by John Keegan
the great aim of these fast-running warriors … was to chase straight on and never stop, only striking one blow at one man, so as to cripple him, so that those behind should be sure to overtake and finish him. It was not uncommon for one man, strong and swift of foot, when the enemy was fairly routed, to stab with a light spear ten or a dozen men in such a way as to ensure their being overtaken and killed.47
The Maoris might, by such methods, have gone far toward exterminating each other, had it not been that their warfare was limited in two ways. Materially, Maori fighting turned on the attack and defence of fortifications. The strength and number of Maori forts — at least 4000 have been found — reflects the power of their chiefs to organise communal labour among a population of forty tribes, numbering altogether between 100,000 and 300,000, and shows how politically developed their culture was. Militarily, however, the existence of the forts worked to spare the Maoris the worst of the warfare they practised among themselves. Built typically on hilltop sites, the forts incorporated extensive food-storage chambers, which allowed the occupants to survive depradation of their fields, and also strong palisades, deep ditches and high banks. Since the Maoris had apparently no instruments of siege warfare, a resolute defence could hold attackers at bay until their campaigning stores ran out.48
Culturally, Maori warfare limited itself because of its very simple objects. Anthropologists have satisfied themselves that the Maoris went to war in order to redistribute land from the weaker to the stronger. The Maori war plan, however, was to eat the fallen enemy (except for their heads, which were kept as trophies). This disparity between what the subjects of ethnography were doing and what anthropologists concluded was the deeper purpose of their actions provides the basis for some of the angriest academic debates. For military historians, it seems clear that the Maori military culture was one of revenge. Male children from the earliest age were taught that insult, to say nothing of robbery or murder, was unforgivable, and the Maori were implacable in storing up a memory of grievance, sometimes from generation to generation, that was satisfied when the enemy was killed, his body eaten and his head mounted on the palisade of the fortified village, where it would be symbolically insulted. This revenge warfare was not conducted on a one-for-one basis; simply to have eaten the enemy and taken a head or heads would be enough to expunge a long-held grievance over even more deaths than were inflicted in reprisal.49
Here is another example of how a cultural ethic, even of the most savage sort, may have the paradoxical effect of limiting the harm warriors will do to each other. When reinforced by material constraints, such as those provided by fortification, its eventual result with the Maoris was to ensure that the potentiality of the chiefdom to transcend the technology of club and spear in a drive towards island-wide conquest did not take place. With the arrival of the musket, several Maori chiefdoms evolved towards statehood with terrifying rapidity, but that is a different story. Meanwhile, in a society of pre-Columbian America far more sophisticated than that of the Maoris, a cultural ethic limited its greater potentiality for Clausewitz’s decisive battle to an even more arresting degree.
The Aztecs
There is a cruelty in the warfare of some pre-Columbian peoples of North and Central America that has no parallel elsewhere in the world. Turney-High considers the Melanesians of the South Pacific to be foremost in ‘simple cruelty’ — the evidence lacks to prove that one way or the other — and perhaps some South Americans to be the worst cannibals (he was an early exponent of the belief that cannibalism was explained by protein deficiency, a view that later gained many but is now losing supporters).50 Neither group, however, went in for the ritual torture of captives, to be followed by cannibalism or not, as was practised by, among others, some Plains Indians and the Aztecs. Turney-High relates:
The Skidi Pawnee strove to capture a beautiful enemy maiden on each of their raids. This girl was then adopted into some very honourable Pawnee family where, to her surprise, she was treated with more consideration than the real daughters of the lodge. She became the pampered darling. Yet late one night she was rudely seized, stripped of her clothing, and her body half painted down its length from head, through groin, to foot with charcoal. She thus symbolised the junction of day and night. She was then strung up between two upright poles … Her adopted father was then compelled to shoot an arrow through her heart just as the sacred Morning Star was rising. The arrows of the priests soon followed, and her body was horribly mangled before it had served its purpose. This rite of appeasement to the Morning Star was considered essential to Pawnee welfare, to success in all things and agriculture in particular.51
A Jesuit missionary to the Huron described an even more ghastly ritual murder of one of their Seneca captives in 1637. He, too, had been adopted into a chief’s family but had then been rejected because he bore wounds. He was consigned to die by fire and was brought into the council house, after his captors had feasted, for a night of agony. The Huron chief announced how his body would be divided, while he sang his warrior songs, and then ‘he began to run a circuit around the fires, again and again, while everyone tried to burn him [with firebrands] as he passed; he shrieked like a lost soul; the whole cabin resounded with shrieks and yells. Some burned him, some seized his hands and snapped bones, others thrust sticks through his ears’. Yet, when he fainted he was ‘gently revived’, he was given food, he was addressed in kinship terms, in which he himself answered those who seared his flesh, and all the while he ‘gasped out his warrior songs as best he could’. At dawn, still just conscious, he was taken outside, tied to a post and burned to death by the application of heated axe-heads to his flesh. Then his body was divided and the pieces distributed as the chief had promised.52
There are descriptions from the Algerian war of young French paratroopers patting and consoling a Muslim captive whom they had tortured for information, but such behaviour bears no relation to the Huron rituals. The paras tortured for a practical purpose, but the Huron and their victim were complicit partners in a ghastliness inexplicable to anyone outside their myth system. The horror of the night of the Seneca’s death has been resurrected by the cultural historian Inga Clendinnen to introduce her brilliant reconstruction of the ethos of the Aztecs of central Mexico, for whom human sacrifice was a religious necessity, warfare the principal means to acquire sacrificial victims, and the captives of warfare, like the heroic Seneca, themselves complicit devotees of the cult which required their protracted death-agonies. The Aztecs were formidable warriors who, between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries AD, succeeded in making themselves masters of the valley of central Mexico and in building the most brilliant material civilisation of all pre-literate, pre-metallic cultures; its splendours, as the awe-struck conquistadors reported, exceeded those of their native Spain. To military historians, however, the fascination of the Aztecs’ civilisation resides in the extraordinary limitations on their capacity for warmaking that they imposed on themselves, through their religious beliefs, and the restraints those beliefs imposed on their warriors in battle.
The Aztecs originally entered the Mexican central valley as humble seekers after subsistence. By making themselves useful as soldiers to the Tepanec, one of the three recognised powers in the valley, and by finding a place of settlement on a thitherto unadopted island in Lake Texcoco, they succeeded in establishing themselves as a power in their own right. Those who then accepted their primacy were incorporated into their empire; those who resisted were forced to fight. Aztec armies were extremely well organised and supplied, as befitted a highly bureaucratic culture; typically they were divided into commands of 8000 men, several of which could march on parallel routes along the empire’s excellent roads at a speed of twelve miles a day, carrying rations for an eight-day campaign.53
It is possible to speak of Aztec ‘strategy’, as Clausewitz would have understood the word. Their wars began, writes R. Hassing,
with what were essentially demonstrations of military prowess in
which equal numbers of soldiers from both sides fought in hand-to-hand combat to display their skills. If this failed to intimidate one side into surrendering, the wars escalated in ferocity, in the number of combatants, and in the use of weapons … such as bows and arrows … Even while ongoing, these wars pinned down dangerous enemies while their forces were decimated in these wars of attrition that the numerically superior Aztecs were bound to win, and they allowed Aztec expansion to continue elsewhere … opponents were gradually encircled until, cut off from outside support, they were defeated.54
Clendinnen represents Aztec warfare in an altogether more complex light. Aztec society was intensely hierarchical — ‘ranked’, as anthropologists say, not by the simpler division of age but by status. At the bottom were slaves, unfortunates who had fallen to the bottom of the economic system; then commoners, the ordinary agriculturalists, craftsmen and merchants of countryside and town; then nobles; then priests; finally the monarch. All males, nevertheless, were born as potential warriors and had the chance to rise to high warrior status through the training-schools of their city districts — calpulli, which were part club, part monastery, part guild. A few novices became priests, but the majority took up everyday life while retaining the obligation to serve as warriors if necessary, and a minority — from noble houses founded on martial exploits — were destined to continue familial tradition. The monarch was chosen from those who achieved the rank of war leader.
The monarch was not simply a soldier, however; nor was he a priest, though priests surrounded him and regulated his grisly daily routines. Nor again was he a god, though he was believed in some sense to be inhabited by godly power. On his accession he was recognised, in a chilling formulary, as ‘Our lord, our executioner, our enemy’, an exact representation of his power over his subjects, some of whom, purchased infants or slaves, were destined to ritual and bloody sacrifice in his presence.55 He is best regarded as an earthly being considered in the possession of the gods, to whom he had to offer blood sacrifice for their benevolent performance of the rhythms — particularly the daily rising of the sun — by which the Aztec people were permitted to carry on their lives. Aztec society itself, however, could not yield a sufficient number of acceptable victims to satisfy the needs of sacrifice. They had to be won in war.
Pitched battle was the central act of Aztec warfare, and it was fought at close range. But it was a form of battle strange to us because of its highly ritualised nature and the mutual acceptance of its codes by Aztecs and their enemies alike. The Aztecs were magnificent goldsmiths but had not discovered iron or bronze. They used the bow and arrow, the spear and the atlatl, the lever that adds range to the thrown spear. Their favoured weapon was a wooden sword, studded along its cutting edge with slivers of obsidian or flakes of flint, designed to wound but not to kill. Warriors wore quilted cotton ‘armour’ which could keep out arrows — the Spaniards later adopted it when fighting the Aztecs, when they found that their steel breastplates were not only too hot but also superfluous in Mexico — and carried small round shields; the object of the warrior was to close with an opponent and strike a disabling blow beneath the shield at his legs.56
Aztec armies were as ranked as Aztec society. The majority of the warriors jostling for place in the battle line would be novices, fresh from the training-schools and organised in groups to learn how to take a captive. Superiors made sure that they yielded station to the experienced warriors, graded according to the number of captives each had taken in previous battles. The most senior, who had taken seven captives, fought in pairs and were distinguished by the most magnificent of the warrior costumes; should one die and the other turn tail, he would be killed by his companions. These warriors have been called the ‘berserkers’ of Aztec warfare, those who set an example of courage on the field and were permitted a roughness of manner in the ordered city life of the Aztecs to be tolerated in no one else.
Yet ‘the great warriors were solitary hunters’, who ‘searched through the dust and confusion of the battle for an enemy of equal, or ideally just higher, rank’. (Classicists and mediaevalists will recognise this ethic from the annals of Homeric and chivalric combat.)
The matched duel was the preferred mode … what [the warriors] strove to do was to bring their opponent down, most often by a blow to the legs — cutting a hamstring, crippling a knee — so that he could be grappled to the ground and subdued. It is possible the seizing of the warrior lock … was enough to effect submission, although there were usually men with ropes on hand to bind the captives and lead them to the rear.
So central to Aztec warfare was the act of individual captive-taking that for a man to give a captive to a comrade who had not made a capture, as a favour to promote him in rank, carried the death penalty for both.57
A battle that began with an exchange of arrows, to sow the confusion in which these individual duels might be fought, ended with those taken prisoner being led to the great city of Tenochtitlan. The victors went their way — the champions to rest until the next ordeal, warriors of middle rank perhaps to retire honourably to bureaucratic posts, those who had failed at the second or third attempt at captive-taking to be expelled from the warrior school and to sink to the status of load-carrier, plying for hire, the lowest place in Aztec society. The ordeal of the captives had only just begun.
Aztec battles might yield many thousands of captives, if conquest followed victory; after the suppression of one revolt by a subject people, the Huaxtecs, perhaps 20,000 were brought to the capital, to be sacrificed in dedication of the new pyramid temple, having their hearts torn out when they climbed to its summit. Some captives, together with bought or tribute slaves, were kept for sacrifice at the four great festivals of the year. At the first, the Feast of the Flaying of Men, Tlacaxipeualiztli, however, were slain a select group of victims whose manner of capture and style of execution epitomised both the form and philosophy of Aztec warmaking. This particular military transaction was stylised to an extreme degree: the ‘flower’ or ‘flowery’ battle, fought between the Aztecs and their neighbours, all speakers of the Nahuatl language, specifically for the taking of captives of the highest warrior class who were fit to undergo sacrificial death. The battles were prearranged and the fate of the victims was known.58
One out of 400 captives taken by each warrior-school might be selected for ‘striping’. In the period of preparation before he was brought to the execution place, he was treated as an honoured guest, ‘constantly visited, adorned and admired by his captor and the captor’s devoted entourage of local youth’ — though also ‘taunted’ with reminders of the terrible fate that lay before him. When the day of the festival came, he was taken, surrounded by priests, to a killing-stone, mounted on a platform high enough for the public to view, tethered with a rope, and there equipped for his death agony.59 The stone gave him a height advantage over the four warriors who were to attack him, and he was provided with four throwing-clubs which he might launch at them. His principal weapon, however, was a warrior sword, edged not with flint but feathers.
The victim, elevated above his opponent and released from the inhibition against killing which prevailed on the battlefield, could whirl his heavy club and strike at the head of his antagonists with unfamiliar freedom. The [Aztec] champions were also presented with a temptingly easy target. The victim could be disabled and brought down with one good blow to knee or ankle, as on the battlefield. But such a blow would simultaneously abort the spectacle and end their glory, so the temptation had to be resisted. Their concern under these most taxing and public circumstances was rather to give a display of the high art of weapon handling: in an exquisitely prolonged performance to cut the victim delicately, tenderly with those narrow blades, to lace the living skin with blood [this whole process was called ‘the striping’]. Finally the victim … exhausted by exertion and lack of blood, would falter and fall.
He was finished off by the ritual opening of his chest and the tearing of his still-beating heart from its se
at.60
His captor took no part in this lethal mutilation but watched from below the execution stone. As soon as the body was decapitated, however, so that the skull could be displayed at the temple, he drank the dead man’s blood and carried the body back to his home. There he dismembered the limbs, to be distributed as sacrifice required, flayed the body of its skin, and watched while his family
ate a small ritual meal of maize stew topped by a fragment of the dead warrior’s flesh, as they wept and lamented the likely fate of their own young warrior. For that melancholy ‘feast’ the captor put off his glorious captor’s garb, and was whitened, as his dead captive had been, with the chalk and feathers of the predestined victim.
Later, however, the captor — who had addressed the victim as ‘beloved son’ during the waiting-time and been addressed in return as ‘beloved father’, and who had provided an ‘uncle’ to attend him during the ‘striping’ — changed his garb again. He took to wearing the flayed skin of the dead man and to lending it out ‘to those who begged the privilege’, until it and its scraps of attached flesh rotted into deliquescence. This was the last tribute paid to ‘our Lord the Flayed One’ who, in the four days preceding his death, had been rehearsed in the ritual of the killing-stone, had four times had his heart symbolically dragged from his chest and, on his last night, had kept vigil with his ‘beloved father’ until the time came to go to the stone and watch those before him on the sacrificial list fight their doomed struggle.
What bore the victim up during his unspeakable ordeal, Clendinnen suggests, was the knowledge that ‘if he died well, his name would be remembered and his praises sung in the warrior houses of his home city’. This has just enough resonance with European epic and saga to carry psychological conviction, at least as far as the behaviour of the warrior is concerned; one is reminded of Colonel Bigeard’s ‘plutôt crever’ when told to parade before the Vietminh cameras at the surrender of Dien Bien Phu, or of the veteran Australian, winner of a Victoria Cross in the First World War, setting off alone towards Japanese lines at the fall of Singapore with grenades in his hands and ‘no capitulation for me’ on his lips, never to be seen again. It does not suffice as an explanation of what the warriors were about en masse on the battlefield, not at any rate for moderns who expect wars to have a material point, and loss of human life to bear a proportionate relation to it. But Inga Clendinnen suggests that ultimately there was nothing material about Aztec warmaking. They believed that they were the heirs of the legendary founders of the civilisation of the central Mexican valley, the Toltecs, and that it was their calling to revive the splendours of the Toltec empire. They achieved that object, but they had been led to it, and could only be sustained in it, by their gods, who demanded sacrifices, of everything and anything of value, even of the most trivial value, but above all of human life itself. Thus while they sought ‘to exact from towns in their immediate vicinity … maximum tribute [as evidence] of acquiescence … in [their] claim to Toltec legitimacy’, far more important was the outward demonstration of an inward acceptance through the test of cooperation in the bloody rituals their gods demanded. What the Aztecs wanted from their neighbours was recognition of their own ‘account of themselves and their destiny’.61