Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power

by Victor Davis Hanson

  Civic militarism would be kept alive even when republicanism was on the wane, in a direct line of transmission from classical antiquity by elites in government and religion, as well as in popular folk traditions among the people. It was an entirely Western phenomenon. The warrior as citizen, and the army as assembly of warriors with legal rights and civic responsibilities, were ideas found in no other culture outside of Europe. Asia, Africa, and the Americas shared no intellectual or cultural heritage with Rome and Greece and thus possessed no source from which to adopt fully the peculiar Roman republican notion of voting assemblies and formal citizen soldiers.

  Even during the so-called Dark Ages in “barbaric” Europe (A.D. 500–1000), civic armies like the Merovingians in western Europe, the Visigoths in Spain, and the Lombards in Italy would, like the Byzantines to the east, adopt Roman military nomenclature and organization to defend their civitates through the use of levies of citizen soldiers. Northern European skill at fortifications, road-building, and military science that kept Islam at bay was handed down directly from the old Roman imperial administration; exercitus, legio, regnum, imperium, and other Latin military and political terminology—or in the East their Greek counterparts— continued to be the language of war from the fifth century A.D. on into the medieval period. The stratagems of Frontinus and Valerius Maximus concerning the use of civic armies would be carefully studied in the late Middle Ages. The patristic writers of the late empire, Dark Ages, and medieval Christendom—from Ambrose and Augustine to Gratian in his Decretum (1140) and Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologiae—outlined the conditions under which the Christian commonwealth could wage a just and legal war (ius in bello), one that would be attuned to the values of a mobilized citizenry.

  During the Renaissance the military precepts of thinkers as diverse as Xenophon and Vegetius—the most widely cited Latin author of the ancient world between the fifth and seventeenth centuries A.D.—would be adopted by Italians like Leonardo Brunni and Machiavelli. Pocket-sized manuscripts of Vegetius, translated into English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish, were published in book form to be used by medieval generals in the field. Even the conquistadors of Charles V’s autocratic reign were imbued with the notion that they were a tiny nation-in-arms as they marched on Tenochtitlán, each soldier enjoying particular rights and protections as a Spanish subject that were unknown among their Mexica adversaries.

  Constitutional government itself would eventually reappear and expand among the pikemen of Switzerland during the Middle Ages, again in fifteenth-century Italy, and in a manner of sorts never forgotten even in monarchial Byzantine Greece, before becoming firmly entrenched with the rise of the modern nation-state in Europe, the Americas, and Australia. In all such instances the best exemplar for those like Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Guibert who called for a return to “a nation-in-arms” was the classical state, and the authors of emulation Sallust, Cicero, Livy, and Plutarch, with their stories of the great levies of the Roman Republic.

  Citizens as Killers

  Civic militarism itself would not always ensure numerical superiority for Western armies—the manpower pool of Europe and its colonies would often turn out to be inferior to that of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Nor would a nation-in-arms always be guaranteed victory through greater morale. At times Christianity would prove that the Sermon on the Mount is a less effective incentive for warriors than jihad. Moreover, Western armies that ventured abroad and across the sea would often be small, professional, and on occasion mercenary. Nevertheless, the ideal of a collective defense by its free citizenry—the musters of the Franks, the pikes of Switzerland, sailors of Venice, or yeomen of England and France—would help to ensure that for most of the time post-Roman Europe itself was safe from invasion, and its overseas expeditionary troops trained, organized, and led with a zeal that emanated from beyond a narrow aristocratic caste—and were thereby more than a match for the numbers and the skill of their non-Western adversaries.

  Again, the latter were sometimes braver men. On occasion they fought for a better cause than the Westerners who invaded their country, ruthlessly enslaved their people, slaughtered women and children, and looted their treasure. The study of military dynamism is not necessarily an investigation into morality—armies of the caliber of Rome’s were often able to do what they should not have. Civic militarism ensured large and spirited armies, not necessarily forces that would respect the cultural and national aspirations of others and the sanctity of human life in general. In that narrow regard of military efficacy, no other people on a single occasion—not Persians, Chinese, Carthaginians, Indians, Turks, Arabs, Africans, or Native Americans—would ever march as free citizens with abstract conceptions of civic rights, and at the formal direction of an elected assembly, but were more commonly paid, frightened, or mesmerized into service to a chief, sultan, emperor, or god. In the end, that fact in and of itself often proved a disadvantage on the battlefield. Sadly, the Western method of creating public armies and legal terms of service was not necessarily a question of good or evil, fairness or injustice, right versus wrong, but one of military skill.

  The significance of Cannae? The worst single-day defeat in the history of any Western military force altered not at all the final course of the war. Sheer stupidity in the form of incompetent generals and bad tactics had thrown away the intrinsic advantage of Western armies: superior discipline, excellence in and preference for shock engagement, technology, and the readiness to turn out en masse for decisive battle. Poor planning had also nullified the natural advantages that accrued to the embattled Romans: fighting at home, in greater numbers, and on the defensive. Bad luck (fighting a military genius in his prime) and inexperienced soldiers (fresh recruits pitted against a veteran mercenary army) had guaranteed the Romans untold problems. In the end, all that made little difference at all.

  The real lessons of Cannae are not the arts of encirclement or Hannibal’s secret of tactical genius, and so they have for too long been ignored by military historians. Students of war must never be content to learn merely how men fight a battle, but must always ask why soldiers fight as they do, and what ultimately their battle is for. The tragic paradox of warfare is that so often courage, audacity, and heroism on the battlefield—what brave warriors can do, see, hear, and feel in the heat of killing—are overshadowed by elements far larger, abstract, and often insidious. Technology, capital, the nature of government, how men are mustered and paid, not merely muscular strength and the multitude of flesh, are the great levelers in conflicts between disparate cultures, and so far more often determine which side wins and which loses—and which men are to die and which to live on.

  Naïve Hannibal—who led thousands of tough warriors into Italy in the belief that his genius was to be matched against other generals and warriors similar to his own, rather than pitted against the faceless and anonymous institutions of republicanism and civic militarism itself. Naïve Hannibal—who believed that this war could be decided by his men’s ephemeral heroism and cunning at Cannae rather than by the lasting power of an idea. Citizens, it turns out, are history’s deadliest killers.

  Contemporary scholars and general students often display a natural empathy toward Hannibal. It is easy to champion an underdog as courageous as Hannibal, and easier still for us moderns to find Roman aggression and imperialism of the third through first centuries B.C. loathsome—their tally of slaughtered Spaniards, Gauls, Greeks, Africans, and Asians finally overwhelms the moral sense. But if we ask what are the military wages of constitutional government and the resulting battle dividends of citizenship, the answer is not found with a Juvenal’s “one-eyed commander perched on his monstrous beast,” but with the nameless and silent men who were gutted and left to rot under the August sun of Cannae.

  Polybius, who witnessed firsthand the later barbaric destruction of Carthage in 146 B.C. and wrote of Cannae seventy years after the Roman defeat, rightly attributed Rome’s resurgence after the catastrophe to its
constitution and the rare harmony between civilian and military affairs under consensual government. The aftermath of the slaughter on August 2, 216 B.C., affected the Greek historian as no other event in Roman history. He used the occasion to present a long analysis of the Roman constitution and the legions—nearly all of book 6 in his history—which remains the clearest and most concise account of those institutions to this day. Polybius ended his excursus about Rome’s remarkable constitutional and military system with a final thought on the aftermath of Cannae:

  For although the Romans had clearly been defeated in the field, and their reputation in arms ruined, yet because of the singularity of their constitution, and by wisdom of their deliberative counsel, they not only reclaimed the sovereignty of Italy, and went on to conquer the Carthaginians, but in just a few years themselves became rulers of the entire world. (3.118.7–9)

  PART TWO

  Continuity

  FIVE

  Landed Infantry

  Poitiers, October 11, 732

  But once the city-states grew and those with infantrymen in heavy armor became stronger, more people shared in government.

  —ARISTOTLE, Politics (4.1297b16–24, 28)

  HORSE VERSUS FOOT

  THE BATTLEFIELD CONFRONTATION between foot soldier and horseman is universal, age-old, and brutal. Cavalrymen have always mercilessly ridden down, trampled, and slain with impunity fleeing infantrymen or unfortunate pockets of poor disorganized skirmishers. Cowardly, in a sense, is this mounted knight’s slaughter of the isolated or terrified foot soldier, whether Pedro de Alvarado’s shameless lancing of unarmed Aztecs, the British 17th Lancers’ butchery of terrified Zulus at Ulundi, or sweeps of Mongol slashers in the villages of Asia Minor. At Omdurman (1898) a young Winston Churchill wrote glowingly about the last charge of the British lancers, but his story is mostly about the systematic spearing of the already defeated and fleeing.

  There is also a class bias in war between horse and foot soldier, in which the aristocratic disdain of the peacetime noble is instantaneously realized in the murderous downward stroke of his lance or saber. Or perhaps the natural insolence of the knight derives not entirely from the past cargo of his birth and wealth, but is created at the moment he mounts, and therein realizes a freedom of movement, relative impunity, and the need for a coterie of retainers unlike his brethren below. The same is true of the modern fighter pilot, whose command of the air, speed, and possession of a complex machine make his rocketing and strafing of soldiers seem almost effortless and in a macabre sense therefore nearly deserved— a different task from shooting face-to-face men who are charging into his foxhole.

  In defeat, the swift horseman can beat death through flight—those few British who survived the Zulu slaughter at Islandhlwana were almost all mounted. In victory, fresh and clean knights (the war world of the horseman is not the muddy universe of the infantrymen) often appear from nowhere to kill—but only after the tough hand-to-hand of their inferiors on the ground is over. The Locrian cavalry who nearly ran down a fleeing Socrates at the battle of Delium (424 B.C.) did so only after their tough Theban hoplite allies had shattered the Athenian phalanx. More often, horsemen at the onset of battle fear lines of grim infantrymen. Mounted warriors the world over, whether they are born or invited into the cosmos of the horse, have always hated crossbow bolts, a wall of spears, a line of shields, or a spray of bullets—anything that allowed the man without a mount to destroy in seconds the capital, training, equipment, and pride of his mounted superior.

  Just as in peace the middling and poor are always more plentiful than the elite, so in Western battle horsemen are rarely as numerous as foot soldiers. Whereas away from the chaotic killing of the battlefield, the wealthy man has the predictable structures of society on his side, in the melee such protocols of class and tradition mean nothing. War, as the antebellum failures Grant and Sherman both learned, is democratic in a way: the carnage of battle is one of the few arenas in which ingenuity, muscle, and courage can still trump privilege, protocols, and prejudices.

  No horse will charge a wall of serried pikes. Even the most heavily mailed mounted warrior will be thrown or pulled down from his mount and killed on his back should he try. In a crowded throng of swords and bobbing spear points, where the horseman cannot use his speed to attack or to retreat, even the advantage of his height and the power of the downward angle of his blows are no guarantees of success. Consequently, armies value disciplined heavy infantrymen because when properly organized and deployed they can kill horsemen. Foot soldiers are more nimble. They can dart easily behind the rider, who turns to his rear only with difficulty. The infantryman’s sharp pike or sword blows to the animal’s flanks, rear, legs, and eyes can send the poor horse rearing in milliseconds, throwing his master several feet up into the air, often with a lethal landing for a man in heavy armor. Horses are large targets and, when wounded, can become the enemies, not the servants, of their riders. Foot soldiers have two hands free for fighting, not one on the reins.

  Riding a horse is also a dangerous thing in itself and has killed thousands in peacetime. Xenophon reminded his horseless Ten Thousand that they enjoyed intrinsic advantages over mounted Persians: “We are on much surer footing than horsemen; they hang on their horses’ backs, afraid not only of us, but also of falling off” (Anabasis 3.2.19). The masterful equestrian George S. Patton was nearly crippled while galloping at his leisure and at home, only to come through unscathed amid German bullets and shells. Throughout the worst of the fighting in the Civil War, Grant was also immobilized not by enemy guns, but by the bucking of his own mount. Whereas horsemen attack far more quickly, kill with a flick of the lance or saber, and vanish in minutes, infantrymen have the advantage when the killing zone is at last clogged and the fighting face-to-face. It has been unwise, whether at Gaugamela, Agincourt, or Waterloo, for even the best cavalry to charge formations of tough foot soldiers—and Europeans, more than any other culture in the history of civilization, produced infantrymen who wished to meet the enemy shoulder-to-shoulder at close quarters, mounted or not.

  THE WALL

  At Poitiers the Islamic throng of mounted Berbers and Arabs, generally known by Europeans as Saracens, from the original homeland of Syrian tribesmen in the Middle East, swept against the line of Frankish infantrymen. Charles Martel and his assorted army—spearmen, light infantry, and aristocratic nobles who had ridden to battle—formed up on foot to hold firm for hours until nightfall. The Arabs shot arrows from their mounts and flayed the Franks with sword blows and spear thrusts while wheeling at their flanks and sides; but they neither killed nor dislodged the Europeans.

  The meager accounts of the battle of Poitiers that survive are in agreement on one key point: the Islamic invaders rushed repeatedly against the Franks, who were static and arrayed in a protective square of foot soldiers. The defending infantrymen who were blocking the road to Tours methodically beat back the assaults until the attackers withdrew to their camp. The chronicle of the continuator of Isidore relates that the Franks (or rather “the men of Europe”) were “an immovable sea” (104–5). They “stood one close to another” and stiffened like a “wall.” “As a mass of ice, they stood firm together.” Then “with great blows of their swords,” they beat down the Arabs. The image from the contemporary chronicle is clearly one of near motionless foot soldiers, standing shoulder-to-shoulder using their spears and swords to repel repeated charges of horsemen. The Franks’ surprising strength lay in the collective weight of their bodies and their skill in hand-to-hand fighting. In the fourth book of the continuum of the Chronicle of Fredegar, we learn further that Charles Martel “boldly drew his battle line” before the Arabs. Then he “came down upon them like a great man of battle.” Charles routed them, overran their camp, killed their general, Abd ar-Rahman, and “scattered them like stubble.” Clearly, a “wall” of some sort had saved France. Abd ar-Rahman had been stopped by the “many spears” of the Franks.

  What was it like in th
e confused fighting at Poitiers? The Franks were large and physically formidable, well protected with chain-mail shirts or leather jerkins covered with metal scales. Their round shields, like those of the old Greek hoplite, were nearly three feet in diameter, curved, made of heavy hardwood, stoutly constructed with iron fittings, and covered with leather. If a man was strong and skilled enough to handle such a monstrosity, there was little chance that either an arrow or a javelin could penetrate its nearly one-inch thickness. A small conical iron helmet protected the head, ideal for warding off downward strokes from horsemen. Each Frankish infantryman lumbered into battle with nearly seventy pounds of arms and armor, making him as helpless in open skirmishing as he was invulnerable in dense formation.

  In past battles with the Romans, lightly clad Germanic tribesmen had either thrown their feared axes from fifteen yards distant or cast their light spears before closing with large double-edged broadswords—weapons that required plenty of room to slash and hack. Battle on the frontier had quickly evolved into a confused affair of individual duels and weapon prowess before successive attacks of Roman cohorts broke barbarian resistance. By the eighth century, however, Frankish infantrymen were less inclined to use their traditional javelins or axes and shunning individual combat for the more classical Roman technique of fighting in unison. At Poitiers the heavily protected Franks were more likely to have used stouter spears for thrusting and short swords that could be stabbed upward while maintaining shields chest-high along a continuous line.

  When the sources speak of “a wall,” “a mass of ice,” and “immovable lines” of infantrymen, we should imagine a literal human rampart, nearly invulnerable with locked shields in front of armored bodies, weapons extended to catch the underbellies of any Islamic horsemen foolish enough to hit the Franks at a gallop. Unable to penetrate the Frankish lines, most Arabs would wheel around in confusion to shoot arrows, cast javelins, or slash with their long swords. There was no attempt of Islamic cavalrymen to hit the European lines head-on in efforts to blast through the phalanx. Penetration through shock alone was impossible. Instead, the Muslims would ride up in large bodies, slash at the clumsier Franks, shoot arrows, and then ride away as the enemy line advanced, hoping that their own attacks and the irregular movement of the enemy would result in gaps for successive horsemen to exploit.