A History of Warfare

by John Keegan

  Bodyguards, regulars, feudatories, mercenaries, military colonists, conscripts, serf militias, remnants of warrior tribes from the steppe — to say nothing of the Frenchmen of the Grand Army itself, some of whom had entered service as the citizen-soldiers of the Revolution whose irresistible élan had first fired Clausewitz with his vision of ‘war as the continuation of politics’ — can we impose any order on this medley? To a drillmaster they may have looked merely like soldiers, some good for the hardest tasks, some useful in the special duties of skirmishing or reconnaissance, some scarcely worth their pay, some a danger to their friends and a menace to all peaceful citizens. In the variety one can find much material to illustrate the interrelationship between military and social forms. What theories explain the variety?

  Military sociologists take as their premise the proposition that any system of military organisation expresses the social order from which it springs — and that this holds true even when the bulk of a population is held in thrall by an alien military hierarchy, of the sort that dominated Norman England or Manchu China, for example. The most elaborate of these theories is the work of the Anglo-Polish sociologist Stanislav Andreski — significantly the son of a military emigré — who is best known for having suggested the universal existence of a Military Participation Ratio (MPR) by which, when other factors are taken into account, the degree to which a society is militarised may be measured.5 Unfortunately Professor Andreski’s work is not ‘accessible’ — now, alas, an adjective of contempt in the academic world, where ‘accessibility’ is confused with shallowness — to the general reader, since he has invented an elaborate vocabulary of new-coined words to define his terms. To offset that, he otherwise writes with clarity and panache, while he takes no moral position about his findings: though he clearly prefers to live in a society with a low MPR, where the armed forces are subject to the rule of law, he is refreshingly free of the delusion that military dictatorships can be abolished by writing articles in journals of political science. Indeed, if anything, he takes a pessimistic, Hobbesian view of human nature, holding that struggle is a natural condition of existence and, like Dr Johnson, that ‘no two people can be half an hour together, but one shall acquire an evident superiority over the other’.

  Andreski begins with Malthus, the father of population theory, who argued that, since populations increase geometrically, but food and living space do not, life can only be made tolerable if births are limited or if deaths are hastened by disease or violence. He thinks this is the origin of warmaking (had he written after the publication of McNeill’s Plagues and Peoples, which argues that imported diseases are more lethal than fighting, he might not have been so sure).6 In primitive societies, he suggests, strong men limit birth rates by appropriating the women of the weak; but as the upper stratum’s birth rate increases, it must either extrude the surplus into the lower, which it continues to limit in size by violence, or else carry violence into the territory of neighbours. By either means a military class, dominant in its own society or conquering over another, is created. Its relative size — the Military Participation Ratio (MPR) — will then be determined by its success, after having satisfied its own — potentially extortionate — needs of consumption and ownership, in accommodating those of the lower strata.7 In victorious tribes, which subdue their surrounding neighbours, all fit males may be warriors; in economically benevolent conditions, where the ruling stratum can provide for an expanding population from trade, industry or intensive agriculture, the armed forces will shrink to the size merely necessary to defend the people’s good fortune, and something we call democracy may even emerge to disguise the realities of power. It is, however, between these two extremes of MPR, he says, that most social systems lie. Their exact nature will then depend on two other factors: the degree to which the rulers find it necessary or are able to exert control over the ruled — what Andreski calls subordination; and the degree to which those who possess military skills and equipment are united among themselves — cohesion.8

  To give some of his examples: the Trek Boers, who left the region of British rule in South Africa at the beginning of the nineteenth century to find free land and hold it against attack by the local Africans, formed a society characterised by high MPR — every man was a mounted shot — low subordination, because the republics they founded were almost without government, and low cohesion, since the patriarchal family remained the unit of loyalty. The Cossacks, on the other hand, had an equally high MPR, low subordination — since leaders had few means to enforce their will — but high cohesion, because the dangers of steppe life held the bands together. More common forms have been low MPR, low cohesion, low subordination — such as the knightly societies of medieval Europe in the long periods of weak monarchical rule — or high MPR, high subordination and high cohesion, which describe the militarised industrial societies of the two world wars.

  Andreski’s brief book takes the breath away by its boldness and sweep. In a series of intricate but apparently logical steps, he leads the reader to accept that there can be only six forms of military organisation and then, by a whirlwind gallop through world history, musters every known society, from the most primitive tribes to the most affluent democracies, within one or another. It is only when the reader has come up for air that doubt supervenes. In a general way, Andreski’s scheme looks too mechanistic: though contemptuous of Marx — ‘purely economic factors produce, no doubt, fluctuations in the height of stratification, but … the long-term trends are determined by the shifts of the locus of military power’ — his analysis is brutally dialectic.9 More particularly, if the reader has any precise knowledge of the societies Andreski so peremptorily dragoons, the fit between them and his categories looks less exact. For example: the Boers may appear to have lacked cohesion, and they were and remain a stiff-necked and quarrelsome lot, but no one who has fought them doubts that, what their laws lack, the power of the Dutch Reformed Church supplies; they have a biblical, not political, cohesion. Again, Cossack insubordination had its limits: expulsion from the band, at the dictate of elders or comrades, exposed the misfit to a dangerous isolation.10 Andreski, moreover, accords little importance to what fellow sociologists call ‘value systems’. Though he concedes that ‘magico-religious beliefs [provided] the earliest foundations of social inequalities’, he then drops the subject.11 He takes no account of the deprecation of violence we have noted among some primitive tribes — which attempt to control it through ritual combat — or among monotheistic creeds, such as Islam, which was forced to create a social order of slaves in order to square the demands of power with those of religion, or in Chinese civilisation, which heroically persisted in the belief, however often deflected from it, that ‘the superior man’, by which was meant the ideal ruler, ‘should be able to attain his ends without violence’.

  It seems more profitable to proceed by a different method: to accept that there are a limited number of forms which military organisation has taken, and that there is indeed an intimate relationship between a particular form and the social and political order to which it belongs, but that what determines the relationship may be exceedingly complex. Tradition, for example, plays a preponderant role. Andreski admits that ‘an egalitarian society where all men bear arms may resist the introduction of more efficient methods which make universal military service useless’.12 It is more usual, if we take only the samurai and the Mamelukes as examples, for exclusive military minorities to cling to antique skills-at-arms, which they may do quite irrationally for hundreds of years. Such minorities — termed by sociologists ‘élites’, but incorrectly, since they are chosen only by themselves — may on the other hand pursue a relentless and extravagant policy of innovation; thus the officers of the Victorian Royal Navy, once they had accepted the steam ironclad, declared new models obsolete at ever narrower intervals, until warship-building became one of the most contested issues in British budgetary politics.13

  Their ‘navalism’ reflected Britain’s geograp
hical circumstances: as a rich island it needed to defend itself against invasion, and as the seat of a maritime empire it needed to protect its trade and overseas possessions. Geography, however, is a universal influence on military forms, which only intermittently is Andreski prepared to recognise: thus he has spotted that it was Egypt’s peculiar isolation that retarded its transition from stone to metal weapon technology and spared it the burden of maintaining a standing army until late in its civilised life. He seems to have missed, however, that it was Europe’s exposure to irruption from the steppe — or later from Viking sea raids — that gave the knightly class so much of its power, that the unchanging steppe habitat made the nomads, once they had bred a man-carrying horse, what they were, that land hunger called the Scandinavians from their narrow coastal fields to go ‘Aviking’ or that it was the absence of any other secure natural harbour in the Adriatic that allowed Venice — a military power that interests him — to dominate that sea and then extend its commercial tentacles as far away as Crete and the Crimea.14

  Above all, he discounts the allure that the warrior life exerts over the male imagination. This is a failing common among academics who interest themselves in military affairs but never leave their university surroundings. As those who know soldiers as members of a military society recognise, such a society has a culture of its own akin to but different from the larger culture to which it belongs, operating by a different system of punishments and rewards — the punishments more peremptory, the rewards less monetary, often, indeed, purely symbolic or emotional — but deeply satisfying to its adherents. I am tempted, after a lifetime’s acquaintance with the British army, to argue that some men can be nothing but soldiers. The feminine parallel is with the stage: some women are fulfilled only theatrically — as prima donna, diva, icon of the photographer or couturier — yet, through that fulfilment, embody a universal ideal of femininity that earns the adulation of women and men alike. Such adulation is not enjoyed by male actors, however much admired; a stage hero merely simulates the running of risks. The warrior hero is admired by both sexes for running real risks; but the man of soldierly temperament — how blinkered social scientists are to the importance of temperament — will run risks whether admired by the outside world or not. It is the admiration of other soldiers that satisfies him — if he can win it; most soldiers are satisfied merely by the company of others, by a shared contempt for a softer world, by the liberation from narrow materiality brought by the camp and the line of march, by the rough comforts of the bivouac, by competition in endurance, by the prospect of le répos du guerrier among their waiting womenfolk.

  The intoxication of the warpath helps to explain to us the ethos of the primitive warrior. Success on the warpath explains also why some primitives became warrior peoples. The rewards of success — if not outright conquest, the appropriation of territory and the subjection of outsiders, then booty or at least the right to trade on dictated terms — are enough in themselves to validate a rejection of settled ways. Yet it is important not to exaggerate the drives to the warrior life. As we have seen, many primitives strove to contain the impulse to violence, while even the most ferocious peoples ascended their pyramids of skulls in the more tentative footsteps of others; Tamerlane could not have become what he did had not earlier horse peoples tested the limits of civilisation’s powers of resistance. Warrior peoples, moreover, have always been a minority among all peoples, whatever the allure — so much overlooked by the bellicose Anglo-Saxons, who prefer to regard themselves as donors to others of parliamentary institutions — of possessing a name that inspires awe; while warriors always form an absolute minority within populations which have passed beyond the primitive stage. There is what sociologists call a countervailing tendency in human nature, which opposes resort to violence. Aldous Huxley said that an intellectual was a person who had discovered something more interesting than sex. A civilised man, it might be said, is someone who has discovered something more satisfying than combat. Once man moved beyond the primitive, the proportion of those who preferred, to fighting, something else — tilling the soil, making or selling things, building, teaching, thinking or communing with the other world — increased as fast as the resources of the economy would stand. One must not idealise; the least fortunate found themselves bound to service or even servitude, while the privileged, as Andreski robustly points out, always rested their position on the power of arms, borne by themselves or loyal subordinates. Post-primitive man, however, did accord a particular value to the unviolent life, exemplified by that of the artist, scholar and, above all, holy man and woman. It was for that reason that the atrocities of the Vikings in particular, despoilers of monasteries and convents, aroused such disgust in the Christian world; even Tamerlane, who had respectfully received the great Arab scholar, Ibn Khaldun, did not descend to their bloody level.15

  To modulate Andreski’s analysis, therefore: let us concede the prevalence of warmaking in the primitive world — while making allowance for the existence of peoples who scarcely knew warfare, and for the attempts to moderate it by ritual and ceremony among those who did — and proceed forthwith to the post-primitive world. Our survey of military history so far reveals six main forms that military organisation may take: warrior, mercenary, slave, regular, conscript and militia. It is purely coincidental that Andreski also believes in the existence of six forms, which he calls homoic, masaic, mortasic, neferic, ritterian and tellenic (all neologisms), since few of the categories match. The warrior category is self-explanatory, but I use it to include such groups as the samurai and the Western knightly class, the nucleus of which may almost always be identified as the remnant of a warrior tribe, alien or native; warrior cults, like the original Muslims and the Sikhs, and self-made warrior polities, like the Zulu or Ashanti, include themselves. Mercenaries are those who sell military service for money — though also for such inducements as grants of land, admission to citizenship (offered by both the Roman army and the French Foreign Legion) or preferential treatment. Regulars are mercenaries who already enjoy citizenship or its equivalent but choose military service as a means of subsistence; in affluent states, regular service may take on some of the attributes of a profession. We have already examined the slave system. The militia principle lays the duty of performing military service upon all fit male citizens; failure or refusal to do duty usually entails loss of citizenship. Conscription is a tax levied upon a male resident’s time at a certain age of life, though to citizens payment of such a tax is also usually represented as a civic duty; selective conscription, especially if for long periods of service to an unrepresentative government — twenty years was the term in Russia before the emancipation of the serfs — is difficult to differentiate from the slave system.

  How warrior societies came into being does not require elaboration, nor do we need to examine how warrior groups acquired or perpetuated their power over non-warriors. Typically they monopolised the use of an expensive weapons system — as the chariot conquerors did — or perfected a difficult skill-at-arms, which was the reason for the horse peoples’ long reign of terror. It is the transitions to the alternative forms which have a more complex rationale. That such transitions are necessary if a society is to evolve is self-evident, since warrior governments tend to be intensely conservative. They, like the samurai, Manchu and Mamelukes, fear to tamper with anything in the system they control, lest in so doing they bring the whole edifice down. As we have seen, however, obsolete military systems cannot resist change in perpetuity; when change comes, however, the new rulers — who may be the enlightened survivors of the old warrior order — confront two central problems. One is how to pay for the new military system. The other is how to assure the loyalty of those who belong to it. The two are intimately connected. Warriordom supports itself by direct exaction, either on the rest of society or on outsiders; hence the horse peoples’ obsessions with taking booty or tribute or demanding the right to trade on dictated terms. Once the military specialism is devolved
away from the direct centre of power — which is the beginning of warriordom’s dilution — an intermediate method of rewarding soldiers has to be found. Genghis was scrupulous in seeing that all booty was centrally collected and equally distributed.16 Even in his own lifetime, however’, as the empire expanded, he was obliged to grant local powers to trusted subordinates and soon after his death such men acquired the right to tax as well as to rule. Genghis’s tax-collectors had brought the revenues to a central treasury; that was an important reason why the Mongol army remained so formidable in his lifetime. In the time of his grandsons, a sort of feudalism had begun to emerge and with it the decline of Mongol power.