by John Keegan
Yet the Napoleonic marshalate also contained men who had held commissions before 1789. Marmont, like Napoleon himself, was a graduate of Louis XIV’s artillery school at Metz, while Grouchy had served in the Gardes écossaises (originally the Varangians of the Bourbon court). ‘Openness to talents’ sensibly meant the talents of royal officers ready to serve the Revolution, even those of emigrants who had thought better of their decision. By 1796, when Bonaparte set off to unleash his terrible swift sword against the Habsburg territories in Italy, the Republican army was an amalgame in the broadest sense of the word: not only of former regular soldiers and ex-National Guardsmen but also of officers from many other traditions, united in service to a new France but also greedily conscious of the rewards that a successful career under arms could bring. Promotion was one, loot another; there would be plenty of both in the next twenty years. Meanwhile the urgency was to discover means that would strip musket and bayonet warfare of its besetting indecisiveness and invest confrontation on the battlefield between revolution and the ancien régime with the same dynamism by which the popular will had overthrown royal government.
A solution lay to hand. Even the royal army had been perturbed by the indecisiveness of battle of the recent Seven Years’ and Austrian Succession wars and many aristocratic officers, notably the Comte de Guibert, had advocated tactical reform. Guibert, like all his military contemporaries, was deeply impressed by the achievements of Frederick the Great of Prussia who, with a small army of highly disciplined regulars, frequently beat those of states much larger than his own. Frederick’s ruthlessly rational approach to warmaking accorded with the spirit of the age — that ‘Age of Enlightenment or Reason [which] had already brought forward the idea that all institutions of government ought to be in harmony with the spirit and desires of the people’.41 Guibert, a typical aristocratic rationalist, believed that Prussian drill and training could transform the French army into a logical instrument of state power. As many of his contemporaries did, he rejected dependence on the old linear formations of musketeers, whose fire alone was supposed to beat down the enemy’s resistance, and urged a change to manoeuvre by larger masses, whose weight would deliver a decisive effect. In this debate between ‘line versus column’, as it has come to be known, he and other like-minded officers effectively carried the day by 1789; but neither he nor they could follow their argument to its conclusion, since that would have required them to accept that soldiers should learn to identify with the state as well as to serve it better. He remained an absolutist at heart. Intellectually he harked back to the idea of the citizen-soldier, but his social prejudices prevented him from embracing the reality.
The Revolution dissolved that contradiction. It brought into being almost overnight a true citizen army, which found in the tactical disputes of the ancien régime the solution to the problems it was shortly to encounter on the battlefield with the surviving ancien régime armies. It has been argued that the Revolutionary armies fought as they did, in dense columns supported by heavy concentration of mobile artillery, because the amateurism of their citizen-soldiers gave their commanders no other choice. More recently it has been recognised that this view is short-sighted: change was on the way in any case and the Revolution’s officers actively hurried it forward. But that does not explain why the changes worked. Under the hand of generals like Dumouriez, Jourdan and Hoche, all the difficulties that had inhibited decision and impeded the movement of armies since the building of the great chains of artillery fortresses at national frontiers in the sixteenth century dissolved as if by magic. French armies overran the borderlands of Belgium, Holland, Germany and Italy, bypassing fortresses that did not at once fall at their approach, and decisively beating the Austrians and Prussians wherever they tried to stem the flood. Part of their success was due to what later would be called ‘fifth columns’; many of the Dutch, for example, were only too ready to embrace the Revolution, which also had many sympathisers in northern Italy. Partly it was due to the sheer size of the Revolutionary armies — which had grown to 983,000 in 1793, at the end of a century in which 100,000 had been an enormous force — and to their disregard for logistic convention; fortresses blocking a line of supply lost their point when the surrounding countryside filled with troops who took what they chose.
Most of all, success stemmed from the superior quality of the Revolutionary armies themselves. At least at the outset, they were composed of men who were genuinely willing soldiers, devotees of a ‘rational’ state (even if its nature greatly alarmed many of the surviving rationalists of the Age of Reason), and led by officers of outstanding personal qualities. It seems untrue that they were undertrained. The new officer corps put great effort into training both the surviving royal and the new volunteer units in 1793–4 — two revolutionary officials reported in June 1793 that ‘the soldiers devote themselves to drill with an indefatigable zeal … the veteran soldiers are astonished when they see the precision with which our volunteers manoeuvre’ — while the artillery, already the best in Europe, thanks to the innovations of Gribeauval, retained many of its original officers as well as gunners.42 When led into battle, the ‘amalgamated’ units simply outfought their enemies, who remained trapped in the habits of doltish obedience and stereotyped tactics from which the French had escaped.
By 1800 the Revolution had been saved from its foreign enemies and secured at home by conservative reaction. The young Bonaparte had outstripped all rivals in winning French victories abroad and had also struck a decisive blow against domestic extremism in the coup of Brumaire in November 1799. Political and military power fell naturally into his hand. Between 1802 and 1803 he entered into an uneasy peace with France’s enemies — Austria, Prussia, Russia, Britain — but then led the armies out again for another twelve years of lightning and even longer-range conquests: against Austria in 1805 and 1809, Prussia in 1806, finally, though disastrously, Russia in 1812. Only in Spain, where in 1809–14 his marshals had to battle against a high-quality British expeditionary force commanded by Wellington, supported by a country-wide guerrilla effort and supplied by the Royal Navy (which, since its victory at Trafalgar (1805) sailed the seas uncontested), did he meet a sustained check. His Grand Army was not the army of the Revolution; though many of its officers and some of its soldiers survived from the epic campaigns of 1793–6, it had become an instrument of state power rather than of ideology. Enough remained of its revolutionary ethos, however, for the great Napoleonic victories — Austerlitz (1805), Jena (1806), Wagram (1809) — to appear as extensions of the whirlwind tradition. On their devastating outcomes Clausewitz, a veteran of the very first Prussian encounters with the Revolutionary armies who survived to witness Napoleon’s defeat in 1815, erected his theory that the harnessing of the popular will to strategic purposes brought ‘real war’ to approximate with ‘true war’, and founded his belief that warmaking was ultimately a political act.
Clausewitz’s ideas were not wholly original, as he himself conceded. Machiavelli, he said, had ‘a very sound judgement in military matters’. That was faint praise. The Art of War, which appeared in twenty-one editions in the sixteenth century alone, was a revolutionary text, because it was the first handbook that directly linked warmaking to the art of government.43 Earlier classical writers, such as Philo, Polybius and Vegetius, had merely described how military affairs might best be regulated. Machiavelli demonstrated how a well-regulated army — by which he meant one recruited from subjects, not hired on the mercenary market — might achieve a ruler’s purposes. It was of enormous value to heads of states who, at a time when the revival of the money economy had eroded the old feudal basis of recruitment, were genuinely confused about how best to raise reliable armies. Machiavelli had modest objectives, however. He merely sought to give practical advice to other men like himself, members of the political class of rich Renaissance city states. Clausewitz’s intellectual ambitions verged on the megalomaniac. Like his near contemporary Marx, he claimed to have penetrated the inner
and fundamental reality of the phenomenon he took as his subject. He did not deal in advice; he dealt in what he insisted were inescapable truths. War was the continuation of politics by other means, and any government which blinded itself to that truth doomed itself to harsh treatment at the hands of an unblinkered opponent.
Hence the enthusiasm with which his own Prussian government took up his ideas — transmitted to it by his pupils and followers in the War Academy and general staff — in the middle of the nineteenth century. On War was a book with a slow fuse. By the time the Prussian army came to fight its wars for hegemony in Germany, however, his ideas had permeated it, and the victories it won in 1866 and 1870–1 ensured that they would thereafter direct the course of the new German empire’s diplomacy as well. By an irresistible process of osmosis, they then percolated throughout the whole European military establishment; by 1914, it is true to say that its outlook was as Clausewitzian as the continent’s coalition of socialist and revolutionary movements was Marxist.
Since the objects of the First World War were determined in great measure by the thoughts that were Clausewitz’s, in the war’s aftermath he came to be regarded as the intellectual begetter of a historical catastrophe; B.H. Liddell Hart, then Britain’s most influential military writer, pilloried him as ‘the Mahdi of Mass’.44 With longer hindsight, this estimate of his influence seems exaggerated. His ideas undoubtedly bore heavily on the assumptions made by generals before 1914 of the high numbers of men that would have to be deployed to gain advantage on a future battlefield and of the high proportion of loss likely to be suffered; the result was that European armies demanded even larger annual intakes of conscripts for both their field forces, which would provide an immediate line of defence, and the reserves from which casualties would be made good and new formations created. But there would have been no point in the generals wanting more soldiers, or even in states instituting the systems of compulsory recruitment necessary to find them, had the men themselves not been willing to serve. Generals had always wanted more troops since states were young, and the history of bureaucracy is littered with examples of futile and discarded schemes of enlistment. Even when a state possessed the means to identify its fit young males and their places of work or residence, as by 1914 all European states did, the best of police forces could not have sufficed to bring an entire age-group to barracks if they resisted and if society at large supported their resistance.
That they did not resist and were not supported tells us something quite different from what is said by those who believe Clausewitz was the architect of the First World War. Architects create structures, but they cannot determine moods. They reflect a culture. They cannot create one. By 1914 an entirely unprecedented cultural mood was dominating European society, one which accepted the right of the state to demand and the duty of every fit, male individual to render military service, which perceived in the performance of military service a necessary training in civic virtue and which rejected the age-old social distinction between the warrior — as a man set apart whether by rank or no rank at all — and the rest, as an outdated prejudice.
Much had worked against this mood, notably the nineteenth-century belief in benevolent progress, of which ever-increasing prosperity and the spread of liberal constitutional governments were the hallmarks. The powerful revival of religious sentiment, too, a reaction against the godlessness both of revolution and of the claims of science to explain the universe — much though the latter had fostered prosperity — resisted it as well. Optimism and the moral deprecation of violence could not prevail, however, against the other forces that hurried forward the militarisation of European life.
The United States, least militarised of Western societies at mid-century, was the first to discover the danger of that movement. Plunged into civil war in 1861, neither North nor South expected a long conflict. Each hastily assembled amateur armies which advanced to battle in the hope of quick victory. Neither contemplated full-scale mobilisation, either of manpower or industry. The South, indeed, had little industry to mobilise. Both found, as decision on the battlefield eluded them, that they were driven to enlarge their armies in pursuit of achieving a success through a superiority of numbers that generalship could not deliver. Eventually the South was to assemble nearly 1,000,000 men under arms, the North 2,000,000, out of a pre-war population of 32,000,000; a military participation ratio of ten per cent, which these figures represented, is, as we have seen, about the maximum a society can tolerate while continuing to function at normal levels of efficiency. The South might have added to its military manpower by drawing on the active males among its 4,000,000 slaves but the chattel nature of its slave system, which it had gone to war to defend, precluded such an expedient. The North, drawing on its greatly superior economic resources, including a larger navy and merchant marine and a much denser railroad network, was enabled to blockade the South from the start and to transport armies to the South’s points of vulnerability. By 1863 it had cut the South in half and in 1864 it bisected its most productive region from west to east. Logistic superiority, however, could not win the war as long as Southern soldiers were willing to fight and could find, as they did, the barest means to do so. The battles of 1864 therefore proved as bloody as those of 1862–3, Southerners fighting as tenaciously in defence of their heartland as they had on the offensive into the North at Gettysburg. The cost to both sides of this ever-deepening struggle was agonising. By April 1865, when the North’s strangulation of the South at last achieved its result, 620,000 Americans had died as a direct result of the war, more than the total number killed in the two world wars, Korea and Vietnam.
The emotional aftermath of the war inoculated several generations of Americans against the false romanticism of uniforms and training-camps. The spectacle the war had presented of the conjuring into existence of great amateur armies nevertheless encouraged ‘volunteering’ by would-be citizen-soldiers elsewhere, notably in Britain, and validated also the progressive enlargement of mobilisable reserves of time-expired conscripts in Germany, France, Austria, Italy and Russia.
The swelling nationalism of such states was militarist in its thrust, while nationalism was fed by their successful imperialism overseas. Even though continental Europe was rarely at war between 1815 and 1914 — despite the international conflicts of 1848–71 and a flurry of civil wars, the period will still bear the description of the ‘great peace’ — European armies and navies were constantly in action in India, Africa and Central and South-East Asia, and their success in winning campaigns small in scope but spectacular in results brought strong satisfactions to the nations that sponsored them. Yet perhaps the most powerful sentiment that supplied popular consent to militarisation was the thrill of the process itself. The proclamation of egalitarianism had provided the French Revolution with one of its headiest appeals. That appeal had been rooted in the identification of equality with arms-bearing and had launched into the European consciousness the idea that to serve as a soldier made a man more not less of a citizen. The Revolution had effectively killed mercenarism and had extinguished also the claim of the old warrior class to monopolise leadership and command. The armies that emerged from the wars of the French Revolution and empire came to be seen — delusively perhaps, since the old warrior class doggedly defended its surviving claim to command appointments — as instruments of social cohesion and even of social levelling. Within them able young men of the middle class could aspire to rank and so to social standing, while all young men, by donning uniform, could display the badge of their full acceptance as equal members of the community. Mercenary and regular enlistment had each, in their different ways, been seen as forms of servility; universal conscription, by contrast, conferred respectability and even enlarged horizons. As William McNeill has written, ‘Paradoxical as it may sound, escape from freedom was often a real liberation, especially among young men living under very rapidly changing conditions, who had not yet been able to assume fully adult roles.’45
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nbsp; This judgement implies that there was a measure of infantilism in Europe’s enthusiastic espousal of militarising tendencies, and that may well be: ‘infantilism’ and ‘infantry’ have the same root. If so, it was the infantilism of a thinking child. Clever men and responsible governments found wordy arguments to justify themselves. Thus the report of the French Chamber of Deputies on the conscription boom of 1905, designed to increase the size of the army even further, opened with the preamble:
It is from the lofty ideas born of the French Revolution that the military ideas of a great republican democracy … must be inspired: and when, after more than a century, the legislator can ask all citizens — without distinctions of wealth, instruction or education — to consent to give an equal part of their time to their country, without exceptions and privileges of any sort, the proof is there that the democratic spirit has once again bound up the chains of time.46
Thus spoke the parliament of the continent’s foremost democracy in the City of Light nine years before the consequences of creating mass citizen armies became apparent. On 3 August 1914, the third day of the First World War, the rectors of the Bavarian universities jointly issued the following appeal: