A History of Warfare

by John Keegan

  The purpose of war, Clausewitz said, was to serve a political end; the nature of war, he succeeded in arguing, was to serve only itself. By conclusion, his logic therefore ran, those who make war an end in itself are likely to be more successful than those who seek to moderate its character for political purposes. The peace of the most peaceful century in European history was held ransom to this subversive idea, which bubbled and seethed like the flux of an active volcano beneath the surface of progress and prosperity. The wealth generated by the century paid, on a scale never before witnessed, for the works of real peace — schools, universities, hospitals, roads, bridges, new cities, new workplaces, the infrastructure of a vast and benevolent continental economy. It also generated, through taxes, improved public health, higher birth rates, and a new and ingenious military technology, the wherewithal to fight true war, through the creation of the strongest warrior society the world had ever known. When in 1818 Clausewitz began the manuscript of On War, Europe was a continent disarmed. The Grand Army of Napoleon had melted away after his exile to St Helena, and those of his enemies had dwindled proportionately. Large-scale conscription had effectively been abolished everywhere, the arms industry had collapsed, generals were pensioners, veterans begged in the streets. Ninety-six years later, on the eve of the First World War, almost every fit European male of military age had a soldier’s identity card among his personal papers, telling him where to report for duty in the event of general mobilisation. The regimental depots bulged with spare weapons and uniforms to kit the reservists out; even the horses in the farmers’ fields were docketed for requisition should war come.

  At the beginning of July 1914 there were some four million Europeans actually in uniform; at the end of August there were twenty million, and many tens of thousands had already been killed. The submerged warrior society had sprung armed through the surface of the peaceful landscape and the warriors were to wage war until, four years later, they could wage it no more. And although this catastrophic outcome must not be laid at the door of Clausewitz’s study, we are nevertheless right to see Clausewitz as the ideological father of the First World War, just as we are right to perceive Marx as the ideological father of the Russian Revolution. The ideology of ‘true war’ was the ideology of the First World War’s armies; and the appalling fate that those armies brought upon themselves by their dedication to it may be Clausewitz’s enduring legacy.

  Yet Clausewitz was not merely an ideologist but also a historian, to whose hand there lay available much else besides his own experience as a regimental officer in a monarchical army and its peremptory treatment by the soldier-citizens of revolutionary France. Reflecting at the end of the 1820s on the whirlwind events of his youth, he ascribed them to

  the people’s new share in the great affairs of state; their participation, in turn, resulted partly from the impact that the Revolution had on the internal conditions of every state and partly on the danger that France posed to everyone. Will this always be the case in the future? From now on will every war in Europe be waged with the full resources of the state, and therefore have to be fought only over major issues that affect the people? Or shall we again see a gradual separation taking place between government and people? Such questions are difficult to answer …22

  Good historian though he was, Clausewitz allowed the two institutions — state and regiment — that circumscribed his own perception of the world to dominate his thinking so narrowly that he denied himself the room to observe how different war might be in societies where both state and regiment were alien concepts. That was not a mistake Moltke would make. He espoused the ideology of Clausewitz for purely utilitarian ends, knowing that war in the further corners of the earth — in Egypt and Turkey, for example, where he had soldiered in the service of the Sultan — could take forms utterly strange to his ideological master, and yet appropriate enough to, indeed indivisible from, the nature of the societies that practised them.

  In the first form, theocratic inhibitions on the waging of war were eventually overwhelmed by material necessity. This becomes apparent in the mysterious history of Easter Island. In the second, where warriordom assumed an extreme form in the Zulu kingdom, it was ambient social chaos that transformed the comparative benevolence of a primitive pastoral society. In the third, that of Mameluke Egypt, religious prohibitions on members of the same creed waging war on each other gave rise to the strange institution of military slavery. In the fourth, samurai Japan, an available improvement in the technical means of waging war was outlawed in the interests of preserving the existing social structure. Much of this history was, of course, closed to Clausewitz. Even if it was theoretically possible for him to have read something of the institutions of the Polynesian Easter Islanders and of samurai Japan from the literature of voyagers to the Pacific which aroused widespread interest in eighteenth-century Europe, he could have known nothing of the Zulus, whose rise to dominance in southern Africa was only beginning at the time of his death. Of the Mamelukes, nevertheless, he should have known a good deal, if only because they were among the most celebrated subjects of the Ottoman Turks whose empire, even in Clausewitz’s lifetime, remained a major military factor in the international politics of Europe. He would certainly have known of the Ottomans’ personal military slaves, the Janissaries, whose existence testified to the paramountcy of religion, rather than politics, in Turkish public life. His decision to ignore Ottoman military institutions flawed the integrity of his theory at its roots. To look beyond military slavery into the even stranger military cultures of the Polynesians, the Zulus and the samurai, whose forms of warfare defied altogether the rationality of politics as it is understood by Westerners, is to perceive how incomplete, parochial and ultimately misleading is the idea that war is the continuation of politics.

  WAR AS CULTURE

  Easter Island

  Easter Island is one of the loneliest places on earth, a dot in the southern Pacific more than 2000 miles from South America and 3000 from New Zealand, the nearest large land masses. It is also one of the world’s smallest inhabited places, a triangle of extinct volcanoes about seventy square miles in extent. Despite its isolation, it belongs firmly within the culture of Polynesia, a highly developed New Stone Age civilisation of the central Pacific which in the eighteenth century embraced the thousands of islands which lie between Easter Island, New Zealand and Hawaii, the three apices of the Polynesian triangle, distant from each other by thousands of miles in space and hundreds of years in date of original settlement.

  Polynesian civilisation was extraordinarily adventurous. Its European discoverers and early ethnographers could not at first believe that a people without a written language could have colonised such an enormous area — thirty-eight major archipelagos and islands spread over twenty million square miles of ocean; elaborate explanations, all false, were devised to deny that the Polynesian canoe sailors had achieved feats of navigation akin to those of Cook and La Pérouse. Polynesian culture remained, nevertheless, remarkably congruent: not only were the languages of widely separated islands evidently cognate, but the social institutions flourishing on Hawaii, New Zealand and Easter Island remained constant and startlingly similar.

  Polynesian society is theocratic in structure. Chiefs, who are believed to be descended from the gods, in turn deified or supernatural forefathers, also hold the office of high priest. As high priest the chief mediates between god and man to bestow on his people the fruits of the soil and the sea; his power of mediation — mana — entitles him to sacred rights (tapu or taboo) over land, fishing-grounds, their produce and much else that is good or desirable. Mana and taboo assured remarkably stable and peaceful societies in normal circumstances and in the happiest Polynesian islands theocracy safely regulated relations between chiefs and people, as well as among the clans that had descended from the original chief.23

  Yet there was never a Polynesian Golden Age. Even in the benevolent Pacific, circumstances were not always normal, if normality means that
resources were always sufficient to accommodate populations. Populations grew, though islanders regulated their numbers by birth control, infanticide and the encouragement of emigration, which they called ‘voyaging’. Times came when fertile land and productive fishing-grounds were fully exploited and no nearby or known island beckoned. Then serious trouble began. The word for a warrior, toa, is identical with that for the ironwood tree, from which clubs and other weapons were made — and used to settle the quarrels, over insults, property, women and succession to position, to which man is naturally prone. The mana of a chief had always been enhanced if he were a notable warrior. But in times of trouble warriors who were not chiefs broke taboo to seize what they needed or wanted, with disastrous effect on the Polynesian social structure. Sub-clans might become dominant and in extreme circumstances a clan might be driven from its territory altogether.

  The worst case was played out on Easter Island, and with particular deadliness. How the Polynesians, perhaps in the third century AD, had found the island, 1100 miles distant over open ocean from the next nearest settled place, remains a mystery. Find it they did, however, bringing with them the staples of island life, sweet potatoes, bananas and sugar cane. They cleared land under the three peaks, harvested fish and seabirds and founded settlements. About AD 1000 they also embarked on the most elaborate veneration of the theocratic principle found in the Polynesian world. Though the population of Easter Island seems never to have exceeded 7000 souls, it succeeded over the course of the next 700 years in carving and raising more than 300 giant statues, typically five times life-size, on extensive temple platforms. In the final stage of statue-raising on Easter Island, during the sixteenth century AD, the islanders also invented a script, which appears to have been used by priests to help memorise oral traditions and genealogies. This was the culmination of a civilised time in which the perceived power of the gods, mediated through living chiefs, imposed peace and order.

  Then something went wrong. Imperceptibly a growing population denuded the island’s environment. Forest clearance reduced rainfall, and the fields yielded less; it also reduced the yield of timber from which canoes were built, thus diminishing the harvest of the sea. Life on Easter Island started to become brutish. A new artefact appeared, the mata’a, a flaked obsidian spearhead of deadly effect.24 Warriors, called tangata rima toto, ‘the men with bloodied hands’, became dominant. The pyramid of clans descended from the founding chief coalesced into two groups, which from separate ends of the island warred incessantly. The paramount chief, descendant of the founder, became a symbolic figure, whose mana no longer impressed. In the course of social disintegration through warfare, the statues were systematically toppled, either as an insult to the mana of an enemy clan or as a token of rebellion by commoners against the chiefs whose mana had failed them. Eventually a bizarre new religion, utterly at odds with the stately theocracy of Polynesia, emerged: ‘the men with bloodied hands’ competed to be the first to find an egg of the sooty tern, thus winning chieftainship — for a year only.

  When the Dutch voyager Roggeveen landed on Easter Island in 1722, anarchy was already far advanced; by the end of the nineteenth century, degeneration — compounded by European slave-raiding and the diseases the Europeans had introduced — had reduced the population to 111 persons, who retained but the sketchiest oral traditions of their remarkable past. From what they told, and from the dramatic archaeological evidence, anthropologists reconstructed a doleful picture of Easter Island society in what they called its Decadent Phase. Not only did it show endemic warfare and betray signs of cannibalism; it also revealed the physical extent of the efforts some islanders made to escape from the effects of warfare altogether. Many of the natural caves and tubes in the lava had been closed with dressed stones taken from desecrated statue platforms, to make personal or family refuges, and at one end of the island a ditch had been dug to separate a peninsula from the mainland, surely a strategic defensive undertaking.

  Refuges and strategic defences constitute two of the three forms of fortification that military analysts recognise; only the third, the regional stronghold, is missing from Easter Island. Its absence does not denote a missing dimension of warfare that the Easter Islanders failed to practise. It is merely an index of how small the theatre of war was. Within the island’s tiny compass, the islanders appear to have taught themselves the full logic of Clausewitzian warfare by bloody experience. They certainly learnt the importance of leadership, which Clausewitz so emphasised; the existence of the entrenchment at the Poike peninsula suggests that some of them agreed with his dictum that the strategic defensive is the strongest form of warfare; they may even, given the extraordinarily sharp decline in their numbers during the seventeenth century, and the mass-production of the newly invented obsidian spearhead, have attempted Clausewitzian warfare’s crowning act, the decisive battle.

  Yet to what self-defeating purpose! Clausewitz may have believed that war is the continuation of politics. Politics, however, is practised to serve culture, and the Polynesians, in their wider world, had devised a culture as beneficent as any within which men have lived. Bougainville, when he arrived at Tahiti in 1761, proclaimed that he had found the Garden of Eden and his account of beautiful people living happily in a state of nature became so influential that it contributed to the cult of the ‘noble savage’ which nourished intelligent European society’s impatience with their own ordered but artificial eighteenth-century world. Out of that impatience grew the political dissent and Romantic ideology that together overthrew the kingly states in which the devotees of noble savagery had been raised.

  Clausewitz, in his exaltation of the dramatic act — decisive battle — and of the egotistic individual — the leader, Napoleon in particular — was as Romantic as any enemy of the ancien régime. In his dedication to king and regiment, however, he remained bound by mana and taboo to an extent of which he was quite unaware. In monarchical Europe, before the French Revolution, the regiment was a device for restraining the violence of warriors and harnessing it to the purposes of kings. Because Prussia, of which Clausewitz was a servant, was peculiarly disfavoured with the good things of this world, its greatest king, Frederick the Great, had encouraged his officers to practise warfare with a ruthlessness which exceeded the bounds other kings thought proper. The propagation of his mana, as it were, required a violation of taboo which fellow kings thought improper.

  Frederick, however, never put himself beyond the pale. He merely pushed warfare in the prevailing code to the limits of acceptable ruthlessness. Clausewitz, raised in a world in which royal mana and military taboos had been extinguished apparently for good, found the words to legitimise the new order. That it was no order at all, and that his philosophy of warfare was a recipe for the destruction of European culture, he failed to perceive altogether. How can he be blamed? The Easter Islanders, isolated in space and time from the larger, more benevolent Polynesian world, no doubt felt, had they been able to articulate the idea, that changed circumstances required a cultural revolution. They may even have invented a word equivalent to ‘politics’ to describe the ferment of loyalties which followed the succession to power of the annual finder of the first egg of the sooty tern. We cannot now say. The degenerate state to which the survivors of endemic warfare found by the first anthropologists had been reduced was not conducive to a measured analysis of the evolution through which their culture had passed. Nevertheless, there is this observation to be made. Clausewitzian warfare did not serve the ends of Polynesian culture. That culture, though it was not free, democratic, dynamic or creative in any of the Western senses of those words, nevertheless adjusted local means to chosen ends in a fashion almost perfectly adapted to the conditions of Pacific island life. Mana and taboo fixed a balance between the roles of chief, warrior and clansman, to the benefit of all three; and if their interrelationships can be called the ‘politics’ of Polynesian life, then war was not its continuation. War, when it came in a ‘true’ form to that corner of P
olynesia called Easter Island, proved to be a termination first of politics, then of culture, ultimately almost of life itself.

  The Zulus

  The Easter Islanders played out their deadly, self-invented experiment in total warfare unseen by the outside world. The Zulus, by contrast, were drawn through the military revolution their society underwent at the beginning of the nineteenth century into a highly coloured confrontation with Western civilisation, in a tale which has grown with the telling. Its beginnings were a little too late for Clausewitz to have been aware of the drama unfolding in southern Africa — as he ought to have been of the story of the Mamelukes which comes next. Its culmination has become one of the great popular history stories of modern times, and a potent element in the myth of the Afrikaner people, in whose great marble shrine at Pretoria the figures of the Zulu warriors the Voortrekers fought are quite as idealised as those of the Boer heroes themselves. That is not surprising; the myth of the Afrikaners requires that their enemies should have been both noble and terrible and, in the course of their rise as a nation at the beginning of the nineteenth century until their catastrophic overthrow in the war of 1879, the Zulus became very terrible warriors indeed.

  In their origins the Zulus led a gentle, pastoral way of life. The Nguni people from whom they rose, cattle-herders who had migrated to the south-east African coast from the distant north in the fourteenth century, were described by shipwrecked Europeans three centuries later as ‘in their intercourse with each other … very civil, polite and talkative, saluting each other, whether male or female, young or old, whenever they meet’.25 They were kind to strangers, who might travel in perfect safety among them, as long as they took the precaution not to carry iron or copper, which were so rare that they gave ‘inducement to murder’, and they were notably law-abiding, particularly in personal relations. Slavery was unknown, revenge had ‘little or no sway’, and disputes were referred to the chief, whose word was accepted ‘without a murmur’. Chiefs themselves were subject to law, and might be fined by their counsellors or have their decisions overturned by a higher chief.