Ripples of Battle

by Victor Davis Hanson

  Pericles, after guiding Athens for some thirty years of imperial expansion abroad and monumental public construction at home, had just died, and his succession was fought over by young firebrands like Cleon and Alcibiades. Socrates was at the height of his powers at Delium, but not alone in his philosophical brilliance. The famous Sophist Gorgias had made his way to Athens for the first time in 427, and the excitement of his visit and its effect on rhetoric and the art of persuasion were just beginning to snowball when the Athenians marched out three years later. Protagoras was still alive in 424 and was joined by a host of other Sophists and philosophers who are usually associated with the first Western intellectual renaissance. Hippocrates, the founder of Western medicine, was a frequent visitor to late-fifth-century Athens. The creator of town planning, Hippodamus, was at the end of his career, while the orator Antiphon, fifty-six at the time of the battle, was delivering his famous courtroom speeches throughout the 420s, as he refined his antidemocratic views that would lay the foundation of the oligarchic revolution of 411.

  The monumental gateway to the Acropolis, the Propylaea, had just opened in 424, a few years after the final dedication of the Parthenon—the crown jewel of the Periclean building program. The third great monument on the acropolis, the Erectheum, was begun just three years after Delium, and the fourth, the smaller temple to Athena Nike, was completed by 410. The architects of the Parthenon, Ictinus and Callicrates, at the time of Delium were at work on a host of other temples and buildings in the city. Phidias, Greece’s greatest sculptor and creator of the famous monumental statues of gold and ivory of Athena and Zeus, housed respectively in the Parthenon at Athens and the great temple of Zeus at Olympia, had died the year before the battle. When the Athenians marched into Delium, Polygnotus, the founder of Western realist painting, was likewise at the end of his career.

  The father of history, Herodotus, was revising his Histories in the early 420s and probably finished a polished version of his Persian War narratives a year or two before the battle. In fact, Herodotus may have died in or around the very time of the fighting at Delium. Thucydides, perhaps the greatest of Western historians, knew intimately veterans on both sides and wrote our only contemporary account of the fighting from his own research and interviews. He too was on the same Athenian board of generals as Hippocrates in 424 B.C. and no doubt knew the slain commander well. Indeed, had Thucydides not been sent to the north with the Athenian fleet, he may well have served alongside Socrates at Delium.

  Shortly after the incineration of the Athenian garrison at Delium, Thucydides was charged with incompetence for his failure to relieve the northern port city of Amphipolis. He was disgraced and then exiled—by a vote of a hysterical citizenry, itself demoralized by the recent events of 424 that had seen its home army butchered a few miles from the assembly hall. The growing frenzy that was unleashed on Thucydides, the historian of Delium, had at least some of its genesis in the Athenian anger over the catastrophe of Delium—which may explain why he devotes a vivid description to a seemingly unimportant battle.

  Taken in this cultural context, Delium was a wounding of the nerve system of Athens. Therefore, given the very nature of Athens at this time, it affected dozens of writers, philosophers, and statesmen whose legacies transcended the meager confines of their city, ensuring ripples of the battle well beyond either the strategic or political importance of the engagement itself. And because Athens was Greece’s greatest city at its greatest age, and since Greece was the laboratory of Western culture itself, a battle so dramatic and fought so close to the city at this time was bound to have repercussions far beyond its mere tactical or strategic consequence.

  Just the opposite was the situation in Thebes and its Boeotian confederation—or so it would seem at first glance. Art, literature, and culture were stagnant. We know of few statesmen of any merit; there was no lasting Boeotian imprint on the history of ideas. But that was not quite the whole truth. If Athens was exploding in a final burst of culture, Boeotia was simmering, stung by its disgraceful support of the Persians a half century earlier and years of Athenian interference and occupation. Yet among the rural cantons of this vast agrarian state was latent genius, waiting for some catalyst like the victory in 424 B.C. over an Athenian army of invasion.

  Not all the Boeotian ripples of Delium were local and confined to the tragedy of small rural hamlets like Thespiae, the refurbishing of public buildings, or a small renaissance in sculpture. Well before Delium, Theban thinkers had apparently been experimenting with the science of tactics, or the idea that abstract laws of maneuver and articulation, not mere muscle and spirit, would determine who lived and died on the battlefield when armies collided. The victory of Delium unleashed that knowledge of reserves, cavalry coordination, deepened columns, elite forces, and tactical articulation which reverberated throughout the Greek world, finding its way into the mind of Epaminondas and eventually to Philip and Alexander—with untold consequences on millions to the east. If the Athenians at Delium were a people of the arts, then what killed them was an art, too, albeit one of a darker sort to be used for the destruction, not the creation, of culture.

  EPILOGUE

  The Imprint of Battle

  If battles are the generators of history, are they all of roughly equal importance? If we can agree that they change events in a manner that the development of the comic book or gender issues within the cloister do not, what gives precedence of memory to particular engagements, allowing some to leave a larger imprint on history than others? Why is Delium more recognized than the battle of Nemea (394 B.C.), but less than Marathon (490 B.C.), Shiloh more so than Bentonville (1865) but not as much as Gettysburg (1863), or Okinawa more familiar than Peleliu (November 1944) and in turn not so well known as Guadalcanal (1942–43)?

  In these three studies I sought to demonstrate how millions of unsuspecting people have been changed by events that are either forgotten or hardly known—and that there are battles important in insidious and often undetected ways, even if they are deemed not so critical by the arbitrary calculus of history. But what precisely is that logic of history? If all battles have important ripples, what determines which engagements deserve more official recognition both formally and in the popular imagination?

  Various criteria come to mind; yet it is nearly impossible to sort out their comparative weight on any given occasion. We should, of course, note the more narrow interests of military historians that focus attention on set pieces like Leuctra, Adrianople, Austerlitz, Chancellorsville, and Inchon because they are stellar examples of tactical brilliance, and thus enshrined as case histories in which the mind of a single general can determine the fate of thousands. In most cases, however, the tactics of Epaminondas at Leuctra or the efficacy of longbows at Crécy are not as well known to the public, and so public recognition requires more from battles than the bloody art of killing—even if such esoterica of new maneuvers and weaponry can have effects upon millions not yet born.

  Oddly, the number of combatants in and of itself is not always a reliable indicator of a battle’s perceived historical import. The enormous American and Japanese forces on Okinawa (eventually to number together nearly a half million on land, on sea, and in the air) no doubt explain the ferocity and horrific losses that in turn changed the lives of hundreds of thousands of veterans as well as those of the relatives and friends of the fallen. Yet most Americans seem to know more about Guadalcanal or perhaps even Iwo Jima. As noted, more probably fought at Nemea than at Delium; the former may have been the largest hoplite battle between poleis in the history of the Greek city-state—an engagement that many classicists nevertheless recall nothing about. The Nationalist Chinese lost an army of nearly six hundred thousand at Suchow in late 1948—and few outside China know a thing about the battle. How many fought can help determine a battle’s legacy, but there is also more to the historical equation than the mere number of combatants who file onto the field of battle.

  Does the sheer number of dead, then,
more likely guarantee remembrance? Usually, horrific casualties capture the attention of future generations—but tragically not always. Otherwise the siege of Leningrad would be far more noteworthy than Little Bighorn—900 days of constant killing and perhaps a million dead versus an hour or so in which 215 were annihilated. Yet the latter, not the former, is probably the most written-about battle in modern military history. There is a cruel arbitrariness to formal history that puts the fate of a few hundred over the tragedy of hundreds of thousands—in addition to the still greater number of those affected by such catastrophic losses. Clearly the dead alone do not determine whether a battle is well known or merely a footnote of history.

  Location seems particularly important. Again, we know at least something about Delium because, like Marathon, it took place near Athens and was seared into the memory of prominent contemporary Athenians whose lives and works we still are familiar with today. Thucydides, after all, gave it three hundred lines. But Coronea, Oenophyta, Nemea? These are fights in the rural hinterlands, closer to Thebes or Corinth than to the grandiose city Pericles built, and so their thousands of dead have always rested in obscurity. Okinawa took on an importance greater than Tarawa or Burma not simply because of its butcher’s bill, but in part perhaps because of its proximity to the Japanese homeland. Had the al-Qaeda terrorists of September 11 chosen to crash their hijacked jets into Fresno’s only two existing “skyscrapers,” there may well have been three thousand Americans dead while at work in their offices, but it is not so likely that the nation itself would have been so radically transformed. The reason is not just that the World Trade Center is a national icon and known internationally and our Security Bank Building is not.

  Rather—terribile dictu—there were not Fresnans in New York’s twin buildings, but instead far more influential men and women who write our books, edit our newspapers, bring us the evening news, run our companies, and monitor our financial health. These so-called movers and shakers saw firsthand, and in some cases were in, what would become an inferno of twenty acres in the very midst of the most powerful city in the history of civilization. Shiloh was located in between North and South, easily accessible by river transport, and a strategic nexus of the entire enormous Western theater in a manner that even the greater nightmare of Cold Harbor was not.

  Timing is critical as well, both in the more immediate sense of a battle’s effect on the tactical and strategic computation of an ongoing war, and on the pulse of a larger popular culture. Delium closed down an entire front; in the same manner Shiloh opened one up even larger. The much-heralded Chaeronea ended the free Greek city-state; the nearly forgotten second battle of Coronea a few miles away did not. In contrast, it is hard to determine precisely what the terrible shelling and bombing at Khe Sanh accomplished—other than perhaps blowing apart as many as fifty thousand North Vietnamese in a few weeks and serving as an exemplar of American courage, tenacity, and frightening lethality. Okinawa will be forever connected with the decision to drop the atomic bombs and the armistice that came only six weeks after the island was declared secure; and yet we know less than we should about its suicidal horror only because the end of Nazism and the close of the European theater were simultaneous events that drew American attention away from the Pacific. Chance has much to do with the hierarchy of formal historical commemoration.

  But just as important as space and time in calculating the immediate military ripples of battle are the more long-term cultural and social currents that can arise. September 11 seemed to be a divide in a variety of contexts, coming immediately after the end of the Clinton administration and in the inaugural year of the Bush presidency—marking an end to a two-decade era of apparent restraint in the face of dozens of past terrorist attacks upon the United States. The loss of three thousand was almost immediately recognized by Americans as the straw that broke the camel’s back—in the same way perhaps the invasion of Poland became the powder keg of World War II, while the earlier extinction of Czechoslovakia is nearly forgotten. The lost at Pearl Harbor seemed to have had more effect on the world than the many thousands butchered at the Rape of Nanking—the former brought to Americans their own dead and led them to war, the latter provided us abstract outrage at the fate of far distant others.

  Cannae is also heralded in a way the immediately prior brutal fighting at Lake Trasimene and Trebia is not. Hannibal’s masterpiece victory took place no closer to Rome and saw not too many more casualties than Trasimene. But Cannae came at the end of a string of Roman defeats and left Italy demoralized and bereft of frontline legionaries for almost six months—Rome itself being relatively vulnerable to immediate attack. Tet was a devastating military defeat for the communist forces in South Vietnam and one of the most lopsided victories in American military history. Yet it is remembered today with a strange mixture of humiliation, loss, and regret—inasmuch as the fighting in Saigon broke out just a few weeks after an American administration had promised that the war was near a close and the enemy exhausted. To many influential Americans—and especially Walter Cronkite—that the communists could lose forty thousand men in and around South Vietnam’s major cities oddly seemed to reflect power rather than the promised desperation. Timing, the offspring of fate and chance, can be everything in determining an engagement’s legacy.

  There are, of course, the flukes of history that affect, perhaps unfairly and cruelly so, the degree of historical deference given to battles. Had Socrates not fought at Delium, we would have no mention of the fighting in any of Plato’s dialogues. Little Bighorn is infamous because of the improbability of Native Americans killing all opposing federal troops who a decade earlier had fought so magnificently on both sides in the Civil War—and perhaps also because the annihilation of every single American soldier under Custer at that small hillock came amid chauvinistic celebrations of the centenary of the nation’s birth. That being said, had colorful, handsome, boisterous, and unstable George Armstrong Custer been absent we would have known much less of a final encirclement forever immortalized as “Custer’s Last Stand.”

  I know many literary critics who can recall that Cervantes fought at the Battle of Lepanto, or that Byron wrote a poem about Don Juan, but otherwise know nothing of the battle’s gruesome details or larger historical context. They certainly care little about the near-contemporary siege of Malta or the horrific fighting on Cyprus weeks before Lepanto. Take Teddy Roosevelt away from San Juan Hill and the Spanish-American War is not much more seminal than an entire series of successful U.S. interventions at places now unknown and unremembered in Cuba and the Philippines.

  Tactics, numbers, the dead, location, timing, political aftershocks, and luminaries all, then, affect the ripples of a given battle. But there is still this lingering question not of actual, but of perceived, import—one that goes directly to the heart of culture, the nature of history, and the dominance of Western civilization. Quite simply, we know about some battles and not others because veterans, eyewitnesses, or historians wrote about them—and often for reasons not entirely explicable by the criteria outlined above. We are still numbed by Hernán Cortés’s final obliteration of Tenochtitlán, where maybe 200,000 Aztecs perished in the inferno; yet less than a half century earlier that same doomed people may well have sacrificially murdered nearly 90,000 of its neighbors at a daily rate that sometimes exceeded the killing tally of Auschwitz—a fact almost unknown today. But then there was no Bernal Díaz del Castillo or Bishop Sahagun around to record thousands walking up the great pyramid to their deaths—and neither printing presses, a book market, nor a literate reading public in Nahuatl-speaking Mexico. Well before Little Bighorn there were tens of thousands of Native Americans who butchered each other yearly—but no yellow journalists, New York papers, or dime-store novelists to record the carnage for posterity.

  The divide is not explicable simply in terms of literacy and illiteracy, or the presence of traditional history versus a less sure oral tradition. There is something about Western civilization its
elf, and particularly in recent years American culture—the power of market capitalism, the dynamism of individual freedom, and the zeal of unbridled inquiry—that combines to skew the remembrance of battles. In Russia, of course, Leningrad is more important than Little Bighorn, and our own myopia about the relative significance of the two battles is irrelevant to most Russians. Yet it remains true that more books—printed in English, available to millions in Europe and the United States, serialized in magazines and adapted to the big screen—deal with Custer than the hundreds of thousands who died among snow, rats, and typhoid to stop Nazism. Someone in Buenos Aires is more likely to know of Custer’s blond locks than about the Russian or German generals at Leningrad.

  So the ripples of battle in their formal sense are guided by the presence of historians, and that means originally Westerners, and more recently in large part Europeans and Americans. And such distortions do not always play out in bias toward Westerners, especially in the present age. In April 2002 the Israeli Defense Forces entered the West Bank community of Jenin to hunt out suspected suicide-murderers, whose comembers had blown up hundreds of Israeli civilians over the prior year. Although fewer than sixty Palestinians were killed in Jenin—the great majority of them combatants—the world media seized upon the street fighting, dubbing it “Jeningrad” as if they were somehow the moral equivalent of one million Germans and Russians lost at Stalingrad. Yet just days after the Israeli withdrawal from Jenin, Pakistan squared off against India. The stakes were surely far higher: One-fifth of the world’s population was involved. Both sides were nuclear powers and issued threats to use their arsenals. In the prior year alone nearly four times more Indians and Pakistanis were killed than Palestinians and Israelis. By any calculation of numbers, the specter of the dead, the geopolitical consequences, or the long-term environmental health of the planet, the world should know all the major cities in Kashmir rather than a few street names in Jenin. And if the world sought to chronicle destruction and death in an Islamic city, then by any fair measure it should have turned its attention to Grozny, where an entire society of Muslim Chechnyans was quite literally obliterated by the Russian army.