A History of War in 100 Battles

by Richard Overy

  The one common denominator for all the battles identified from the historical record is the dependence on state or sub-state forms of organization that are capable of raising an army, seeing to its provisioning, and imposing sufficient levels of discipline (with the incentive of loot or the threat of punishment) to ensure that the rank and file remain in place long enough to fight. The capacity to raise an army does not mean a settled and powerful civilization. American Indian tribes could collaborate sufficiently to bring an army of warriors together long enough to achieve what was needed; the Mongol tribal units integrated by Genghis Khan into a completely militarized society represented a loose federation, but it was organized enough to divide men into divisions, battalions and platoons and to provide camels, oxen and carts to move the arrows and the few provisions that the steppe soldiers needed. The other requirement was money, and warfare played a central part in the creation of complex coinage and taxation systems – the cost of warfare was likely to exceed what could be supplied by the potential field force or navy on its own behalf. As battles became more complex with the addition of elaborate equipment and the need for large supplies of ammunition, food or weapons, Western societies came to dominate global warfare, though not exclusively so. They developed states and industrial economies capable of raising the technological and organizational threshold of conflict and applying more managerial values to the battlefield. The result since the eighteenth century was the onset of widespread asymmetric warfare between the West and the rest, though the odds could sometimes be overcome if traditional communities gained access to the new weaponry or if they could surprise their opponent. Increasingly, the only way to conduct modern battle was to borrow the Western way of war, as the Japanese navy demonstrated to devastating effect at Pearl Harbor. Even in this case, old and new mingled together as the bushido values of the Japanese military made surrender impossible, leaving some soldiers fighting to the death in the Pacific War armed only with swords.

  A painting by the French artist Louis Philippe Crépin (1772-1851) depicts the action at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. The battle demonstrated the extent to which modern naval war could only be fought effectively by wealthy states with developed industries, able to supply and pay for large and well-equipped fleets.

  If the cultural differences between battles in different eras and regions make it impossible to generalize about the historical circumstances that explain battle, some explanation is needed for the explosion in the number of battles fought over the last 1,500 years. The eighteenth-century English clergyman Thomas Malthus famously described the problems caused by overpopulation, which result in wars, disease and famine, all of which bring population back to levels the local environment can support. Population growth in the prehistoric age necessitated a search for additional resources, such as pasture, game or raw materials. If this coincides with adverse climate change, as seems to have been the case among the prehistoric native populations of the southwestern United States, then communities are compelled to violent competition for new resources. It would be wrong, however, to see this solely as a prehistoric solution. Changes in population levels in the vast Eurasian steppes partly explain the surges of violent migration and raiding from central Asia for hundreds of years in the first millennium CE. One of the excuses given centuries later for Hitler’s wars of aggression was the German search for Lebensraum (‘Living Space’) so that territory and resources could match population size. When Japan found access to additional resources for her overcrowded islands blocked off by the international economic crisis, the solution was invasion of China and, eventually, the seizure of resources and territory in Southeast Asia.

  This suggests crude biological or material imperatives that are all too often overlooked or denied when describing human history, but which clearly act at certain historical moments as a driver towards conflict. There is, of course, an important difference between human and animal populations when faced with food shortages, climate change and competition for resources. Human beings are conscious of what they do. War is clearly the product of growing social and political organization, and the evolution of ideologies or cultures that see conflict as justified by defining the enemy ‘other’, whether it is the Persian Empire, the barbarians of the great migrations or the infidels and pagans defined by the mass religions. In the period from the early medieval world, when battles occur almost ceaselessly, religion runs as a clear thread through hundreds of them. When the Sudanese Mahdist forces attacked the British expeditionary force at Omdurman in 1898, they cried out ‘Fight the infidel for the cause of God!’ as they rushed towards the British machine guns. Not all religions have preached virtuous battle, but those that have – in particular Christianity and Islam in all their different guises – see some form of holy war, whether jihad or crusade, as a divine injunction. The political religions of the last century, fascism and communism, preached simply a secular version of holy war, justified by national struggle or the class war. Ideologies, religious or otherwise, were (and still are) capable of exerting an exceptional psychological pressure to accept self-sacrifice for the sake of a cause defined as noble or sacred.

  Finally, there is war as a product of hubris. As more organized states or tribal federations emerged, there arose patterns of leadership that conferred upon kings, emperors and tribal chieftains exceptional power to demand fealty and compel service. The result was the emergence of warrior aristocracies whose members combined tough military service with land ownership or other symbols of distinction. In Europe and Asia, these warrior aristocracies dominated for several thousand years; even when larger and more settled political systems emerged, the aristocracies were expected to provide military leadership, rally their own peasants as military levies, and lead them into battle. This was the Prussian model of aristocracy, but it was not exclusively Prussian and can be found in state and sub-state units for thousands of years. Kings and their warrior elites did not need population pressure or religious idealism to fight, though these might have contributed, but fought over rival dynastic ambitions, claims to land through marriage or contract, the pursuit of wealth and empire for its own sake, or simply because that is what warrior elites did. Battle was the reason for their existence. In Frederick the Great’s Silesian wars in the 1740s, sixty noble generals were killed on the field of battle to ensure that Silesia was seized and held to satisfy Frederick’s lust for territory.

  All these explanations played some part in the thousands of battles that have been fought across recorded history, even if each has its own particular historical explanation. Nevertheless, what is striking about any history spanning those 4,000 years are the common characteristics that emerge about the nature of battle itself. John Keegan, in his book The Face of Battle, put together a medieval, early modern and modern battle to illustrate how men ‘control their fears, staunch their wounds, go to their deaths’. But the same approach could cover all the battles in history, if there were as full a record from their participants as there has been for the past millennium. Even though battles are fought in a particular historical context and with changing military technologies, it is still possible to acknowledge their common features, and to understand what the face of battle meant for societies as far apart as the early city-states of the Near East and the developed, industrially armed states of the present. The experience of the volunteers, conscripts, levies, slaves or mercenaries who found themselves in battle on land or at sea is a daunting one. They inhabited briefly a special kind of community, cut off temporarily from the rest of the world, in which nothing mattered at that moment except prevailing over the enemy and avoiding their own death – the ‘truth of battle’.

  The hardest thing to understand is the willingness to fight when, as the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes understood more than 300 years ago, the rational thing to do is to run away. On every account we have from the participants, battle is a deeply traumatizing experience with exceptional levels of risk and danger and the ever-present prospect
of death, or, what was often worse, a serious wound that would leave you helpless and in agony on the battlefield, later to be battered or speared or bayoneted to death if your side lost, or untreated and likely to die if they won. For most of recorded history, there was no agreed protection for those who were wounded or taken prisoner, and although prisoner-taking could be one of the benefits of battle, particularly if the prisoners could be made to fight for their captors or used as slaves, there are numerous accounts of mass slaughter, mutilation and torture. The power of the victor over the vanquished is absolute, arbitrary and, at the end of an exhausting and dangerous contest, likely to be brutal. Even the emergence of the Red Cross in the 1860s and the Geneva Conventions covering prisoners of war in the twentieth century have not affected the savage fighting in civil wars, nor, in the Second World War, the neglect or killing of millions of prisoners.

  A nineteenth-century engraving shows the Egyptian queen Cleopatra at the great naval Battle of Actium in 31 BCE. The presence of women in the front line of battle has always been a rarity, and in reality Cleopatra fled from the scene of battle rather than stay and fight.

  For most of those on ancient or modern battlefields, the willingness to fight is dictated by the options available. Social pressure, demands for sacrifice, harsh discipline, respect for comrades – often drawn from the same area or tribe – and temporary loyalty to a cause or a person combine to prevent mass desertion. Most accounts of battle from the ordinary soldier show that the event itself is dominated by a psychological commitment to combat once the point of no return has been reached. After weeks of marching and camping, actual battle can be exhilarating as men are overtaken by waves of pent-up adrenalin. Unsurprisingly, fear also exists widely in battle, yet fear does not debilitate those who fight. William Wharton, an American novelist who served at the front line in Europe in 1944, found that he was ‘scared more than most people’, but he controlled his fear because of his companions: ‘I discover the difference between being scared and being a coward is having other people find out.’ Small-group loyalty has almost certainly been the key to combat in battle because most soldiers and sailors see only a miniature part of the conflict in which they are involved, fighting side-by-side with the few men around them, the battlefield hidden by dust (in early battles), smoke (in later conflicts) or the accident of geography. In hand-to-hand fighting, found in battles across the whole historical span, there is little sense of any order or shape to the battle: the enemy in front of you has to be killed or maimed or he will kill you. At that moment, religious enthusiasm, loyalty to the king or the national ideal become meaningless. Battle is really a description of thousands of small fights for survival, which merge into the single contest once historians give them some narrative shape to explain who won and who lost.

  For a large part of 4,000 years of recorded conflict, men have fought because of what they were promised or hoped to find when the enemy, whether on a battlefield or in a siege, is defeated. Looting – whether for treasure, slaves or sex – runs through the accounts of thousands of battles. The huge Ottoman army gathered by Sultan Mehmet II to besiege Constantinople in 1453 may have been attracted to the idea of jihad against the bastion of Orthodox Christianity, but as one observer noted of the repeated and fruitless attempts to storm the city, the soldiers ‘ran towards certain death for booty’. When the city was taken, Mehmet allowed only a day of looting instead of the three customarily allowed under Islamic law, but the eyewitness accounts render a squalid picture of Ottoman soldiers on the rampage, taking anything portable, tying together groups of inhabitants to be dragged off to slavery, raping both women and young boys. Soldiers were often not paid regularly for their service before the last few hundred years (though mercenaries would only fight if they thought they would profit from it with cash, salaries or loot), so they would take any perquisites of war they could find. At Poltava in 1709, Russian troops stripped their Swedish enemies naked on the battlefield, dead and wounded, and took away the boots and tunics as their just deserts. In much classical and early warfare, stripping the dead could provide a moment of good luck, as officers and commanders often took their cash or jewels with them in case they were appropriated in their absence. The capture of the Turkish commander’s ship at Lepanto in 1576 revealed his entire fortune in chests below decks, and the coins and jewellery were distributed among the incredulous marines and sailors who found it.

  The possibility of booty was immediate before the professionalization of the military and its support organizations in the nineteenth century. For much of the previous 3,500 years covered by the battles in this book, armies were complex social units, accompanied by women and children, often in large numbers, and a motley crew of retainers, servants and labourers bringing the supplies and guarding any treasure. Wives commonly accompanied the march and awaited the outcome in the baggage train. Other women were brought along, voluntarily or otherwise, to service the sexual needs of the men. Hundreds of women would be employed preparing food, moving supplies, mending uniforms or helping to dig trenches. Ottoman armies numbered by chroniclers in the hundreds of thousands usually contained a whole community of followers, wives and concubines; the core of fighting men was only a smaller fraction of the whole. In Europe, the large train of women had been gradually suppressed by the seventeenth century, partly to allow armies to become more mobile but also on moral grounds. Women came to be excluded from military occupations and were left behind in the garrison towns. Those women who accompanied the army were widely regarded as prostitutes. This explains the savage killing of hundreds of women after the Battle of Naseby in the English Civil War. Puritan soldiers punished the women for their immorality, even though a number of them were the wives of Royalist officers. As women came to be excluded from military life, so battles became a male domain, occasionally invaded by a handful of women who wanted to serve as soldiers (an estimated 30 to 50 in the French Revolutionary Wars, 400 in the American Civil War). In the modern age, the identification of battle as an expression of male identity was a central feature of much pacifist writing by women, most famously in Virginia Woolf’s 1938 critique of posturing manhood, The Three Guineas. Since the First World War, women have once again come to form an important auxiliary arm to the regular forces, but now they are uniformed and organized, and bear no resemblance to the vast baggage-trains of earlier times.

  In addition to the prospect of booty, soldiers have also been sustained, or alarmed, by religious symbols, superstitions, visions and omens. There are obvious reasons why appeals to the supernatural were important. Belief in a god or gods or the power of the sacred was common to almost all armies throughout history. Since victory was never certain, soldiers and their commanders searched for some sign that they enjoyed divine protection; indications that the opposite might be the case did not necessarily stop soldiers fighting, but it could be deeply demoralizing. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus described arguments in Athens over how to interpret the Delphic Oracle when the priestess predicted that an enemy from the east would bring inevitable woe to the city – ‘from the topmost roofs trickles black blood’ – but that all-seeing Zeus ‘gives a wooden wall’ for ‘divine Salamis’. The pronouncement was difficult to interpret, though it was widely regarded as a signal of impending doom. But the Athenian Themistocles insisted that the wooden wall meant ships, and that the city should spend its accumulated wealth on procuring a new fleet. His view prevailed and the Persian fleet was destroyed at Salamis a few months later. In the later siege of Constantinople, when the fearful Greek population of the city awaited the Ottoman onslaught, there was an eclipse of the full moon that left just a thin lunar crescent, symbol of their Islamic enemy. The inhabitants saw this as a profound omen of the city’s collapse; the Ottoman army rejoiced at such a clear indication of divine favour and a few days later the city was in their hands. Battles were fought by soldiers blessed by priests, buoyed up by favourable auguries and omens, or certain that death in a sacred cause would ensure a l
ife hereafter.

  The conditions of most battlefields were such that superstitious expectation offered a thin ray of hope that somehow, amidst the sheer arbitrariness of combat, you might survive where others perished. The context of fighting across the ages has been universally grim. Soldiers often fought after a long march, already exhausted, with bleeding or blistered feet. They were at the mercy of the weather, and mud, rain or snow made a tough assignment tougher still. Dirt, insects, infection and hunger added to a soldier’s routine woes. The anti-hero in Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front complains that his experience of war is only ‘despair, death, fear… an abyss of suffering’. The searing stories of the retreat of Napoleon’s Grande Armée from Russia in 1812 show what price ordinary soldiers paid for their leaders’ grand ambitions, as well as the civilians unlucky enough to be in the path of a desperate army. In battle, the physical demands are hard for anyone who has not experienced it to grasp. After the Battle of Blenheim in 1704, the defeated Comte de Mérode recorded that he had fought continuously for thirty hours, despite suffering an injured and swollen knee, had had no sleep, no food, and just one swig of water. This could be a soldier’s tale from any battle. ‘Why,’ asks William Wharton, ‘do humans, especially military humans, want to do things the hard way?’ Soldiering before the age of aircraft and long-range artillery was an inefficient way of utilizing manpower that too often had soldiers fighting in a daze of exhaustion, at the end of their tether, bleeding from unnoticed wounds, and all because of what their commanders asked of them. Small wonder that time and again in battle accounts, from swigs of rum before a naval engagement to the half pint of brandy served to Napoleon’s soldiers just before Austerlitz, alcohol is used to revive flagging spirits, to dull sharp fears or to combat the freezing climate.