Practicing History

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  In that war men performed prodigies of valor and endurance, suffered and sacrificed and killed each other, moved by two convictions: that their country was right and that they were fighting to bring about a better order of things. If I may be forgiven for quoting myself, “When at last it was over, the war had many diverse results and one dominant one transcending all others: disillusion.”

  The fourteen points that looked so brave in the abstract melted as soon as they touched the hard reality of national interests among the victors. The Treaty of Versailles did not establish a peace of reason or even stability. The League of Nations, despite genuine and valiant effort, proved a failure (as has its successor, the United Nations). After four years, as Graham Wallas wrote, “of the most intense and heroic effort the human race has ever made,” the hopes and beliefs possible before 1914 slowly shriveled.

  No betrayal of hope was more profound than that in socialism. It is hard to convey to this generation how ardent, how dedicated, how convinced were the anarchists, socialists, Marxists, working-class and labor-union leaders, and all the advocates of whatever class or kind who believed in and struggled for the goal of social revolution—that great overturn which would wipe out the wickedness and oppression vested, as they thought, in property, and build a new order based on social justice. They believed that the brotherhood of the working class transcended national boundaries, that war would be stopped when the workers of the world would refuse to shoulder a rifle to fire on their comrades of another country. They believed that when they should succeed in their task—the overthrow of capitalism—social inequities and want would be eliminated, leaving man free to fulfill his nature to be good as God intended him. This idealism was a powerful engine of social progress, a real political force, the motive power and faith of men like Kropotkin, Jean Jaurès, Keir Hardie, Eugene Debs. Much of it was directed toward practical material ends and class gain—higher wages, shorter hours, better working conditions—but what fueled the movement was the fire of idealism of its leaders who believed themselves acting not merely for class or group but for all mankind.

  I do not suppose I need to discuss the change represented by the labor movement—or rather labor establishment, for it is no longer a movement—of today. Labor has won the rights and the gains it was fighting for, and now virtually controls the employer instead of vice versa, but added comfort and welfare does not seem to have added to the wisdom or happiness of the human species. The illusion broke in 1914 when socialism fell a victim to nationalism and the working class went to war with no less enthusiasm than anyone else. Shortly afterward the longed-for goal, Revolution, was incredibly and actually achieved in one country. What excitement, what enthusiasm, what soaring hope! “I have seen the future and it works,” proclaimed Lincoln Steffens. But if that was the future, it only proved history’s most melancholy truth: that every revolution, as the French anarchist Sébastien Faure said, “ends in the reappearance of a new ruling class.” Or in the case of Russia, as gradually became clear, in a new tyranny.

  Not unnaturally, cynicism took hold in the 1920s and ’30s. Compared to the pre-war period when the future seemed full of promise, these decades seemed a time when, in the phrase of Gertrude Stein, “there was no future any more.”

  At the same time, on the political scene the best international efforts for collective security—the Covenant of the League of Nations, the Washington Treaties for Naval Limitation, the Kellogg-Briand Pact by which fifteen nations renounced war as an instrument of national policy—were proved hollow in the face of determined aggression. Japan swallowed Manchuria and moved in on China, Germany rearmed and reoccupied the Rhineland unopposed, Italy annexed Ethiopia and a feeble attempt at sanctions was called off, and in Spain, where resistance to fascism at last took shape, it was smothered in the name of non-intervention.

  What allowed these events to happen, I believe, was the reverse of belligerent will, or rather a sharply divided will as between aggressors and appeasers. The victors of the last war, with no motive like Germany’s to resume battle, feared any disturbance in the status quo, especially the threat to property represented by communism. No one has so many fears as the property-owner; it is the householder who trembles, not the prowler outside. Greater than fear, the true enfeebler of the democracies was a kind of moral defeatism arising from the corpse of the last war. It sapped the will to resist aggression.

  And so, barely twenty years after the most terrible experience mankind as a whole ever suffered, after the wounds and gangrene, the deaths, disease, destruction, the ravaged ground and leafless trees, the months and years in trenches, the mud and blood, shelling and gas, the smell of rotting corpses, the lice and typhus, the loss of homes, uprooting of populations, burning of villages, the starvation, misery, brutality, and suffering of all kinds—we went at it all over again.

  How could it happen? Who would have imagined in 1919 that twenty years would be all the grace the world would allow itself? This is a terrible question and the most damaging testimony against man that the recording angel will have to bring—or at least it was until the 1960s, when the over-use of soil, air, and water is causing ruin of our environment that may earn a blacker mark.

  Along with the Second World War occurred an episode of man’s inhumanity to man which for sheer size, deliberate intent, and organized pursuit, was unprecedented. Its historical significance is not yet, I believe, fully appreciated. The German nation’s attempt to exterminate the Jews and achieve what they neatly called a “final solution” was an act not easily reconcilable with our idea of human progress. The Germans, who conceived and carried it out nearly to completion, were considered one of the most, and by themselves the most, civilized of nations. Yet they plunged into an orgy of savagery conducted as a matter of approved national policy, on a level which humanity was supposed to have outgrown. What is no less significant is that the other nations—excepting Denmark but not excepting the United States, which had the least to fear—watched, let it happen, offered no extra asylum or rescue, and generally avoided interfering to a point that suggests they would not have been unhappy to see the final solution succeed.

  Indeed, I believe we are witnessing something of the same phenomenon now in the treatment of Israel at the U.N. compared with its tolerance of Arab attacks. Anti-Semitism is very old, very convenient, latent in states as well as people, and evidently impossible to exorcise. I suspect the Jews will survive if only because the world needs them as the scapegoat of guilt of one kind or another. If they disappeared, the world would feel obliged to re-invent them.

  A historian needs, I think, a perspective of at least twenty-five years, and preferably fifty, to form an opinion of any value, so I shall go no further into the present. Except for a quick look at science, or rather applied science—that is to say, technology, which is what the layman mainly sees. The four chief technological agents of change in the last twenty-five years or so have been the bomb, the tube, the computer, and the pill—that is, nuclear power, television, electronics, and contraception. As regards the revolution in sexual morality that is partly a result of the pill (although it is also a cyclical phenomenon that recurs in history), the aspect that is genuinely shocking is the careless breeding of unwanted children in increasing numbers. High-school adolescents often seem to regard pregnancy as a condition affecting only themselves, with no thought of it as a condition that brings to life another human being. Damaged and resentful as they grow up, these children will be a mounting charge upon society. Under the circumstances, it hardly seems rational to impose restrictions on contraception and abortion. When there are already too many people, no unwanted child should be born into the world.

  The computer and the tube are beyond my scope for today, and even more so the bomb. Being quite properly scared of what we have wrought, we have not used it again since its first employment, but its strategy has reached the extremity of deterrence known as Mutual Assured Destruction, which carries the blunt acronym M-A-D, Mad. We seem t
o have pinned a label on ourselves in case some future historian should need a hint.

  Meanwhile we use incessantly that equally lethal weapon, the automobile, which kills fifty thousand annually in the United States, not counting the thousands maimed—a self-inflicted Hiroshima every year. If one adds to the human casualties the land the automobile has destroyed by highways and parking lots, the pollution of air by its fumes, the horrors perpetrated upon the countryside by its gas stations, the choking of cities by its traffic, it can be reckoned easily the most destructive instrument ever devised by man. Yet at its inception it was a wonderful instrument of freedom that whirled people at exhilarating speeds and opened up new realms of movement and travel. Now it has become a monster of which every person needs one or more, usually twice the size and horsepower necessary for utility. The proliferation and evil effects could be controlled, but are not. Everyone suffers, but no one calls a halt.

  The same unstoppable momentum seems to characterize other products of technology. What of a society that uses expensive and dwindling fuel to heat buildings in winter to eighty degrees because sixty is too cold, and then cools them in summer to sixty degrees because eighty is too hot? There is a craziness about all this, a sense of forces getting out of control, of the machine running away with man, which is another source of the general uneasiness of this age.

  I recognize that I have not given a fair share so far to good and encouraging and pleasant things, but since my object has been to look for the origins of our discontent, the emphasis has necessarily been on trouble. Probably this is not unjustified because, on balance, I think the twentieth century so far has contained more bad than good, though it may look different from the future looking back. Perspective changes every view. The world is old and history long—some four thousand years of recorded history, of which the 1960s represent a quarter of one percent. In that perspective now-ism dwindles.

  Does it serve any purpose to have unrolled this gloomy catalogue? I am not sure, but possibly the confusion of our time may seem less senseless and absurd when it can be shown to spring from real and demonstrable causes. It generally helps to know the reason for things.

  * * *

  Address, Pomona College, February 1969.

  Generalship

  MY SUBJECT TONIGHT was suggested by your Commandant with no accompanying explanation; just the word “Generalship,” unadorned. No doubt he could safely assume that the subject in itself would automatically interest this audience in the same way that motherhood would interest an audience of pregnant ladies. I do not know whether General Davis thought the subject would be appropriate for me because I am the biographer of a general who vividly illustrated certain qualities of generalship, both in their presence and their absence, or whether he had something of larger scope in mind.

  In any event, as I considered the subject I became intrigued for several reasons: because it is important, because it is elusive, and because it is undergoing, I think, as a result of developments of the past twenty-five years, a radical transformation which may make irrelevant much of what we now know about it. I will come to that aspect later.

  I should begin by saying that I have no greater qualification in this matter than if you had asked Tennyson to lecture on generalship because he wrote “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” I did not write the biography of Stilwell in his capacity as soldier, but rather in his capacity as a focal figure and extraordinarily apt representative of the American relation to China. I did not write The Guns of August as a study of how war plans go wrong—at least I did not know I was doing that until it was all over. I am not primarily a military historian, and to the degree that I am one at all, it is more or less by accident. However, since life is only fun when you attempt something a little beyond your reach, I will proceed with the assignment.

  In Colonel Heinl’s Dictionary of Military Quotations, the subject headings “Generals” and “Generalship” together take up more space than any other entry. If the closely related headings “Command” and “Leadership” are added, the subject as a whole takes up twice as many pages as any other. Why is it so important? The answer is, I suppose, because the qualities that enter into the exercise of generalship in action have the power, in a very condensed period of time, to determine the life or death of thousands, and sometimes the fate of nations. The general’s qualities become, then, of absorbing interest not only to the military but to citizens at large, and it is obviously vital to the state to determine what the qualities are, to locate them in the candidates for generalship, and to ensure that the possessors and the positions meet.

  I have also seen it said that senior command in battle is the only total human activity because it requires equal exercise of the physical, intellectual, and moral faculties at the same time. I tried to take this dictum apart (being by nature, or perhaps by profession, given to challenging all generalizations) and to think of rivals for the claim, but in fact no others will do. Generalship in combat does uniquely possess that distinction.

  The qualities it requires divide themselves into two categories as I see it: those of character, that is, personal leadership, and those of professional capacity. When it comes to command in the field, the first category is probably more important than the second, although it is useless, of course, if separated from the second, and vice versa. The most brilliant master of tactics cannot win a battle if, like General Boulanger, he has the soul of a subaltern. Neither can the most magnetic and dashing soldier carry the day if, like General Custer, he is a nincompoop in deployment.

  Courage, according to the Maréchal de Saxe, is the first of all qualities. “Without it,” as he says undeniably, “the others are of little value since they cannot be used.” I think “courage” is too simple a word. The concept must include both physical and moral courage, for there are some people who have the former without the latter, and that is not enough for generalship. Indeed, physical courage must also be joined by intelligence, for, as a Chinese proverb puts it, “A general who is courageous and stupid is a calamity.” Physical, combined with moral, courage makes the possessor resolute, and I would take issue with De Saxe and say that the primary quality is resolution. That is what enables a man to prevail—over circumstances, over subordinates, over allies, and eventually over the enemy. It is the determination to win through, whether in the worst circumstance merely to survive or in a limited situation to complete the mission, but, whatever the circumstance, to prevail. It is this will to prevail, I think, that is the sine qua non of military action. If a man has it, he will also have, or he will summon from somewhere, the courage to support it. But he could be brave as a lion and still fail if he lacks the necessary will.

  Will was what Stilwell had, the absolute, unbreakable, unbendable determination to fulfill the mission no matter what the obstacles, the antagonists, or the frustrations. When the road that he fought to cut through Burma at last reached China, after his recall, a message from his successor recognized that the first convoy to make the overland passage, though Stilwell wasn’t there to see it, was the product of “your indomitable will.”

  Sensible men will say that will must be schooled by judgment lest it lead to greater investment of effort or greater sacrifice than the object is worth, or to blind persistence in an objective whose very difficulties suggest it was a mistake from the start. That is true enough; good judgment is certainly one among the essentials of generalship, perhaps the most essential, according to the naval historian Raymond O’Connor. He quotes C. P. Snow’s definition of judgment as “the ability to think of many matters at once, in their interdependence, their related importance, and their consequences.” Judgment may not always be that rational, but more intuitive, based on a feel of the situation combined with experience.

  Sometimes judgment will counsel boldness, as when Admiral Nimitz, against the advice of every admiral and general in his command, insisted on assaulting Kwajalein, site of the Japanese Headquarters at the very heart of the Marshall archipelago,
although this meant leaving the enemy-held outer islands on the American line of communications. In the event, American planes were able to keep the outer islands pounded down, while Kwajalein proved relatively undefended because the Japanese, thinking along the same lines as Nimitz’ subordinates, had convinced themselves the Americans would not attempt to assault it.

  More often than not, however, judgment counsels “Cannot” while will says “Can.” In extremity the great results are gained when will overrides judgment. Will alone carried Washington through the winter of Valley Forge, that nadir of misery and neglect, and only his extraordinary will kept the freezing, half-starved, shoeless army, unpaid and unprovisioned by the Continental Congress, from deserting. Judgment would have said, “Go home.” I suppose it was will that dragged Hannibal over the Alps although judgment might have asked what would happen after he gained his goal, just as judgment might have advised Stilwell that his mission—the mobilizing of an effective Chinese army under the regime of Chiang Kai-shek—was unachievable. Hannibal too failed in his objective: He never took Rome, but he has been called the greatest soldier of all time.

  Sometimes the situation calls for will that simply says, “I will not be beaten”—and here too, in extremity, it must override judgment. After the awful debacle of four battles lost one after the other on the French frontiers in August 1914, and with the French Army streaming back in chaotic retreat and the enemy invading, judgment might have raised the question whether France was not beaten. That never occurred to the commander-in-chief, General Joffre, who possessed in unsurpassed degree a quality of great importance for generals: He was unflappable. Steadiness of temperament in a general is an asset at any time, and the crown of steadiness is the calm that can be maintained amid disaster. It may be that Joffre’s immunity to panic was lack of imagination, or he may have suffered all the time from what Stilwell called “that sinking feeling” and concealed it. We do not know because he kept no diary. Whatever the source of his imperturbability, France was fortunate to have it in the right man at the right time. Certainly it was Gallieni who saw and seized the opportunity to retrieve disaster, and Foch and Franchet d’Esperey who supplied the élan to carry it through, but it was Joffre’s ponderous, pink-cheeked, immovable assurance that held the army in being. Without him there might have been no army to make a stand at the Marne.