worked happily to build a new world. Again the rosy picture changed and grew much darker as we learned about the real brutality and the destructiveness of those years.
The emergence of the strong state went hand in hand with its increasing monopoly over the use of force and violence within its borders. If you refuse to pay taxes, set your neighbor’s house on fire or ignore the summons to do military service, a strong state will lay hands on you and often your property as well and you will be punished and even, sometimes, executed.
We may see the state as oppression incarnate, but we should think for a moment what it is like to live where there is no state power. The Samoans and the New Guinea highlanders once knew that and the unfortunate people of the failed states of Yemen, Somalia and Afghanistan know it today.
Rulers who cannot defend their own peoples or suffer defeats abroad lose their support. In classical China, emperors who failed to deal with violent revolts within or attacks from outside were said to have lost the mandate of Heaven and were therefore no longer fit to rule.
Great powers are not necessarily nice ones—why should they be?—but they do provide a minimum of security and stability for their own people.
The better Leviathans have consistent laws, reasonable taxes and security of property, and sometimes even, as in the Roman Empire, a tolerance of different customs and religions.
Leviathans can also bring peace to their neighborhoods if they are powerful enough. In the 19th century the British Empire acted as the world’s policeman, ensuring that the world’s waterways were secure and conflicts, where possible, were dampened down. The British did this out of their own self-interest, to protect their trade and their empire, but the Pax Britannica, like the Roman one before it, made possible the flourishing of trade and commerce and vast movements of peoples around the globe. We may be living through the end of the hegemony of the American Leviathan and we are starting to realize that the world needs someone or something to maintain order. A less stable substitute is a coalition of powers of roughly equal size and strength that agree to work together to keep the peace.
It only takes one or two powers, however, such as Germany before the First World War and Germany, Japan and Italy before the Second, to decide to challenge the status quo and for peace to tip toward war.
The world reverts surprisingly easily to Hobbes’s state of anarchy where no power trusts another. Then the prospect is repeated conflict, just as it is within failed states.
After the fall of the Roman Empire in the West in the fifth century A.D., Europe gradually reverted to a lower level of development: trade fell off because the roads and waterways were too dangerous for travelers, and learning and the arts faded. Waves of invaders—Angles, Vandals, Huns, Goths—swept through, looting and pillaging, because there was no force to stop them. Local strongmen with their castles and their retainers exploited their subjects and waged war on each other.
Europe has had far fewer periods of unity than China but it has moved by fits and starts from some 5,000 independent political units (mainly baronies and principalities) in the 15th century to 500 in the early 17th century, 200 at the time of Napoleon in the early 19th and fewer than thirty after 1945.
That did not bring an end to war but it did limit the number of potential combatants and therefore the number of likely wars. The growth of European unity with European institutions was consciously conceived as an alternative to the European state system, with all its dangers for conflict.
The need to make war has gone hand in hand with the development of the state. The historian Charles Tilly goes so far as to say, “War made the state, and the state made war.” Protecting yourself, from neighbors or raiding nomads, takes organization—to get the bodies to fight and then to provide leadership and the discipline and training to exact obedience. Governments need to know how many fighters they can muster and that leads to counting and to keeping records. The word “census” comes from ancient Rome; in the sixth century B.C. the authorities started to list male citizens both for collecting taxes and because they were expected to bear arms. While early soldiers often brought their own weapons and food, with larger and longer campaigns the government had to provide them and that meant more bureaucrats to count and find the supplies and the animals and the boats to transport them.
For the famous Battle of Cannae against the Carthaginians in 216 B.C., it has been estimated that the Roman army of some 80,000 (figures are always tricky in the ancient world) would have required about 100 tons of wheat a day for their army. In the eighteenth century, the British navy was the single biggest industry by far in the whole of the British Isles. While you could build a cotton mill for £5,000, a large capital ship for the navy such as Nelson’s Victory cost over £60,000. To build, staff and maintain the navy required shipyards, warehouses and bases both in the British Isles and overseas and a growing number of officials, administrators, suppliers and workers. The navy needed money, a great deal of it, as well as organization and management, and the British government developed the necessary tools and institutions, which then came in handy for managing other aspects of British society.
The Treasury was founded in the second half of the seventeenth century to keep military expenditure under control but over time developed into a body which kept track of the spending of all government departments. In the 1690s, when Britain was at war with France and desperately needed funds, the government as an emergency measure founded the Bank of England, which could take money from subscribers and lend to the government at a fixed rate. Because the government was able to guarantee regular interest payments thanks to its efficiency in collecting taxes, investors found government-issued annuities or bonds solid and desirable investments. The result was more funding available for such purposes as war.
Wars sometimes pay for themselves if the defeated enemy has good pickings. Alexander the Great accumulated huge wealth from the Persians. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Spanish financed their European wars largely from the gold and silver they brought back from the defeated Aztec and Inca empires.
Until the second half of the twentieth century war constituted by far the largest expenditure for the most powerful states of Europe. In the Nine Years War of 1688–97 between the France of Louis XIV and Britain, it is estimated that France was spending 74% of its revenue and Britain 75%. Although his armies won repeated victories, Louis was eventually obliged to make an unsatisfactory peace because he could no longer find anyone willing to lend him the money he needed. The British, it turned out, were much better at taxing as well as borrowing and managing their debt. Although France was the richest country in Europe, Louis XIV and his successors never managed to tap into that wealth and this eventually affected France’s capacity to wage war.
The British, it is true, found it easier to collect taxes because they could impose customs duties at their ports. More important, however, they had a parliament which was prepared when necessary to raise taxes and, by the eighteenth century, had what was probably the most efficient tax-collecting system in Europe. The public grumbled but paid up. By the end of the American Revolutionary War in 1783 the average Englishman was paying almost three times as much in annual taxes as his French counterpart. What is more, the taxes were collected by a government agency, not, as in France, by tax farmers who bought the rights to raise taxes on the understanding that they could keep whatever extra they raised as long as they gave the government a fixed amount.
As the British state became more organized, efficient and powerful, it was able to strengthen its control over British society, including the rebellious Scots and Irish. The excise commissioners amassed quantities of information, from the number of candle makers to the number of shops. The Excise Office gave licenses to thousands of brewers, publicans, tea and coffee dealers, and a host of other trades. Its inspectors were everywhere, with “ten thousand eyes,” as people complained.
Governments encouraged railway building in part to be able to move troops easily about the country in case of domestic unrest or to the frontiers for war. Germany got a single time zone in place of the existing patchwork when the military demanded it so that they could move troop trains smoothly. Better education and better nutrition were needed to produce fitter soldiers and sailors.
It is another uncomfortable truth about war that it brings both destruction and creation. So many of our advances in science and technology—the jet engine, transistors, computers—came about because they were needed in wartime.
Prominent historians and economists, among them Walter Scheidel and Thomas Piketty, have argued persuasively that major wars can also act to narrow the gap between the rich and the poor and that the experience of the nations involved in the First and Second World Wars bears this out. Major wars stimulate employment; labor becomes more valuable so wages and benefits go up; and the rich pay higher taxes voluntarily, or find it harder to avoid doing so.
There is some evidence too that war brings social as well as economic leveling. Men and sometimes women are conscripted and thrown together with people unlike any they have ever met before. In the First World War, when young British officers, mostly educated in public schools, censored the letters their men were writing home, they were often surprised to find that ordinary soldiers expressed the same sorts of loves, fears and hopes as they themselves felt.
Finding the will and the resources to make great advances is harder in peacetime; it is all too easy to put off doing something about poverty, the opioid crisis or climate change until another day. War concentrates our attention and, like it or not, has done so throughout human history.
We know more about dynastic wars in the Middle Ages and early modern Europe. Rulers regarded their land as their personal estates and saw nothing wrong in trying to expand their possessions. It was almost always possible to find a reason for war, whether an insult or an ancient claim to revive. The web of family connections which linked Europe’s rulers meant that most successions could be disputed.
Wars in the past may have been made by a single leader or elites but often they had some popular support. The citizens of the Greek city-states feared for their way of life and so came together to fight the Persians.
Protecting co-religionists can be a most convenient excuse for war. In the middle of the nineteenth century the great powers were looking greedily at the declining Ottoman Empire. Britain and France, both of which had extensive interests in the eastern end of the Mediterranean, did not want Russia reaching out toward Constantinople, with its all-important command of the straits that led to the Mediterranean
In June 1914 the heir to the Austrian throne made the singularly stupid mistake of going to Sarajevo.
The Archduke had not been popular and his wife was looked down upon as a mere countess. In death, however, they provided the perfect excuse for Austria to attempt to destroy Serbia, which, so it was felt in Vienna, had been stirring up trouble along the southern border for far too long.
So there are apparently many different reasons for wars in different times and places. Abductions, romances, religion, dynastic struggles, conquest, imperialism, assassinations or fabrications. Yet certain motives appear again and again: greed, self-defense, and emotions and ideas. Greed for what others have, whether it is food for survival, women for servitude or procreation, precious minerals, trade or land, has always motivated war.
Napoleon’s model above all was Alexander the Great. He invaded Egypt longing to build an empire in the East as Alexander had done. “I was full of dreams,” Napoleon later wrote to a friend. “I saw myself founding a religion, marching into Asia, riding an elephant, a turban on my head and in my hand a new Koran that I would have composed to suit my need.” In his own search for glory, Napoleon turned Europe upside down and destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives.
Religion can merge into nationalism as orthodoxy does with the Serbs and the Russians, and offers both a cause worth dying for and the promise of eternal life.
Many Crusaders—kings such as Richard I of England, the Lionheart, and Philip II of France and great landed magnates—left behind properties, position and families and many never returned. Egged on by religious leaders such as Pope Gregory VII, who reminded the faithful of the passage from the Book of Jeremiah “Cursed be he that keepeth back his sword from blood,” they killed indiscriminately those they thought of as infidels. In the massacres in Jerusalem in 1099 the streets were said to have run with blood, in some places up to the knees of the Crusaders’ horses. “None of them were left alive; neither women nor children were spared,” said a contemporary account.
Wars of ideology, whether religious or political, are often the cruelest of all because the kingdom of heaven or some form of earthly paradise justifies all that is done in its name, including removing human obstacles. Those who hold the wrong ideas or beliefs deserve to die much as diseases ought to be stamped out, or they are simply the necessary sacrifices on the way to achieving a dream which will benefit all of humanity. Today we have religious wars again and the targets are again without limit until the final goal is achieved. Sadly, even wars which are meant to be about ending war itself take on that limitless character.
[ does the following remind you of FOX, evangelist and other right wing media & politicians? ]
Civil wars so often take on the character and cruelty of a crusade because they are about the nature of society itself. The other side is seen as having betrayed the community by refusing to agree to shared values and a common vision and so extremes of violence and cruelty become permissible, even necessary, to restore the damaged polity. An external enemy is a clear but understandable threat; a civil war is rather fueled by anger and hurt at the incomprehensible betrayal of the other side.
Civil wars have been increasing since 1945 as wars between states become rarer. Greece, Nigeria, Sudan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, Congo, Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia: the list is long and touches much of the world.
In a civil war the small grudges and enmities of peacetime are magnified and become lethal. During the Peloponnesian War a conflict broke out among the citizens of the city-state of Corcyra, ostensibly between enemies and supporters of democracy. In fact, said Thucydides, “men were often killed on grounds of personal hatred or else by their debtors because of the money they owed.
Civil wars are hard to forget, even when peace comes, because they so often leave peoples living side by side who have very recently been enemies. Forgiveness is difficult and it is hard for the losers to accept defeat and the victors to be magnanimous
Order of a sort returns, as it did in Spain or Tito’s Yugoslavia, but the bitter memories of the savagery and atrocities on both sides simply go underground.
Over a century and a half later, the American Civil War still casts its shadow, in the arguments over the flying of the Confederate flag or the statues of Confederate generals or the tangled racial politics and the lingering resentments of Southern whites.
In asymmetric war, where a weaker power can disrupt and challenge much stronger forces through unconventional means, was a warning of what was going to happen to coalition forces in both Afghanistan and Iraq, where they were battered by hit-and-run attacks by guerrillas who communicated through secure channels and who used cheap improvised explosive devices, often shells or other containers packed with explosives and pieces of metal such as ordinary nails which can be set off with cheap, readily available technology such as the remote controls for children’s toy cars or garage-door openers. Such devices have caused the majority of casualties for the occupying forces in both countries. Moreover, the occupations lacked clear goals after the initial ones of toppling the Taliban or Saddam Hussein. The military found themselves taking on nation-building, something they were not trained for and for which they were not given clear directives.
The excuses for war are many and varied, but the underlying reasons have not changed significantly over the centuries. The vocabulary may be different: where nations once talked of honor they now tend to say prestige or credibility. Yet greed, self-defense and emotions and ideas are still the midwives of war. And in its fundamentals, strategy, meaning the broad goals of war, has not changed. On land or sea, opponents seek to undermine each other’s capacity to wage war or destroy it forever.
Young men, and they are almost invariably men, are brought up by their elders to value such qualities as discipline, bravery and a willingness to die. And the epics they hear, the books they read, the songs they sing or the paintings and sculpture they see, hold before them the examples of great warriors. Chivalry served, conveniently, to cast a sheen of glamour and nobility over the reality of bloody wars, often made for the most selfish of ends and fought with the utmost brutality The tournaments, with their elaborate rituals and courtesies, were both a substitute for war and training for it. In 1241 80 knights died at one tournament at Neuss on the Rhine alone.
In nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain the upper classes prided themselves on sending their sons to schools with spartan regimes—a mix of cold showers, hard beds, beatings, poor food and stories of past heroes—to toughen them up.
A friend of mine from university who grew up on their family estate in East Prussia during the Second World War once told me of how he and his little male cousins were taught by their grandmother to use their knives and forks in either hand because, as she said, they were going to be soldiers when they grew up and might well lose an arm. Yet they would still be expected to eat politely.
By contrast, classical China produced many great generals, fought many wars and conquered many peoples but did not elevate military values above civilian. (It helped, perhaps, that the scholars rather than the military wrote the histories.) Fighting was not held up as something admirable but rather as the result of a breakdown in order and propriety. There is no equivalent of the Iliad in Chinese literature and the heroes held up for the young to emulate were the great bureaucrats and wise rulers who maintained the peace. Early on Chinese thinkers such as Confucius and the great strategist Sunzi (also known in the transliteration Sun Tzu) stressed that the state’s authority rested on its virtue as well as on its ability to use force. And for Sunzi, the greatest general was the one who could win a war, through maneuver or trickery, without fighting a battle. Prestige in Chinese society came rather from being a scholar, poet or painter; and from the Tang dynasty onward the examination system to enter the imperial civil service was the favored path for fame and prestige. Successful generals were sometimes awarded a scholar’s rank and gown as a mark of particular favor where many European societies would have given military decorations to meritorious civilians.
War has often been won through attrition, cutting enemy supplies as the British have done repeatedly with their navy, harassing enemy forces while avoiding battle as the Spanish irregular forces did when Napoleon invaded Spain, or denying invaders sustenance through a scorched-earth policy as the Russians did in the Napoleonic Wars and again in the twentieth century in the face of Germany’s invasions.
War is such an important business, its consequences potentially so momentous, that some of the greatest thinkers in different cultures have devoted themselves to trying to work out infallible prescriptions for success. The Romans studied the Greek wars and Renaissance Europe rediscovered both the Greeks and the Romans, just as military colleges today still study the great battles of the past.
India, China and the Ottoman Empire were all as rich as Europe in the sixteenth century and possessed advanced technologies, from printing to gunpowder. Yet they were not able to build on what they already knew. Historians continue to argue about why this is so but agree that its growing technological edge made it possible for Europe to reach out and conquer much of the rest of the world.
The horse was as important for war and human society as the introduction of metal and has remained so up until nearly the present. (The last cavalry charge may have been in Afghanistan in 2001.) Horses made possible new means of communication and of moving goods and peoples about—and of making war, whether with war chariots or with mounted archers and swordsmen—and so the horse increased the reach and power of armies and governments.
The new technology of the horse-drawn chariot carrying its warriors armed with metal weapons and composite bows proved to give such an advantage to whoever had them that states were obliged to invest in them or go under, as many did.
When strong central government collapses, as it did in the Thirty Years War in Europe in the seventeenth century, Yugoslavia in the 1990s or in Iraq today, power flows downward as well, to those who are strong and ruthless enough to attract followers and maintain themselves by extorting resources. The collapse of the Roman Empire in the West by the fourth century A.D. left a Europe where power increasingly devolved to local strongmen whose wealth and status depended on land and their ability to defend it with armed retainers against their neighbors or invading peoples.
It has been estimated that it took a large prosperous farm of between 300 and 450 acres to equip and sustain a knight. Over time the armor, for both man and horse, became more elaborate and heavier to the point that they rendered both less mobile and so more vulnerable to the new weapons and tactics of the infantry. And like turtles flipped onto their backs, the riders struggled to move if they were thrown to the ground. To keep the loyalty of their forces and to defray the costs, European rulers, whether modest nobles or kings, rewarded them with land, which provided a strong incentive for continued fighting.
Mongol warriors wore silk undershirts, so that if they were hit by an arrow the silk wrapped around its head. It was not only easier to get the arrow out; the risk of infection, until the modern age a greater killer of soldiers than death in battle, was much less.
In an early arms race, the growth of your neighbors’ armed forces meant that you had to keep up or risk being conquered. Armies were going to increase dramatically in size, ten times between 1500 and 1700 alone.
While ground forces were still using horses and mules for transportation in the two world wars, it was the train, the steamship and the internal combustion engine that made their scale and reach possible.
If belligerent nations could not harness their economies to the war effort, they could not fight on. As a result the line between legitimate and illegitimate targets in war blurred until it was nearly erased altogether. Bombing or shelling such things as railway lines, fuel depots, munitions factories and dams were after all ways of undermining the enemy’s capacity to fight in the field. And gradually so too were attempts to destroy civilian morale by flattening their homes, churches, hospitals and schools and by killing the civilians themselves indiscriminately.
Another new term was to enter the language by the time of the First World War: the home front. Whether or not they chose, civilians were now part of the battlefield. In the Second World War as many as 50 million civilians may have died as a result of mass murder, bombing or famine and disease caused by the war.
In the end the French were to be defeated in part because they had aroused the very emotions in others that had carried them to power. The Spanish, the Prussians and the Russians who experienced French invasions were not grateful to be offered their liberty on the point of a French sword and so the French found themselves confronting awakening, different nationalisms and wars of national resistance. In the century after the Napoleonic Wars came to an end, old and new nationalisms welded together peoples who had never been accustomed to thinking of themselves as members of a “nation,” sharing such characteristics as culture, language, history, religion, customs and, on the edge where racial theories flourished, biology. Education and improved communications helped to spread the uses of a national language.
Authoritarian governments have often used war as a way to unite their people against a common external enemy. They have also found it a handy excuse to crack down on dissent and those they see as dangerous revolutionaries.
Nationalism served to inspire wars and it also, as in the Vendée, led to a demonization of the enemy, whether the military or civilians, who were seen as an existential threat to a just cause and as impediments standing in the way of the fulfillment of the nation.
The American general Philip Sheridan, who had laid waste to the Shenandoah valley in the Civil War, gave his advice that, once the enemy army was finished off, it was necessary to inflict so much pain on the civilians that they would beg their government to make peace: “The people must be left with nothing but their eyes to weep with over the war.”
In the American Civil War a reasonably efficient soldier with a rifle and magazines could fire sixteen shots per minute. By the end of the nineteenth century the machine gun, which could fire hundreds of bullets a minute, had made its appearance.
Another of the great changes in war in the nineteenth century was that where once armies had marched, they now had mechanized transport. (They still had to march once they had disembarked at railheads from their trains or if lorries were not available.) Before the Industrial Revolution, armies were like locusts: once they had eaten everything in sight, they had to move on.
The size of Napoleon’s armies, like those of Alexander or Frederick the Great, had been limited by the supplies, from food to ammunition, that they could carry or forage. Napoleon lost most of his great army in Russia when his soldiers starved or froze to death. Now, with trains or steamships, armies could be moved great distances more quickly and kept in the field much longer as fresh supplies kept coming in.
The changes to war were equally great at sea. Although the British navy kept sails on its first steam-powered ships, just in case, steam and the new turbines made ships more reliable, maneuverable and fast. Coal, and coaling stations around the world, and later oil now became important strategic assets and targets. The new technology made it possible for the ships to carry armor, which was initially installed over the wood, and much heavier guns. The invention of the gun turret which could swivel 360 degrees meant that ships no longer had to fire broadsides—which left their whole length exposed to counterfire—but could fire over their bows and sterns as well. The growing range of the naval guns, from around ten miles in the First World War up to eighteen miles by the Second World War, meant that navies could engage without ever seeing each other.
In the summer of 1914, Germany was able to move 2 million men, 1,189,000 horses and all their equipment on 20,000 trains, into Belgium and northern France on the Western Front with very few hitches. In the first two weeks of August, German trains, each of 54 cars, were moving toward the French frontier across the Rhine on the crucial Hohenzollern Bridge at Cologne every ten minutes.
The Germans were also among the first to realize that the new railways could only be useful if they were organized properly. Germany pioneered the general staff, the necessary brain to move the behemoth of the new mass armies about.
Staff officers studied everything from forts, to understand their strengths and weaknesses, to American circuses, to learn ways of moving quantities of people, animals and equipment across great distances.
Much of the drive to improve public health, diet, living conditions and education came from the need for fit and healthy recruits.
One of Hitler’s many mistakes was to underestimate the value of science, a field in which Germany had once led the world. The Nazi regime neglected basic research and allowed some of its best scientists to join up so that they wasted their expertise and often ended their lives on the battlefields. The Nazis also drove out Jewish scientists, among them Albert Einstein, with the result that the exiles were able to offer their talents to Germany’s opponents. Without the work of the refugee scientists, it is unlikely that the Allies could have developed the atomic bomb so quickly.
“The first essential condition for an army to be able to stand the strain of battle,” said the German general Erwin Rommel, “is an adequate stock of weapons, petrol and ammunition. In fact, the battle is fought and decided by quartermasters before the shooting begins.
Napoleon tried to stop trade between the British Isles and the Continent to force the British to end hostilities; the British responded with their favored strategy of a naval blockade. They tried it again against Germany in the First World War. The German economy became increasingly unable to sustain the war effort without vital products such as foods or natural phosphates, crucial in making fertilizer.
Food has always been a critical front in the struggle over resources. Besieging armies have counted on the help of hunger to force garrisons to surrender. Armies, as Napoleon said, march on their stomachs and denying them food has long been a tactic in war.
By the end of the First World War many Germans, especially the poorer classes in the cities, were starving, and desperate housewives marched banging their empty pots and pans. This was later characterized by the German High Command as part of the “stab in the back” which had made it impossible for German troops to fight on. The food shortages were partly caused by the British blockade but were also the result of the German government’s inefficient planning and ineffective rationing. In both world wars Britain managed with much greater success to increase its food production and ensure a fairer distribution. During the Second World War the British doubled their arable land by plowing up pastures and parks. By focusing on crops such as wheat and potatoes at the expense of animal husbandry, they increased the proportion of home-grown food in the British diet.
Stringent government controls meant that scarce shipping was used for high-calorie foods such as meat and cheese rather than sugar, nuts or fresh fruit.
War, particularly large-scale prolonged war, makes many demands and it is hideously, often ruinously, expensive. Indeed when the First World War broke out most of the world, including the European belligerents themselves, assumed that it would have to end after a short time as money and resources ran out. Instead states rapidly learned how to manage and expropriate societies’ wealth on a much greater scale than they had imagined possible. Walter Scheidel has estimated that in the First World War the state in belligerent powers such as France, Germany or Great Britain increased its share of GDP from four to eight times. By the middle of the Second World War, Germany was using the equivalent of 73% of its GNP for the war effort. When peace came, governments did not relinquish all the levers of power they had amassed or unlearn the lessons about extracting resources from society. Taxes certainly did not go back to prewar levels.
Because industry, technology and better organization of society made the mobilization of their resources possible even in peacetime, European countries found themselves obliged to create bigger armed forces, or be left behind their neighbors. By the end of the 19th century all the great powers, with the exception of Britain, which relied on the seas and its navy, the most powerful in the world, to protect it, had adopted peacetime conscription, which obliged young men of military age to do military service for a stated period and then remain in the reserves for another number of years. This meant that nations had large armies in existence and much larger ones that could be summoned up in a crisis.
Change is never easy for hierarchical organizations and the military through time has treated innovations such as conscription with suspicion. The British army clung to the practice of allowing young men to buy commands long after most Continental armies had abandoned it as inefficient. It was a convenient way for the government to raise funds and for the army to ensure that it got the “right sort” of men. The practice was finally abolished in 1871, when disasters caused by incompetent officers, most notably the futile and bloody Charge of the Light Brigade during the Crimean War, had caused too much public furor to be ignored.
Many men and many horses were to die before the cavalry abandoned their horses for the despised new tanks and armored vehicles. It did not help that anti-intellectualism was a matter of pride in many military circles. The British army staff college was established in the mid-nineteenth century over the objections of the senior military and in its early years only educated a handful of officers a year. When an officer in a fashionable British regiment thought of applying to it one of his fellow officers said, “Well, I will give one piece of advice, and that is to say nothing about it to your brother officers, or you will get yourself jolly well disliked.
Free public education, growing literacy and the emergence of cheap newspapers with huge circulations meant that the public had much greater access to news even far beyond the country’s borders. And the advent of the telegraph, which by 1914 had bound the world together much as the internet does today, meant that the home audiences were following events such as wars and international crises virtually as they were happening. For the first time, the British realized just how incompetent their own military could be and how badly their soldiers were treated.
Newspapers and publishers realized that war was good for sales.
The American government lost the battle for public opinion during the Vietnam War because the networks’ evening news and print reporting persuaded large sections of the public that the war was both unjust and disgraceful.
Democracies, where leaders are always conscious of the next election, have a particularly hard time sustaining unpopular wars, as the French had discovered in their own war in Indochina, but even the authoritarian Soviet Union paid a high political cost for its unsuccessful and unpopular war in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Public opinion can also work the other way, pushing governments into stances and wars they do not want. Navy and army leagues, veterans’ associations and defense industries have shown great skill in whipping up public demands for more spending on the military.
Governments and their military have learned to play the game of manipulating public opinion too. In the First and Second World Wars, all sides controlled war correspondents carefully lest too realistic a picture of the fighting weaken public morale. Although the US military allowed reporters extraordinary access in Vietnam, it drew the conclusion that it must never make that mistake again. In both wars with Iraq the media were tightly controlled and managed.
Today the absurd spectacle of the high-stepping soldiers from India and Pakistan who nightly strut their robotic lowering and folding of flags, with their high kicks, stamps and twirls, at a border crossing on the Old Trunk Road between their two countries, draws increasingly large cheering crowds. It is surely a bit of harmless fun. Or is it? Both countries have nuclear weapons and a long history of conflict and mutual suspicion. And militarism, whether that means elevating the military to a position as the noblest and best of their societies or the leaching of military values, such as discipline and obedience into the civilian world, can lead to trouble for democratic societies.
It is widely accepted that some of Pakistan’s generals have sold nuclear technology to North Korea. Civilian leaders who have tried to rein in the military have rapidly found themselves out of office and, if they are lucky, in exile. In both India and Pakistan civilian politics have taken on a military tinge, with some political parties sponsoring paramilitary organizations whose members wear uniforms, march in formation with flags and carry sticks to menace their opponents.
The First World War had a deep impact on European society, not least in the persistence of wartime values and organizations long after the war itself had ended. Former soldiers formed paramilitary groups
Right-wing politics in Germany were imbued with nostalgia for the “spirit of 1914,” when, so it was believed, the German nation had sunk all its differences in a common cause. Veterans turned out in their uniforms to march, and the new fascist and communist movements had their own uniforms and formations, obeyed their leaders unquestioningly and went out on expeditions to beat up their enemies. “For us,” an Italian fascist said, “the war has never come to an end. We simply replaced external enemies with internal ones.
Nineteenth-century Europe provides a warning of what can happen during a long peace when the military come to see themselves as superior to society, the best and bravest part of it with a special, even divine, mission to protect the nation, and when military values trump civilian ones.
All over Europe crowned heads and their heirs appeared more often than not in uniform. Kaiser Wilhelm reveled in his collection and took, curiously enough, particular pride in the uniform of a British admiral. Little boys in most countries wore military-style uniforms to school and learned to march in the cadets, while little girls often wore pinafores modeled on seamen’s uniforms. As they grew older, they could join organizations such as the British Boy Scouts, the aim of which was to prepare boys to serve their king and country, or, in the case of girls, something like the Girl Guides, which would make them good wives, mothers and nurses.
The idea that war is not only natural but essential to society, a test of humans and their state, has a long history. The Romans, for example, thought a common enemy was good for them. As the Roman historian Sallust said about Rome’s struggle with Carthage, “There was no strife among the citizens either for glory or for power: fear of the enemy preserved the good morals of the state.
“War is terrible,” President George W. Bush said in a 2006 interview, “but it brings out, you know, in some ways it touches the core of Americans who volunteer to go into combat to protect their souls.
Popular culture, from collectible cigarette cards with pictures of great military heroes to boys’ magazines, served to reinforce the special aura and place of war and the armed forces, and the importance of military values for a strong society.
Developed countries in the late nineteenth century worried, as some do today, that the modern human was weaker, morally and physically, than his or her ancestors.
What is it that will draw men, and less frequently women, into a conflict and keep them fighting even when the battle or the cause seems lost? And why is it that fighting can bring out the noblest and the basest sides of human nature? As we are both fascinated and repulsed by war, so too are we by those who fight, the warriors. We at once admire and fear them. And we wonder if we could do what they do. We puzzle over what it is that makes the warrior brave.
The reasons why individuals fight, bravely or not, fall into the same rough categories that those for groups including nations do: for gain, to defend themselves or because of ideas and emotions. We can break them down still more. It is by no means an exhaustive list but here are some reasons people have given for fighting: because they have no choice; to protect their loved ones or their nation; out of a sense of honor; for fear of their officers; to win the approval of those they respect; to show off; to test themselves; to rape, pillage and loot; for glory; for a cause; for their comrades; or to get ahead in the world. In peacetime volunteers who join the military may not think of fighting at all but rather of seeing the world or learning a useful trade. The British military once came under heavy criticism for recruiting posters that showed tropical beaches, ski slopes or classrooms without a hint that those who signed up might be called upon to risk their lives in combat.
Powerful states—and they have become that way at least partly through military force—often simply assume that their subjects belong to them and any attempt to avoid that obligation is equivalent to treason. In many societies, slaves or those captured in war were forced into service. Christian slaves rowed the great fleets of the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century and Christian boys seized from their families and forcibly converted to Islam filled the ranks of the elite Ottoman Janissaries.
Before the advent of modern war, which drew in whole societies and required soldiers with education, European powers preferred to use the most expendable members of society to fill up the ranks of their armies. In eighteenth-century Europe criminals, even murderers, were often given a choice, which was scarcely a real one at all: execution or join the military. Poor, friendless individuals were simply rounded up by press gangs to serve in the army or the navy. Or sometimes, as the Farquhar play The Recruiting Officer shows, young men were plied with drink until they signed on. The Duke of Wellington called his soldiers, who even after the French Revolution were recruited in the old way, “the scum of the earth.” And to the earth they returned, their graves unmarked.
Poverty was and still is an inducement to join the military. Today the American military recruits heavily in the poorer rural and urban areas. It is no accident that so many mercenaries in early modern Europe came from its poorest parts, such as Scotland, Switzerland or Ireland. Military service gave them more or less regular pay and food and the opportunity to help themselves to whatever they could, from money to women, as they marched along.
Good farmers or skilled artisans were much more valuable to their rulers at home.
Even the worst of wars can nevertheless also be an escape. The French Foreign Legion has always been known for not insisting on the real names or inquiring into the pasts of those who applied to join it. After the Second World War it recruited a number of men with French names who spoke with German or Italian accents and seemed to have a good understanding of military matters. There is another sort of escape too that war offers and that is from the mundane and the boring. In Renaissance Europe upper-class young men offered their services to one army or another for the fun of it.
Even in peacetime the military offers the enticing prospect of a secure world, where the rules are clear and decisions, at least for those in the lower ranks, are made by others. And, like a traveling circus or theatrical troupe, it has its own values, which are often pleasingly at odds with those of ordinary society
Renaissance soldiers—and it is possible to think of parallels today, in the civil wars in Africa, for example—highlighted their differences from civilians by growing their beards and hair, wearing outlandish hats and garish clothes, and sporting outsize codpieces. When a man becomes a soldier, Machiavelli commented, not only does he change “his clothing, but he adopts attitudes, manners, ways of speaking and bearing himself, quite at odds with those of civilian life.
Religions promise immortality or rewards in the afterlife for those who die in battle. Thousands of Iranian volunteers marched across mine-strewn battlefields in the long war between Iran and Iraq in the 1980s, believing that they would go directly to heaven when they died because the ayatollahs had told them so. Some carried keys they had been given which were supposed to speed their entry.
Sermons, books, pamphlets, plays and paintings, then later radio, cinema and television can work powerfully on people to urge them into war.
It has almost always been the young men who volunteer or are taken first for war. They are physically fitter and more resilient than their elders and, as well, they have not yet developed the ties of family and community which might make them less willing to risk their lives.
Perhaps the existence in different cultures of war-making goddesses—Astarte, Athena, Kali, the Valkyrie—or the legends surrounding warrior queens such as Zenobia of Palmyra is a recognition of women’s potential. It is also a way of limiting it to divine or perhaps unnatural women. Some have fought as women but many disguised themselves as men, including Deborah Sampson, who was in the American War of Independence, and Lizzie Compton and Frances Hook in the American Civil War, who kept reenlisting when their identities were discovered.
Among the nomadic horse-riding warrior peoples from the steppes whom the Greeks called Scythians women appear to have been the equals of men, even when it came to fighting, and in death they lie with their weapons. Perhaps as many as 37 percent of Scythian burials are of women warriors. Tombs of Viking women warriors from a later period have been found as well.
We remember such women warriors because they have been so rare in history. When women have been active participants in war, it has more often been as mistresses or wives accompanying their men, as nurses, cooks or purveyors of food or sex. The Spanish army in the Netherlands in the sixteenth century had 400 mounted prostitutes and another 400 on foot. In the American Civil War, the women who accompanied the Union general Joseph Hooker’s Army of the Potomac generated a new word for prostitutes.
The French army long had them as a matter of course.
A Spanish force besieging the Dutch town of Bergen-op-Zoon in 1622 was, said a local, “such a small army with so many carts, baggage horse, nags, sutlers, lackeys, women, children, and a rabble which numbered far more than the army itself.” The authorities often tried to limit the numbers, but until armies could provide their own supplies they were forced to allow the private suppliers. Moreover, it was almost impossible to prevent desperate women from following the armies; if their men abandoned them they and their children would probably die. If the men themselves died in battle or of disease the women would have to find other husbands or protectors as quickly as possible.
While women have moved into other formerly male spheres in the twentieth century, armed forces have been slow to accept them as equals and use them in combat. The reluctance, or perhaps it is more accurate to call it resistance, has drawn on various arguments: that women are by nature nurturers, not warriors; that their presence on the battlefield might be bad for discipline as the men in their unit try to protect them; or that they are physically and temperamentally unfitted for the rigors of war.
Or perhaps what really matters is that men fear that admitting women will destroy a cozy club. American male marines, said a woman officer, felt that the presence of women would make it impossible for them any longer to “fart, burp, tell raunchy jokes, walk around naked, swap sex stories, wrestle and simply be young men together.
American women going into the Marines, perhaps the toughest of all the services, have encountered hostility and misogyny, even sexual abuse. And often hostility has come from society at large.
[ A female friend in the Navy said her objection to not being allowed to fight was that combat pay was 3 times greater than the pittance she was paid, yet she was still at risk of losing her life ]
In the Second World War a whispering campaign accused members of the American Women’s Army Corps (the WACs) of being little better than prostitutes. Many of the women warriors Alexievich spoke to found that when they came home women who had not fought accused them of going off to the front to chase men. “We know what you did there!
Even the Nazis, who had made such play of Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen, church) as women’s proper sphere, found they had to call them into service in the Second World War. By 1945 there were 500,000 women in the German armed forces in support roles. There were probably double that number in the Soviet forces. The Soviet authorities had always talked in peacetime about the equality of men and women (although the reality was rather different), but it was the devastating losses of men suffered during the German invasion that brought women into the armed forces, many of them as volunteers. Soviet women were at the front as medical staff but also as combatants, anti-aircraft gunners, partisans behind the German lines, infantry, tank crew and pilots. The Soviet air force had three all-women units of which the most famous was a bomber regiment nicknamed by the Germans the “night witches.
Since 1945 women have continued to fight in guerrilla wars against foreign occupiers or their own governments but when the fighting has stopped their contributions have often been downplayed or written out of the history. When the Sandinistas won in Nicaragua in 1979 most women were demobilized or moved to women-only units. After the Algerian War of Independence, the women who fought were not given pensions.
If men’s views on women as warriors are ambivalent so too are women’s. Successive waves of feminists have been uncomfortable with discussion of women fighting, preferring to see war as something men do.
Far more than women, men learn to fear being cowards. Being accused of behaving like a woman carries connotations of emotionalism and weakness. In military training, even today in modern societies, sergeants and officers shame new recruits by calling them “pussy” or “girl.” So for women to fight alongside men threatens to undermine notions of what it is to be a man.
“These guys were raised to think that girls were weaker and inferior, and put all their identity and manhood in what they do. So when these guys see women in the field, they panic, thinking, ‘Oh my God, what does that make me?’
During the left-wing government of Salvador Allende in Chile, some of his conservative women opponents threw corn at the military because they were “chickens” afraid to remove him from office.
The most important thing for the Duke of Wellington was not that his officers could read a map or understand how a gun worked; it was that they should be brave. Before 1914 English public schools, their families and their friends taught that lesson to middle- and upper-class boys like Grenfell and his cousins: they were to learn to keep their upper lips stiff and their emotions well under control. If death came for them they must face it bravely.
In great struggles like the First and Second World Wars it was almost unthinkable not to go when everyone about was enlisting and when civilians looked askance at men of military age who were not in uniform.
War can offer adventure; it has also been a business, often a very profitable one. Mercenaries, free lancers as they were once known after their weapons, or guns for hire, have an ancient and frequently dishonorable history. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries bands of armed men roamed Italy, hiring themselves out to prosperous city-states for their struggles with their neighbors. The men, the condottieri, came with their own weapons and armor and usually fought for as long as they were paid. If the funds did not come for some reason, they were quite capable of stopping in the middle of a campaign, even during a battle, and holding their employer to ransom. When campaigning, which usually took place in the dry summer months, finished, the condottieri often roamed around the countryside helping themselves to whatever they could lay their hands on.
Machiavelli loathed the mercenaries as dangerous parasites on the body politic and urged Italian rulers to institute militia made up of civilians who would be imbued with the right sorts of virtues and have true loyalty to their city and, equally important, be well disciplined and well trained. The challenge, he discovered, and it is a perennial one, is how to take civilians—farmers, shoemakers, office clerks or schoolteachers—and make them into a cohesive body of troops, prepared to obey orders and endure hardship, and be ready to kill and be killed. The Romans, he went on, conquered the world because they were continually training their troops, they maintained strong discipline and they took the arts of war seriously:
Taking off civilian clothes and putting on uniforms, standardized haircuts and living in barracks all mark the passage from one world to another. Old loyalties, to family, friends or communities, must be superseded by newer ones.
Military discipline has always depended in large part upon fear of punishment, from being confined to barracks to execution. From the ancient Greeks to the Iroquois, the military have used the gauntlet, with the victim running between his fellows as they strike at him. Prussian officers beat their men with the flats of their swords, while the Spanish used the ramrods from their muskets. For centuries the British army and navy used the cat-o’-nine-tails, which could lay a man’s back open. Failure to obey orders, losing one’s weapon and desertion are all a threat to order and unity and that is particularly dangerous in battle.
In 1941 William McNeill, a young American who had been drafted, along with millions of others, encountered another, equally ancient way that the military make individuals into soldiers.
“Words are inadequate to describe the emotion aroused by the prolonged movement in unison that drilling involved.” He felt, he recalled, a sense of well-being and pleasure at being part of a collective ritual with his fellow soldiers. Marching became an end in itself: “Moving briskly and keeping in time was enough to make us feel good about ourselves, satisfied to be moving together, and vaguely pleased with the world at large. McNeill eventually wrote a book about the importance of what he named “muscular bonding.” Drill and discipline together create the warriors who will obey orders and perform tasks together like trained athletes and dancers even in the most difficult of circumstances.
Having a clear task, as sailors do on their ships, for example, can keep panic at bay. Training and discipline also make the military do what is unnatural in risking their own lives and taking those of others. When discipline and training fail and units lose cohesion not only are they less of a threat to the enemy but they become vulnerable.
The 16th’s men did not know how to march or to wheel about as a body, something which is difficult in the best of times but especially on the battlefield, and their officers did not yet have either the authority or the knowledge to command them. When they were attacked on their flank through the tall stalks of corn by the toughened and experienced Confederate soldiers, there was chaos. The 16th’s officers, as inexperienced as the men, had no idea what to do. One said desperately to his colonel, “Tell us what you want us to do and we’ll try to obey you.
A strong sense of comradeship and a willingness to follow orders, which make men fight and endure together, can lead to systematic organized cruelty and evil. Ordinary Men is what the historian Christopher Browning entitled his study of a German police battalion that massacred Jews in Poland. Some were anti-Semites but most seem simply to have been obeying orders. The men were given the option to transfer out of the battalion if they found the task too hard; of 500, fewer than a dozen left.
Even the military from good democratic regimes with strong liberal values are capable of committing atrocities. One of the perennial challenges facing even those societies that deplore such wanton violence is to make their military into killers but controlled ones.
For much of history the records were made and kept by that minority who could read and write. We know what the knight on horseback or the captain on his poop deck thought or felt but not the humble foot soldier or seaman.
Many soldiers in the First World War, however, and this is true of many other wars as well, did not see combat at all or were on quiet fronts where there was little action. There were many different types of battlefields during the war, on the long Eastern Front, in the Balkans, the Middle East, Africa or Asia, or on the seas, and many different experiences of the war, and many styles for describing them. So whatever I say here is only a sampling of what exists and what can be said about the experience of war.
By the 20th century the seamen often never saw the enemy ships because they were over the horizon. The flying aces in the First World War often saw each other’s faces as they fought and even knew each other by name. They were seen by the troops struggling in the mass war below, and often saw themselves, as modern equivalents of knights in armor, giving war a human dimension. Air war has moved on so rapidly, however, that pilots are becoming obsolete and future aerial combat will be between machines. For the most part the heroes we have and the stories we know are largely from land war.
Do we have any hope of understanding or feeling what it is to be in combat with and against other human beings? The smells, sounds and sensations of the fighting, the presence of fear and of death, the madness that can grip the soldiers in attack, the panic of the defeated? Even while the goal is elusive we keep trying, because war is so much part of being human and of our history and development.
Muddle and confusion have also been part of war as long as it has existed. Battle is at once one of the most organized of human activities and one with the greatest likelihood of things going wrong.
In War and Peace Pierre Bezukhov wanders, bewildered, about the battlefield at Borodino. He has little idea of what is happening, whether the Russians or the French are winning or losing, and nor do the officers and men he encounters, and, as Tolstoy points out, or the generals on either side. Generals’ memoirs written after the event may tell the story of a grand strategic plan duly unfolding but the reality is much messier. Even the great commanders, whether it was Napoleon trying to find a hill or a tower which would let him see the battlefield, or General Norman Schwarzkopf in the First Gulf War with electronic eyes on the ground, can only peer into the confusion and try to gauge where the battle is going. In the midst of battle, orders can come too late, are impossible to carry out or never get there, and the recipients misunderstand or disobey.
For soldiers from the early modern age until the second half of the nineteenth century, war was literally in a fog. “The truth is,” one soldier wrote, “when bullets are whacking against tree-trunks and solid shot are cracking skulls like egg-shells, the consuming passion in the breast of the average man is to get out of the way.” Yet he got up and went forward when the order came. “In a second the air was full of the hiss of bullets and the hurtle of grape-shot. The mental strain was so great that I saw at that moment the singular effect mentioned, I think, in the life of Goethe on a similar occasion—the whole landscape for an instant turned slightly red. Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to. It was what had brought them to war in the first place, nothing positive, no dreams of glory or honor, just to avoid the blush of dishonor.
Even Julian Grenfell felt fear, as he admitted to his mother after his first action in France. He wanted to claim that he had enjoyed it, “But it’s bloody. I pretended to myself for a bit that I liked it; but it was no good; it only made one careless and unwatchful and self-absorbed.
While it is difficult to predict in peaceful conditions who will be brave and who won’t, training and discipline and sometimes leadership can help to carry the warriors through the most perilous of combats. And to cope with death soldiers have often made a joke of it, propping up enemy corpses with cigarettes in hand.
Religion or ritual has long been a part of battle in many different cultures. Over the centuries warriors have used dances, rituals and prayers to prepare for battle and have worn amulets or observed superstitions to keep them safe. Drink and drugs can have similar effects in helping warriors prepare for battle and deal with it afterward.
While combatants mourn the dead, they cannot afford to linger on their loss. “One suffers vicariously,” wrote Frederic Manning, “…with the inalienable sympathy of man for man.” One forgets quickly, he went on, and there is relief too in still being alive.
Ernst Jünger, author of Storm of Steel, one of the classic war memoirs, said the village where the survivors were billeted resounded with the sounds of cheerful reunions. “Such libations after a successfully endured engagement are among the fondest memories an old warrior may have. Even if ten out of twelve men had fallen, the two survivors would surely meet over a glass on their first evening off, and drink a silent toast to their comrades, and jestingly talk over their shared experiences.
In Burma in the Second World War George MacDonald Fraser was surprised and perhaps a bit shocked when, after a battle in which one of their number had died, none of the other soldiers in the section said much about it or the dead man. “They expressed no grief, or anger, or obvious relief, or indeed any emotion at all; they betrayed no symptoms of shock or disturbance, nor were they nervous or short-tempered. If they were quieter than usual that evening, well, they were dog-tired.” Yet, and again he was shocked, before they turned in, they spread out a groundsheet and placed on it all the dead man’s possessions and each took one. It was, Fraser came to understand, a way of remembering and honoring him.
Of course, being in a war is not only about fear, death or action; it is also about waiting around, boredom and grumbling about food, lice, the rats, weather or the senior officers.
Most soldiers carry a steel helmet, compress bandage in case hit, mosquito repellent, rations and water.
Day was for resting, night for work, whether bringing up supplies, repairing or building new trenches, tunneling or making raids into no-man’s-land. The full moon was not something to admire; it was an enemy. Fireworks in the skies were not festive but guides for death and destruction. The meanings of landscapes changed too: rivers and canals were no longer for transportation or for watering crops but defenses or obstacles to attack. Mountains, forests, hills and valleys were parts of battle plans, tactical goals to be captured or held.
Behavior that may be unacceptable in peacetime—swearing or blaspheming, for example—becomes normal in war. So does scrounging, or what in peacetime might be called stealing.
Sexual norms alter in wartime too. We think at once of rape, an act of dominance and destruction, but in war sex can also be a reaffirmation of life. The knowledge that death may be near makes peacetime prohibitions and restrictions pointless. “By most people’s standards we were immoral,” said an American soldier of the Second World War, “but we were young and could die tomorrow.” Emotional contact with another human being mattered, even if it came through paid sex.
What can also upset those who are fighting is the impression that many at home are profiting from the war. The ordinary soldiers in Manning’s novel or in Fraser’s memoir complain repeatedly about the high wages workers in mining, for example, or war industries are getting; about the profits manufacturers are making; or simply about how civilians might be enjoying themselves.
A Japanese soldier in China in the late 1930s is saddened when his commander orders wounded Chinese soldiers to be interrogated and then killed: “Even though they’re our enemies, they’re human beings with a soul like all other living things in this world. To use them as helpless tests for one’s sword is truly cruel.” A Soviet woman who was a medical assistant in a cavalry regiment during the Second World War recalled the remorse she felt when she shot two German soldiers: “One was such a handsome young German. It was a pity, even though he was a fascist, all the same…That feeling didn’t leave me for a long time. You see I didn’t want to kill. There was such hatred in my soul: why had they come to our land? But when you yourself kill, it’s frightening…”
Soldiers might be rough with each other but they could also be surprisingly gentle. “Friendship” seems too pallid a word and “love” too romantic, although there are elements of both in what combatants have tried to express down through the centuries. The best that English can do is “comradeship.
A Canadian general I was once interviewing for an educational radio program spoke about the excitement of war but only after I had turned off my tape recorder. It was, he said, like riding a very fast motorcycle. The knowledge that you could crash and die at any moment added to the thrill. Even more disturbing is the realization that some combatants actually enjoy having the power of life and death over another and take pleasure in killing and destruction.
When the BBC’s Lord Reith wrote a memoir in the 1960s about his time as a young British transport officer in the First World War, he had trouble finding a publisher because his memories did not fit well with the prevailing view that the war was loathed by everyone who was unfortunate enough to be in it. He was happy and thrilled to be in France. When he rode at night through Armentières, his reaction was: “How queer it all was. How vastly exciting. Exciting to be on a horse at all; on a horse in the dark streets of this deserted foreign town instead of, just at this time, setting out with one’s mother to go to evening service in Glasgow. He also noted in his memoir the beauties that war can produce; the daylight in the summer, the wild flowers in no-man’s-land, the blue sky flecked with the white of anti-aircraft shells bursting. Night fighting could be even more spectacular.
The nearness of death can make the world lovelier and more precious. You sit in a filthy paddy being shot at, wrote O’Brien, “but for a few seconds everything goes quiet and you look up and see the sun and a few puffy white clouds, and the immense serenity flashes against your eyeballs—the whole world gets rearranged—and even though you’re pinned down by a war you never felt more at peace. Do you know how beautiful a morning at war can be? Before combat…You look and you know: this may be your last. The earth is so beautiful…And the air…And the dear sun…
A conversation in a cellar in Berlin in April 1945 about what the Soviet troops might do shows what women civilians fear. Throughout history, in different times and different places, they have been warriors’ prizes, to be carried off and made part of their households or raped on the spot. In Germany alone in 1945 it is estimated that as many as 2 million women were raped by Soviet forces, some of them by multiple men, over a short period of time. The Soviet authorities made little effort initially to keep their men under control and allowed the widespread looting of alcohol stocks, which helped to release any inhibitions the soldiers might have felt.
Serb rapists took pleasure in telling Muslim women that they would give birth to future Serb warriors. Serb nationalist forces set aside women in “rape camps” or brothels and Serbian fighters carried out public rape to intimidate and gain information as well as to encourage non-Serbs to flee.
When the German siege of Leningrad started in September 1941, the city had a population of around 7 million; by the time it ended in January 1944, 1.75 million had managed to escape and 1 million had died. In the Second World War between 50 and 80 million civilians—we will never know with any certainty—may have died. The range is so broad partly because, as has happened so often before, records were often not kept or were destroyed and because of differences over what to count: deaths from weapons or from starvation and disease as well. In their sack of Nanjing in 1937, the Japanese may have killed up to 300,000, raped 20,000 and as well burned a third of the city’s buildings.
In the Second World War in Europe, Germany not only used prisoners of war as slave labor—against conventions which it had itself signed up to—but it forced some 4 to 5 million civilians mainly from the occupied Soviet Union but also from Poland, France and eventually Italy and elsewhere in Europe to labor for its war effort. The slave laborers were kept on starvation rations and abused. Those unable to work—“useless mouths”—were deliberately killed. Women were sterilized or forced to have abortions. Stalin deported various non-Russian minorities, from some 1.2 million Volga Germans, whose ancestors had come to Russia generations before, to 180,000 Crimean Tartars, on the grounds that they were collaborating with the enemy.
As a major seaport at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, Beirut has known war many times during its 5,000-year history. Its inhabitants believe that it has been destroyed and rebuilt at least seven times. Hittites, Phoenicians, ancient Greeks and Romans, Byzantines, Mameluks, Ottomans and latterly the French and Syrians have all coveted it.
The sacking of cities and the rape and slaughter of their inhabitants have a long and dishonorable history. Sometimes commanders try to control their soldiers; too often they order them to commit atrocities or simply encourage them to behave as they will to civilians.
The longer or more costly a siege is, the more likely it is that the citizens in a town after its surrender will suffer a dreadful fate, because the attacking soldiers see resistance as having prolonged the hardships that they, the attackers, have endured.
In war all armies, even friendly ones, march through peaceful countryside scooping up the available food as they go. Farm buildings go up in flames and cattle are driven off. Navies sink merchant shipping or blockade ports. Bombers drop their bombs on targets which might have some military use but often include housing, schools and hospitals. Civilians must survive as best they can, but disease and hunger will join their killers.
The deliberate targeting of civilians has long been a tactic of war, whether to squeeze resources out of them, force the enemy to stand and fight or weaken his will to carry on. For centuries besieging armies in Europe demanded treasure to spare towns and monasteries from destruction and the murder of their inhabitants.
The anarchy war so often brings opens the way for private entrepreneurs to prey on civilians as well. In the fourteenth century, during the Hundred Years War between the English and the French, private gangs calling themselves such names as Smashing Bars and Arm of Iron roamed across France extorting, brutalizing and murdering, much as armed gangs did in the Lebanese civil war and do today in Libya or parts of the Congo. Between 1356 and 1364 more than 450 places in France were obliged to pay ransom. Sometimes, like the Mafia or the Cosa Nostra, the armies and private gangs demanded regular protection money. In the 16th century in Germany and the Netherlands, householders could get a certificate (in German a Brandschatzung or fire tax) to show that they had paid up. The military authorities even had preprinted forms with blanks to be filled in for the amounts and dates. Failure to pay recurring taxes on time led to what was called “execution,” often the burning down of villages or even execution of locals. Even when invading armies obey their own rules, civilians are still seen as there to be exploited, their supplies and savings to be used and their houses appropriated for billeting soldiers.
In the Europe of the Middle Ages the knights, whose chivalric code has been so admired, used the chevauchée, an innocent word for a brutal tactic. True they rode, as the name suggests, but the chevauchée’s purpose was to take, burn or level everything—animals, crops, buildings, people—in their path. That is why in parts of France you still see fortified farmhouses and churches where the poor took refuge. Not that it always saved them, because buildings could be stormed or set aflame, as when 100 peasants were slaughtered when the English broke into the church at Orly. The noble warriors used the destruction, including that of peasants and serfs whom they saw as their inferiors, to force their opponents out of their fortified castles to defend their property. (And the looting and pillaging were ways of keeping the ordinary soldiers happy.)
Brutality against civilians is also intended to keep them submissive and teach them that resistance does not pay. In 1942 during their war against China, the Japanese adopted a similar policy in their Three Alls: Burn All, Kill All, Destroy All. Today Syrian government forces lay waste to rebel towns and villages.
Sherman viewed every Southern civilian, young, old, men and women, as an enemy. In pursuit of victory he singled out civilians in key Confederate states such as Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina for special treatment, expelling the inhabitants of selected towns and cities and setting buildings on fire, appropriating horses and cattle and destroying crops. The March to the Sea, through Georgia in 1864, left a trail of ruin some sixty miles wide across the state and in the following year South Carolina suffered the same fate.
The Europeans regarded the American Civil War with a certain amount of pity, as evidence that the Americans had not yet advanced in civilization as far as they so evidently had. In the decades before the First World War, Europeans increasingly thought that war was something that only less advanced and less civilized parts of the world still engaged in.
The Germans were not the only ones guilty of maltreating civilians. The British blockade of Germany, which included foodstuffs, remains controversial to this day. Recent work by a young British historian, Mary Cox, shows that poor children in Germany, whose parents could not afford to buy increasingly expensive food for them, were undernourished and their growth affected during and just after the war, when the British continued the blockade to put pressure on the Germans to agree to their peace terms.
When their armies withdrew in the face of German advances in 1915, the Russians not only used scorched-earth tactics but forced non-Russian minorities to leave. Some 300,000 Lithuanians, 350,000 Jews and 750,000 Poles were sent eastward into Russia. Jews were singled out for special attention and pogroms against them continued through the war in Russian-held territory.
All the belligerents used bombing of civilians to disrupt enemy war efforts and weaken the will to fight on. Ports, factories, railway marshaling yards, oil depots, dams and bridges were all targets, but so too were housing and city centers. Hermann Goering promised Hitler in the summer of 1940 that he could force Britain to sue for peace by bombing its airfields and key cities, especially London.
The aim was, said Harris in a top-secret memorandum in October 1943: The destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers, and the disruption of civilized community life throughout Germany…the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport and lives; the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale; and the breakdown of morale both at home and at the battle fronts by fear of extended and intensified bombing, are accepted and intended aims of our bombing policy. They are not by-products of attempts to hit factories. In 1943, 40,000 died in the German city of Hamburg, many in the firestorm that swept the city as a result of Allied bombing, and in 1945 perhaps a further 35,000 in Dresden.
The American bombing of Tokyo that same year with incendiary bombs (a weapon chosen deliberately because so many structures in the city were made of wood) destroyed sixteen square miles and left 80,000 to 100,000 dead and 1 million homeless.
Total war also blurred the distinction which had been established in the preceding centuries between the proper roles of combatants and noncombatants. Uniforms, hierarchy, discipline and rules were meant to mark out the military from civilians. The former had the right to use force; the latter did not. But what happened when civilians took up arms or resisted armed invaders? Did the rules of war apply to them or not? Could and should such civilians be punished—as General Sherman did in the American South, for example? Questions like these were part of larger and continuing attempts to control and regulate war, but they also point to the increasing importance of civilians in war.
Before the modern age, civilian support for war was not something rulers cared much about, but with the appearance of nationalism and the growing complexity and demands of war, civilians—their approval and their labor—became increasingly important to the war effort.
The International Red Cross, founded in the mid-nineteenth century, could look after the military or victims of war, raise money for soldiers’ families, provide and staff hospitals for the wounded, or buy bonds to finance the war effort. Women, the young and the old could take on jobs to free men for the front or help the authorities by volunteering to monitor blackouts or watch for fires. Conversely, when the public, or enough of them, withdraw their support for wars, as they did in Russia in 1917, in Germany in 1918 and in the 1960s and 1970s in the United States during the Vietnam War, it is difficult if not impossible for governments to fight on.
Although the Nazis had suppressed communism, much of Party activity had simply gone underground and communist organization, with its firm hierarchy and self-contained cells, proved highly adaptable to resistance activities. The growing resistance networks, communist and non-communist alike, helped Allied airmen and soldiers escape; provided valuable intelligence, including plans for parts of the Atlantic Wall erected by the Germans to deter Allied landings and detailed information about Axis troop strengths, organization and movements; and carried out sabotage in factories, along railway lines and of telegraph and phone lines.
In her memoir Hour of the Women Fritz-Krockow describes how she and her mother and the maid took over from her stepfather and the other nobly born men of the district. She dealt with the Soviets, bribed officials, scavenged and stole to survive because the men could not: “When it came to ducking your head and crawling on all fours to pick the spinach you needed so as not to starve—with no room for honor and duty—that was where they failed. Such tasks they left to us. Her stepfather was in an improvised prison camp in the Soviet zone. She located him and told him through the barbed wire that she had wire cutters and train tickets to the West. At first he refused to leave, on the grounds that he had given his word as a gentleman and an officer that he would not escape. It was only when she claimed not to know how to travel by herself that he agreed to come. Not surprisingly, when they were safely reestablished in the West she found she could not go back to the old relationship of dependency and submissiveness to the men in her family. The anonymous woman in Berlin has a similar reaction.
She now sees men as the weaker sex, miserable and powerless: “Deep down we women are experiencing a kind of collective disappointment. The Nazi world—ruled by men, glorifying the strong man, is beginning to crumble, and with it the myth of ‘Man.’ ” She sees defeat in war as the defeat of the male sex.
War has a way of upending traditional roles and expectations. In Renaissance Europe women in besieged cities were expected to join in their defense. During an 18-month siege of the Italian city of Siena between 1552 and 1553 all women, rich and poor alike and between 12 and 50, were issued with baskets and spades or picks. When the order was cried through the streets, the women were to leave their households and go to work on the city walls. The more total the war, the greater the demands on women’s labor and skills.
In 1877, when a conflict broke out between Russia and the Ottoman Empire, Von Suttner saw for herself what war could mean and increasingly devoted her considerable energies to attempting to abolish it. Von Suttner, trailed by her husband, moved westward and became something of a celebrity, devoting her time and her pen to the cause of peace. In 1889 she published her most famous novel, Lay Down Your Arms. Overwrought and overwritten, with an improbable plot, its fervent antiwar message nevertheless resounded in a Europe which was becoming increasingly aware of the great destructive capacities unleashed by the Industrial Revolution and the growth of nationalism. Von Suttner met with statesmen including Theodore Roosevelt to beg them to bring an end to war and she also developed a strong partnership with Alfred Nobel, the Swedish industrialist. An engineer and inventor, Nobel had developed new and powerful explosives initially for mining. Armed forces around the world, however, had been quick to see their potential for better and more deadly weapons. As Nobel’s fortunes had grown so had his guilty conscience. He wished, he said, that he could develop a weapon of such “frightful efficacy for wholesale destruction” that war would become unthinkable. Von Suttner persuaded him rather to endow a prize for peace and, since she spent extravagantly, then lobbied shamelessly to receive it. Even pacifists such as von Suttner were prepared to work on developing laws for the making and conduct of war in the hopes that, one day, human beings would come to realize that violence no longer had a place in their affairs.
In 1913 John Reed, a young Harvard graduate already making a name for himself as a radical muckraking journalist, spent four months with the rebel Mexican leader Pancho Villa. Reed happened to show him a pamphlet with the latest rules of war which had been agreed at the Hague Conference of 1907. Villa, reported Reed, spent hours going over it: “It interested and amused him hugely.” Villa wanted to know more about the conference and whether there had been a Mexican representative there. Above all he found the whole endeavor absurd: “It seems to me a funny thing to make rules about war. It is not a game. What is the difference between civilized war and any other kind of war?” Villa had put his finger on one of the several paradoxes that confront us when we think about war. How can we talk at all about controlling and managing something where violence is the tool and the domination, if not the total destruction, of the enemy the goal? Yet that has not stopped us from trying repeatedly to do so over the millennia.
Like ants with their nests, we laboriously build up a more or less agreed structure only to see it kicked apart by the heavy foot of war.
The Old Testament is filled with references to the Israelites fighting a righteous war against their enemies. He must kill the Amalekites, God tells King Saul, “men and women, infant and suckling.” God himself, says the Book of Exodus, is “a man of war.
The thinkers of the classical world around the Mediterranean started the process, which has gone on by fits and starts, of disentangling law, ethics and morality from religion in thinking about war. For the Greeks and then the Romans a just war was one which was fought to redress a wrong or an injury. Furthermore, the great Roman orator and writer Cicero argued, war was only permissible when all other means of maintaining peace had been exhausted. “There are two types of conflict,” he said, “the one proceeds by debate, and the other by force. Since the former is the proper concern of a man, but the latter of beasts, one should only resort to the latter if one may not employ the former.
The conduct of the war itself should involve as little cruelty as possible and have as its aim peace. Plato, who grew up during the Peloponnesian War, argued that war ought to be fought knowing that the two sides will eventually have to be reconciled.
While feudal knights were still killing each other’s peasants and putting the inhabitants of besieged towns to the sword, for example, Islamic scholars had long been developing rules for how women and children should be treated in war.
The issues raised are not easy ones and have been debated for centuries and still are. What makes a war just and who has the right to wage it? And what principles, if any, should guide the way wars are fought and ended? When it comes to the conduct of war, the questions continue. When is it permissible to attack civilians? And how and which ones? How should prisoners of war be treated?
Even when we think we are making headway we find ourselves in a maze of contradictions. Why do we try and outlaw some weapons and regard others as lawful even though the function of both is to kill and maim? Killing by firebombing or flamethrowers is considered acceptable, but ever since the First World War poison gas or biological warfare has been widely regarded as beyond the pale, even by those who use them.
It is all right, says the Old Testament Book of Deuteronomy, for you, as a victorious man, to carry away a woman if you like her and will make her your wife. But, the passage goes on, “if thou have no delight in her, then thou shalt let her go whither she will; but thou shalt not sell her…for money, thou shalt not deal with her as a slave.
Like so many others before 1914, Carnegie was far too optimistic. As in earlier times, the exigencies of war tore holes in the web of laws and conventions intended to contain it. Whether the Germans in Belgium, the Austrians in Serbia or the Russians in Galicia, the occupiers terrorized and brutalized local populations during the First World War. The actions of the British in Iraq in the early 1920s, where the new tool of air power was used to bomb rebellious districts into submission, of the Italian and German air forces in the 1930s in Spain during the Civil War or of the Japanese in China after 1937 demonstrated that, as much as the international community might deplore attacks on civilians in general and on their resistance in particular, the powers ignored international agreements when it suited them.
Making the laws is one thing; enforcement another. Nations have police forces, courts and prisons. Those who break the law can be judged and punished. The international order so far has only achieved the beginnings of such a system and recent history is full of examples of nations breaking the laws of war when it suits them and they think they can get away with it. Before 1939, Germany had signed up to the various protocols about treating prisoners of war and the Nazis did observe them in the West with peoples they considered their racial equals, such as the British or the French. In the East, however, where the German forces were dealing with Poles or Russians, who, according to Nazi ideology, were racial inferiors, they allowed themselves a free hand to brutalize and murder their prisoners. Even democratic regimes have found that, when defeat is imminent or victory just out of reach, it is tempting, even necessary, to bend the rules. After all, it can be dangerous to fight with one hand tied behind your back.
The British and the Americans overcame their initial reluctance and used mass bombings of civilians in the Second World War to try to hasten its end and spare the lives of their own citizens.
Yet we continue to hope, as people have done through the centuries, that we can do more than control war and mitigate its effects—that we can abolish it altogether. In Europe’s Middle Ages the Church tried repeatedly to impose the Peace of God and outlaw war, except for the holy cause of the Crusades. From the tenth century to the twelfth bishops called on local nobles to attend councils where they would take vows not to plunder local churches and monasteries, hurt unarmed priests or steal from peasants. The list got longer with time: crimes came to include attacking merchants or someone on the way to or from church, or uprooting vines. In the eleventh century the Church also attempted to forbid fighting on certain days: for example, from the end of the evening prayers, Vespers, on Wednesdays until sunrise the following Monday, or during sacred seasons in the Christian calendar such as Easter and Christmas. Understandably, there was much popular enthusiasm for the Church’s measures, but the nobles and their retainers kept on their lawless ways even under threat of excommunication. The Church also tried, with some success, to direct noble violence outward, toward the Crusades. While religions have, like the medieval Church, a mixed record when it comes to war, certain sects have produced more than their share of antiwar activists. After the Napoleonic Wars, British dissenters and evangelicals established the Society for the Promotion of Permanent and Universal Peace and Quakers and Mennonites have been active in antiwar movements up until the present.
The nineteenth century, with its evident signs of material progress, especially in Europe and the Americas, gave rise to hopes that there would be a similar transformation of the moral nature of humanity. By 1914 many Europeans had come to think of war as obsolete, something that only the less civilized did. Looking back on his childhood, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig recalled, “People no more believed in the possibility of barbaric relapses, such as wars between the nations of Europe, than they believed in ghosts and witches.
There appeared to be sound economic arguments against war as well. As the British journalist Norman Angell pointed out in his wildly popular The Great Illusion, war no longer made economic sense. In the past nations had fought each other for loot; in the modern world they got what they needed at much less cost through trade and investment.
The nations of the early twentieth century were so economically interdependent that a war would hurt even the most powerful among them. And that interdependence should be encouraged. Free trade was not just good for all, it brought good. The world was being knitted together before 1914 in other ways too, through travel—the second half of the nineteenth century saw both mass tourism and mass movements of migrants—and by the growth of international organizations, from the International Committee of the Red Cross to the Inter-Parliamentary Union.
When Tsar Nicholas II suggested the first disarmament conference in The Hague, his fellow heads of state and their ministers were not particularly enthusiastic. “Conference comedy,” said the Kaiser, and Edward VII called the idea “the greatest nonsense and rubbish I ever heard of.” The public felt otherwise (a petition in favor of disarmament in Germany, for example, got over 1 million signatures) and so the powers agreed to send delegations to the Netherlands. The German one, which included a professor who had just written a pamphlet condemning the whole peace movement, was under orders to oppose any measures that would impede Germany’s ability to wage war. The British, whose delegation included Admiral Jacky Fisher, who was in the midst of overhauling and strengthening the navy, refused to contemplate any measures that would affect their ability to use a blockade in war. The Americans expressed support for peace but said that their own forces were so small there was no point in limiting them.
And perhaps Tolstoy had a point when he criticized arms limitation as a dangerous diversion from the real cause, which was getting rid of war altogether. In War and Peace, on the eve of the Battle of Borodino, in which he will be mortally wounded, his hero Prince Andrey reflects on attempts to make war less cruel: But playing at war, that’s what’s vile; and playing at magnanimity and all the rest of it. That magnanimity and sensibility is like the magnanimity and sensibility of the lady who turns sick at the sight of a slaughtered calf—she is so kind-hearted she can’t see blood—but eats fricasseed veal with a very good appetite. They talk of the laws of warfare, of chivalry, of flags of truce, and humanity to the wounded, and so on. That’s all rubbish.
The League of Nations would provide sufficient collective security for its members to deter attacks by outsiders and sort out disputes among its members peacefully. If members refused to engage in discussion or submit to arbitration, Wilson believed, the solution was economic sanctions. “No, not war but something more tremendous than war. Apply this economic, peaceful, silent, deadly remedy and there will be no need for force.” Wilson also hoped that international public opinion would serve to isolate and shame aggressive nations.
In Britain the League of Nations Union had 400,000 members by the start of the 1930s. Some 11.5 million British men and women, nearly 40 percent of the adult population, voted in a peace ballot held between 1934 and 1935, providing huge majorities in support of the League and disarmament.
Nations signing their Pact of Paris promised to renounce war as an instrument for settling disputes among themselves. Eventually sixty-one nations signed up, including Germany, Italy and Japan. There was, as skeptics pointed out at the time, no way of enforcing the pact and the outbreak of war in 1939 showed that they were right to be skeptical.
In April 1945, just before Germany’s surrender but while the fighting continued in the Pacific, forty-six nations met in San Francisco to create the United Nations. It has not lived up to its promise of getting rid of war once and for all—that was always too much to hope for—but it has brokered a series of arms-limitation agreements and has helped through peacekeeping and peace-building and the activities of its various bodies.
The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union which followed the Second World War again focused humanity’s attention on the dangers of war. Novels, films and television programs such as On the Beach, Dr. Strangelove and The Day After gave terrifying pictures of the impact of nuclear war and the ease with which it might occur.
The great commanders, Alexander, Julius Caesar, Napoleon, MacArthur, Montgomery, had the ability of great actors to reach out and make their men feel that their commanders knew them, cared about them and were speaking directly to them. They grasped what Shakespeare had, that war is a sort of theater, and that theatrical gestures play their part.
Wilfred Owen wrote to his mother of the “very strange look” he had seen on the faces of soldiers in 1917 at the huge British base of Étaples: “an incomprehensible look, which a man will never see in England…It was not despair or terror, it was more terrible than terror, for it was a blindfold look, without expression, like a dead rabbit’s. It will never be painted, and no actor will ever seize it.
In war as in dance, music helps to train soldiers so that movements become automatic and they stay together, even in battle. I have often noticed while the drums were beating for the colors, that all the soldiers marched in cadence without intention and without realizing it. Nature and instinct did it for them.” Sunzi advised commanders to use gongs and drums, as well as banners, to keep their troops together while marching, maneuvering and charging and to focus their attention on one particular point.
High-pitched woodwinds and brass can carry over much battlefield noise. In the Napoleonic Wars, infantry regulations for the British army listed a variety of messages that could be sent by music: advance, retreat, even warnings about the approach of enemy cavalry or infantry.
A British veteran of Wellington’s Peninsular Wars against the French said that, when the French drummers beat the pas de charge at the Battle of Waterloo for the quickened step at the start of an attack, the sound was something “few men, however brave they may be, can listen to without a somewhat unpleasant sensation.
In peacetime, as they did in the decades in Europe before the First World War, the arts can prepare the public psychologically for war. Military bands playing in bandstands in parks all over Europe, naval reviews on summer days, horse guards jingling down avenues in their dress uniforms, these were entertainment for the masses but they were also powerful propaganda for war.
Yellow highlight | Location: 3,909 Popular fiction and magazines for boys largely wrote about the heroic deeds of the past. In Germany the most popular subjects were the nation’s great triumphs, whether the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in the first century A.D., when Germanic tribes defeated a Roman army, or victory over the French at Sedan in 1870.
The successful photographer Mathew Brady decided to make as complete a record of the American Civil War as possible. In 1862 Alexander Gardner took what became the most famous series in the collection at the battlefield of Antietam, the bloodiest day of the Civil War. In one photograph the crumpled bodies of soldiers stretch along an ordinary country road as it meanders into the distance. Does it make his photographs any the less moving if we know that he often staged his scenes, moving bodies about?
By the middle of the First World War a small Kodak camera cost a dollar and could fit in a uniform pocket. The authorities tried to censor the photographs as they did soldiers’ letters and the Canadians attempted to ban soldiers from carrying cameras, both unsuccessfully.
In Cambridge, near the railway station, a bronze statue of a striding soldier has a curiously short torso on long legs because the funds raised were not enough and the size had to be reduced. The obelisk was a popular shape for a memorial because it was cheap and easy to make. Eventually there were going to be 60,000 memorials in Britain and France alone.
The popular view today, and not just among the British, is that those who fought in the First World War were dupes, lured to the battlefields by irresponsible elites wielding slogans about fighting for civilization or king and country or the home fires. We should be careful about condescending to those who lived in the past. The dead had ideas and beliefs just as we do. We may not agree with them, but we should respect them. Those who went off to the First World War did think they were fighting for something worthwhile, more usually their loved ones than abstractions such as democracy or empire.
While the West has enjoyed peace at home the world has seen, depending on how you count them, between 150 and 300 armed conflicts since 1945. Some, such as the Korean or Iran–Iraq wars, have been, like many earlier ones, between states, but by far the greatest number have been inside states, whether struggles for independence against imperial rulers, as in Algeria or Indonesia, or civil wars.
And outside powers have frequently joined in, expressing the highest principles and acting all the while to further their own interests. As political structures, often fragile to begin with, splinter, war becomes an ever-shifting game, where the stakes are life and death, played between relatively sophisticated bodies such as states or religious movements at the one extreme and criminal gangs and mercenaries at the other.
Ending such wars, as Europe’s Thirty Years War in the 17th century showed and Afghanistan and Somalia show today, is a hard and long task. And the factors that produce war—greed, fear, ideology—will continue to work among us as they always have.
The impacts of climate change such as the struggle for scarce resources and the large-scale movements of peoples, the growing polarization within and among societies, the rise of intolerant nationalist populisms and the willingness of messianic and charismatic leaders to exploit these will provide, as they have in the past, the fuel for conflict.
We should not assume, however, that massive wars between states are no longer possible. One of the many wrong predictions in the 1990s was that the age of the nation-state, with its pronounced identity and strong central government, was disappearing in an increasingly internationalized world where borders were becoming meaningless. However, the United States, China, India and Russia have not disappeared into what Trotsky rudely called the dustbin of history, and they are continuing to plan and spend heavily on their war-making capacities against similarly prepared and armed foes. Their defense budgets continue to climb. China’s spending has gone up as much as eight times in the past two decades.
The United States allocates nearly two-thirds of its discretionary budget (those funds not mandated for paying the interest on national debt and entitlements such as social security) to defense. It spends as much as the next eight spenders combined, even though six are friendly nations or allies—Saudi Arabia, France, Britain, Germany, India and Japan—and only China and Russia, at the moment, can be seen as serious potential enemies.
The international agreement that space should not be militarized is fraying as the powers contemplate space-based weapons or countermeasures against each other’s communications satellites.
A whole other dimension for war has opened up, with dizzying speed, in cyberspace. As the world, its peoples and its things, from refrigerators to intercontinental ballistic missiles, have become linked through the internet, the possibilities of disruption have grown. And if war is also about undermining the faith of the enemy’s people in their own institutions and leaders or interfering in their internal politics, then cyberspace is an active battlefield there too.
Meanwhile the older battlefields are getting new and improved weapons which must be absorbed and countered. At one extreme are gliding missiles which fly at the speed of intercontinental ballistic missiles but have much greater accuracy. At the other are tiny self-propelling devices. The American army has ordered Black Hornet drones, at thirty-two grams about the same weight as an ordinary letter, for its soldiers to use for surveillance of their surroundings.