by John Keegan
Yet despite the lengths to which domestication went, the Cossacks were always spared the indignity of paying the ‘soul tax’, which branded a Russian subject a serf, and they were specifically exempt from conscription, which the serfs regarded as a sentence of death. Indeed, to the very end of tsardom the Russian government preserved the principle of treating with the various Cossack hosts as if they were free-standing warrior societies, in which responsibility to answer the call to arms fell on the group, not its individual members. Even at the outbreak of the First World War the Russian war ministry looked to the Cossacks to provide regiments, not heads, a perpetuation of a system, part feudal, part diplomatic, part mercenary, that in a variety of forms provided states with ready-trained military contingents almost from the beginning of organised warfare.
The Cossacks whom Clausewitz knew were much nearer to the free-booting marauders of original Cossackdom even than the dashing rovers whom Tolstoy was later to romanticise in his early novels, and their burning of the outskirts of Moscow in 1812, which led to the conflagration of the capital, was wholly in character. The Cossacks remained cruel people and the burning was not the cruellest of their acts, though cruel enough — it left several hundred thousand Muscovites homeless in the face of a sub-Arctic winter. In the great retreat that followed, the Cossacks showed a cruelty which stirred in their western European victims a reminder of the visitations of the steppe peoples, pitiless, pony-riding nomads whose horsetail standards cast the shadow of death wherever their hordes galloped, visitations that lay buried in the darkest recesses of their collective memory. The long columns of the Grand Army that straggled knee-deep through the snow toward the hope of safety were stalked just out of musket-shot by waiting squadrons of Cossacks who swooped whenever weakness overcame a sufferer; when a group succumbed it was ridden down and wiped out; and when the Cossacks caught the remnants of the French army that had failed to cross the Beresina River before Napoleon burned the bridges, slaughter became wholesale. Clausewitz told his wife that he had witnessed ‘ghastly scenes … If my feelings had not been hardened it would have sent me mad. Even so it will take many years before I can recall what I have seen without a shuddering horror.’7
Yet Clausewitz was a professional soldier, the son of an officer, raised to war, a veteran of twenty years of campaign and a survivor of the battles of Jena, Borodino and Waterloo, the second the bloodiest battle Napoleon ever fought. He had seen blood shed in gallons, had trodden battlefields where the dead and wounded lay strewn close as sheaves at harvest, had had men killed at his side, had a horse wounded under him and had escaped death himself only by hazard. His feelings ought indeed to have been hardened. Why then did he find the horrors of the Cossack pursuit of the French so particularly horrible? The answer is, of course, that we are hardened to what we know, and we rationalise and even justify cruelties practised by us and our like while retaining the capacity to be outraged, even disgusted by practices equally cruel which, under the hands of strangers, take a different form. Clausewitz and the Cossacks were strangers to each other. He was revolted by such Cossack habits as riding down stragglers at the point of a lance, selling prisoners to the peasants for cash and stripping the unsaleable ones to the bare skin for the sake of their rags. It probably inspired his contempt that, as a French officer observed, ‘when we faced up to them boldly they never offered resistance — even [when we] were outnumbered two to one’.8 Cossacks, in short, were cruel to the weak and cowardly in the face of the brave, exactly the opposite pattern of behaviour to that which a Prussian officer and gentleman had been schooled to observe. The pattern was to persist. At the battle of Balaclava during the Crimean War of 1854 two Cossack regiments were sent forward to oppose the charge of the Light Brigade; a watching Russian officer reported that, ‘frightened by the disciplined order of the mass of [British] cavalry bearing down on them, [the Cossacks] did not hold, but, wheeling to their left, began to fire on their own troops in an effort to clear their way of escape.’ When the Light Brigade had been driven out of the Valley of Death by the Russian artillery, ‘the first to recover’, reported another Russian officer, ‘were the Cossacks, and, true to their nature, they set themselves to the task in hand — rounding up riderless English horses and offering them for sale’.9 The spectacle would no doubt have reinforced Clausewitz’s contempt, strengthening his conviction that the Cossacks did not deserve the dignity of the title ‘soldiery’; despite their mercenary conduct, they could not even be called proper mercenaries, who are normally faithful to their contract; Clausewitz would have probably considered them mere scavengers, who made a living on the offal of war but shrank from the butchery.
For the real work of war in the age of Clausewitz was butchery. Men stood silent and inert in rows to be slaughtered, often for hours at a time; at Borodino the infantry of Ostermann-Tolstoi’s corps are reported to have stood under point-blank artillery fire for two hours, ‘during which the only movement was the stirring in the lines caused by falling bodies’. Surviving the slaughter did not mean an end to butchery; Larrey, Napoleon’s senior surgeon, performed two hundred amputations in the night after Borodino, and his patients were the lucky ones. Eugène Labaume described ‘the interior of the gullies’ that crisscrossed the battlefield: ‘almost all of the wounded by a natural instinct had dragged themselves thither to seek protection … heaped on top of each other and swimming helplessly in their own blood, some called on passers-by to put them out of their misery.’10
These slaughterhouse scenes were the inevitable outcome of a way of warmaking that provoked peoples whom Clausewitz found savage, like the Cossacks, to flight when it threatened to involve them but, if they had not witnessed it, to laughter when they had it described to them. European drill, when first demonstrated by Takashima, the Japanese military reformer, to some high-ranking samurai in 1841, evoked ridicule; the Master of the Ordnance said that the spectacle of ‘men raising and manipulating their weapons all at the same time and with the same motion looked as if they were playing some children’s game’.11 This was the reaction of hand-to-hand warriors, for whom fighting was an act of self-expression by which a man displayed not only his courage but also his individuality. The Greek klephts — half-bandits, half-rebels against Turkish rule whom their sympathisers, the French, German and British Philhellenes, many of them ex-officers of the Napoleonic wars, tried to instruct in close-order drill at the outset of Greece’s war of independence in 1821 — also reacted with ridicule, but in disbelief rather than contempt. Their style of fighting — a very ancient one, encountered by Alexander the Great in his invasion of Asia Minor — was to build little walls at a point of likely encounter with the enemy and then to provoke the enemy to action by taunts and insults; when the enemy closed, they would run away. They lived to fight another day, but not to win the war, a point that they simply could not grasp. The Turks also fought in ethnic style: theirs was to rush forward in a loose charge with a fanatical disregard for casualties. The Philhellenes argued that unless the Greeks stood up to the Turks they would never win a battle; the Greeks objected that if they stood in the European fashion, breasts bared to the Turkish muskets, they would all be killed and so lose the war in any case.
‘For Greeks a blush — for Greece a tear’ wrote Byron, the most celebrated of the Philhellenes. He had hoped with other lovers of liberty ‘to make a new Thermopylae’ at the side of the Greeks. His discovery that they were invincible only in their ignorance of rational tactics depressed and disillusioned him, as it did other European idealists. At the heart of Philhellenism lay the belief that the modern Greeks were, under their dirt and ignorance, the same people as the ancient Greeks. Shelley, in his preface to Hellas — ‘The world’s great age begins anew/The golden years return’ — put this belief in its most succinct form: ‘The Modern Greek is the descendant of those glorious beings whom the imagination almost refuses to figure to itself as belonging to our kind, and he inherits much of their sensibility, their rapidity of conception
, their enthusiasm and their courage.’ But Philhellenes who shared a battlefield with Greeks not only rapidly abandoned their belief in the common identity of ancients and moderns; among those who survived to return to Europe, ‘almost without exception’, writes William St Clair, the historian of Philhellenism, ‘they hated the Greeks with a deep loathing, and cursed themselves for their stupidity in having been deceived’.12 Shelley’s naively poetic proclamation of the courage of the modern Greeks was particularly galling. The Philhellenes wanted to believe that they would display the same tenacity in close-order, in ‘the battle to the death on foot’, as the ancient hoplites had done in their wars against the Persians. It was that style of fighting which, by devious routes, had come to characterise their own brand of warfare in western Europe. They expected at the least that contemporary Greeks would show themselves willing to re-learn close-order tactics, if only because that was the key to winning their freedom from the Turks. When they found that they would not — that Greek ‘war aims’ were limited to winning the freedom to persist in their klepht ways of cocking a snook at authority in their mountain borderlands, subsisting by banditry, changing sides when it suited them, murdering their religious enemies when chance offered, parading in tawdry finery, brandishing ferocious weapons, stuffing their purses with unhonoured bribes and never, never, dying to the last man, or the first if they could help it — the Philhellenes were reduced to concluding that only a break in the bloodline between ancient and modern Greeks could explain the collapse of a heroic culture.
The Philhellenes tried but failed to make the Greeks accept their military culture. Clausewitz did not try but would have failed to make the Cossacks accept his military culture. What he and they failed to see was that their own Western way of fighting, typified by the great eighteenth-century French Marshal de Saxe in his acute critique of the military shortcomings of the Turks and their enemies as marked by ‘l’ordre, et la discipline, et la manière de combattre’, was quite as much an expression of their own culture as the ‘live to fight another day’ tactics of the Cossacks and the klephts.13
In short, it is at the cultural level that Clausewitz’s answer to his question, What is war?, is defective. That is not altogether surprising. We all find it difficult to stand far enough outside our own culture to perceive how it makes us, as individuals, what we are. Modern Westerners, with their commitment to the creed of individuality, find the difficulty as acute as others elsewhere have. Clausewitz was a man of his times, a child of the Enlightenment, a contemporary of the German Romantics, an intellectual, a practical reformer, a man of action, a critic of his society and a passionate believer in the necessity for it to change. He was a keen observer of the present and a devotee of the future. Where he failed was in seeing how deeply rooted he was in his own past, the past of the professional officer class of a centralised European state. Had his mind been furnished with just one extra intellectual dimension — and it was already a very sophisticated mind indeed — he might have been able to perceive that war embraces much more than politics: that it is always an expression of culture, often a determinant of cultural forms, in some societies the culture itself.
WHO WAS CLAUSEWITZ?
Clausewitz was a regimental officer. That requires some explanation. A regiment is a unit of military force, typically a body of soldiers about a thousand strong. In eighteenth-century Europe, the regiment was an established feature of the military landscape and it survives intact into our own time; indeed, some existing regiments, notably in the British and Swedish armies, have continuous histories of some three centuries. Yet at its birth in the seventeenth century the regiment was not merely a new but a revolutionary constituent of European life. Its influence became as significant as that of autonomous bureaucracies and equitable fiscal authorities, and interwoven with them.
The regiment — semantically the word connects with the concept of government — was a device for securing the control of armed force to the state. The complex reasons for its emergence derived from a crisis which had developed two hundred years earlier in the relationship between European rulers and their providers of military service. Traditionally kings had depended for the raising of armies, when needed, upon landholders in the countryside, to whom local rights of subsistence and authority were devolved in return for their promise to bring armed men, in numbers proportionate to the grants of land held, and for a stated period, on demand. The system was in the last resort determined by the subsistence question: in primitive economies, where harvesting and distributing are constrained by difficulties of transport, armed men must be planted on the land, with rights over the harvest, if they are not to relapse into labouring status.
This feudal system was never neat, however — its varieties in place and over time defy categorisation — and rarely efficient. By the fifteenth century it had become very inefficient indeed. A condition approaching permanent warfare afflicted much of Europe, the result of both external threat and internal fractiousness, which the feudal armies could not suppress. Attempts to make armed forces more effective, by conceding greater independence to landholders in the worst-troubled areas or paying knights to serve under arms, only heightened the problem; the landholders declined to muster when called, built stronger castles, raised private armies, waged war in their own right — sometimes against the sovereigns. Kings had long supplemented feudal with mercenary force — when they could raise the money. In mid-fifteenth-century Europe, kings and the great landholders alike found their territory ravaged by mercenaries who had been called into service by offers of cash which had then dried up. Unpaid mercenaries became a scourge, sometimes as greatly feared as the intruders — Magyars, Saracens, Vikings — who had inaugurated the militarisation and castellation of Europe in the first place.
The problem was circular: to raise more soldiers as a means of restoring order was to risk adding to the number of marauders (écorcheurs as the French called them, scorchers of the earth); to shrink from restoring order was to condemn the tillers of the soil to rape and pillage. Ultimately a king of France, the country worst afflicted, took the plunge. Recognising that the écorcheurs had ‘become, despite themselves, military outcasts, yet hoping sooner or later to be recognised by the king or the great lords’, Charles VII ‘proceeded in 1445–6 not, as is sometimes said, to create a permanent army but to choose from the mass of available soldiers’ the best on offer.14 Mercenary companies with a uniform composition were formed and officially recognised as military servants of the monarchy, whose function would be to extirpate the rest.
The compagnies d’ordonnance, as Charles VII’s creations were called, were made up of infantrymen, whose social inferiority to the feudal cavalry put them at a military disadvantage, enhanced in turn by prevailing doubts about their physical ability to stand against cavalry on the battlefield. Some infantry, notably the populist Swiss, had already shown a capacity to do down mounted men with edged weapons alone; when effective handguns came into general use at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the moral point, as the military historian Sir Michael Howard has characterised it, was settled by technology for good.15 Thenceforward infantry consistently beat cavalry, which found itself marginalised on the battlefield, while continuing to insist on recognition of its ancient social standing. That social standing was, however, further and simultaneously undermined by the impact of gunpowder on the feudal cavalry chiefs’ strongholds. Battery by mobile artillery, a new weapon first effectively deployed by Charles VII’s successor, Charles VIII, spelt an end to the defiance of royal authority by lords with strong castles. The process began in the 1490s; by the early 1600s their descendants were pleased to accept colonelcies of infantry by royal favour.
Such colonelcies were attached to the ‘regiment’ — or command — of a collection of companies, the company itself having been proved by experience to be too small either to count on the battlefield or to attract, unless it were to a company of royal guards, a man of standing as commander. Thus regimental
colonels in most European armies were also proprietors, as were the chiefs of the mercenary units that continued to exist side by side with the new royal regiments well into the eighteenth century. Proprietors were paid a lump sum from the royal treasury, spent it as they chose on pay and uniforms, and usually sold the subordinate offices, captaincies and lieutenancies, to supplement their incomes; ‘purchase’ of commissions persisted in the British army until 1871.
These new regiments rapidly acquired a character different from that of the mercenary bands of late feudalism and the Wars of Religion, which had usually disbanded when funds dried up (unless, as happened to numbers of Italian city states, the hirelings took control of government). They became permanent royal — eventually national — institutions, often acquiring a fixed headquarters in a provincial city, recruiting in the surrounding area and drawing their officers from a coterie of associated aristocratic families. The Prussian 34th Infantry Regiment, which Clausewitz joined in 1792, at the age of eleven, was just such a regiment. Founded in 1720 and garrisoned at the Brandenburg town of Neuruppin, forty miles from Berlin, it had a royal prince as colonel; its officers were drawn from Prussia’s minor nobility, while the soldiers — conscripted for an indefinite term from the poorest in society — formed, with their wives, children and invalid comrades, more than half the town’s population.
A hundred years later, the whole of Europe would be dotted with such garrison towns, some giving a home to several regiments. At their worst such regiments resembled that of Anna Karenina’s lover, Vronsky, which Tolstoy depicts as a dandies’ club, officered by idlers and swells who cared more for their horses than their men.16 At their best, however, such regiments became ‘schools of the nation’, which encouraged temperance, physical fitness and proficiency in the three Rs. Clausewitz’s regiment was a forerunner of the latter sort. Its commander set up regimental schools to educate the young officers, to teach the soldiers to read and write and to train their wives in spinning and lace-making.