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

by Victor Davis Hanson

  By the mid-fifth century B.C. the Greeks themselves were sensitive to the role that money and markets were beginning to play in warfare. Subsequent conservatives like Plato and Aristotle lamented that battle was no longer a contest of courage waged by hoplite phalanxes, but had become an unfettered enterprise on land and sea where money allowed armies to travel far from home, to be paid and maintained in the field, and to be augmented by mercenaries and sophisticated weaponry such as fleets, siege engines, and artillery. Capital, not courage, would determine who lived and who died. In the West during the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. ethical restraints on war making and economic activity seem to have been abandoned about the same time, ending for good the nascent idea of limited wars fought according to protocol, martial hierarchies, and moral economies that operated on principles other than the purely commercial. The impetus was largely capitalistic and democratic: designers were free to profit by building better weapons than their competitors, while rulers sought to arm as many of their subjects as cheaply and lethally as possible.

  In the first book of Thucydides’ history the great democratic statesman Pericles reminds his fellow Athenians about the innate military advantages their own market economy offered in a war against the more parochial agrarian states of the Peloponnese. Pericles concluded:

  Those who are yeomen farmers are more likely to risk their own lives than their property, for they believe that while they might survive the fighting, they are not sure that their capital will. Thus, although the states of the Peloponnese could defeat all of Greece in a single pitched battle, they would have no luck against a military organization so vastly different from their own. (Thucydides 1.143.2–3)

  The sentiment that war was a question of money was grudgingly acknowledged even at Sparta, where King Archidamus at about the same time (431 B.C.) warned his blinkered comrades that “war was no longer a matter of hoplite arms, but of money” (Thucydides 1.83.2).

  During the subsequent Hellenistic age, this novel notion that money won wars became unquestioned. The looting of the Achaemenid treasuries by Alexander the Great spurred a military renaissance in the eastern Mediterranean for more than two centuries as relatively small cadres of Greek-speaking dynasts ruled vast Asiatic populations in Seleucid Asia and Ptolemaic Egypt because of their ability to establish sophisticated trading regimes, corporate agriculture, and vast mercenary armies equipped with elaborate siege engines, catapults, and ships—all based on the conversion of the old Achaemenid treasuries to minted coinage. Rome was the capitalist war machine par excellence of the ancient world, as military activity was first gauged in terms of economic feasibility—illustrated by the rich record of imperial papyri and inscriptions that attest to the intricate system of logistical supply contracted out to private businessmen. The classical cultures, unlike their adversaries in the eastern Mediterranean and to the north, predicated their military success in part on the ability to coin money, respect private property, and operate free markets.

  In the twilight of the empire, observers were quick to point out that Roman military impotence was a result of a debased currency, exorbitant taxation, and the manipulation of the market by inefficient government price controls, corrupt governmental traders, and unchecked tax farmers —the wonderful system of raising capital operating in reverse as it devoured savings and emptied the countryside of once-productive yeomen. But even during the collapse of the empire and the subsequent Dark and Middle Ages, Europeans were adept in fabricating a variety of superior military goods in great numbers, from plate armor to matchless double-edged swords, crossbows, and Greek fire, prompting many states to publish decrees forbidding their merchants from exporting such arms to potential enemies.

  The alternative to capitalist-financed warfare was either simple coercion—the forced impressment of warriors without pay—or tribal musters fueled by promises of booty. Both systems could result in enormous and spirited armies: Vercingetorix’s quarter-million-man Gallic army that nearly defeated Caesar at Alesia (52 B.C.) and the nomadic invasions of Genghis Khan (1206–27) and Tamerlane (1381–1405), who overran much of Asia, are the most notable examples. Cetshwayo, as we shall see, mustered 20,000 Zulus, who massacred the British at Isandhlwana (1879). But even the most murderous hordes could not really sustain—feed, clothe, and pay—a military force with sophisticated weaponry for a lengthy period of time. At some point farmers, traders, and merchants do not work if they are not paid, and standing armies are nearly impossible to maintain without regular salaries and contracts for supply.

  For those states, ancient and modern, that failed to adopt the tenets of capitalism and private enterprise, if they were to war long enough, they would eventually encounter Western armies that were supplied by an amoral and unfettered market. In such cases, the numbers, brilliant leadership, and battlefield courage of the Other could be nullified by smaller, even poorly led armies that were better fed, equipped, and armed by those who saw profit in war. Ali Pasha’s failure at Lepanto was not his tactical folly; nor was it an absence of courage on the part of the Janissaries, or even a dearth of Turkish bullion. The tragic loss of thousands of Ottoman faithful in the waters off Aetolia was due rather to the Christians’ more or less godless system of market capitalism that produced in plenitude galleasses, harquebuses, cannon, boarding nets, mass-produced galleys—and risk-taking commanders who had no hesitation in sawing off their ships’ prows at a moment’s notice.

  PART THREE

  Control

  EIGHT

  Discipline—or Warriors Are Not Always Soldiers

  Rorke’s Drift, January 22–23, 1879

  Free though they are, they are not entirely free—for law is their master, whom they fear far more than your men fear you. Whatever their law commands, that they do; and it commands them always the same: they are not allowed to flee in battle from any foe, however great the numbers, but rather they are to stay in their ranks and there conquer or perish.

  —HERODOTUS, The Histories (7.104)

  KILLING FIELDS

  “Each Man in His Place”

  THE LAST MOMENTS at the battle of Isandhlwana were ghastly. Colonel Anthony Durnford’s Natal Native Horse—250 horsemen and 300 foot soldiers from the Ngwane and Basuto tribes—after minutes of firing murderous volleys that had mowed down the attacking waves of Zulus, ran out of ammunition. Unfortunately for Durnford, his native contingent was not formed up in a square. It had spread itself thinly along the ridge on foot, in a loose line of some six hundred to eight hundred yards, firing carbines without bayonets. Durnford, like every British commander at the camp on the ridges of Isandhlwana, had vastly underestimated the size of the Zulu impis (regiments). Consequently, for most of the late morning he had unnecessarily exposed his men to attack in sorties well beyond camp, failing utterly as the senior officer in command at Isandhlwana to form up the garrison into some type of the standard British defensive perimeter. Durnford would pay for his tactical imbecility with his life and those of his men. Thousands of Zulus easily poured through their thinned ranks, stabbed and routed them, and were soon among the wagons—and at the backs of the regular army itself! Almost everywhere along the British lines, soldiers were firing far more slowly as they searched desperately for additional ammunition.

  For the first time, after almost an hour of being butchered by systematic British volleys, the Zulus could at last use their deadly assegais (spears) at will. The close-quarter fighting with the European camp attendants ensured them freedom from the deadly rifle fire that had broken their initial charges across the open ground. Once in the confines of the camp, the barefoot, lightly clad warriors, armed with razor-sharp spears, enjoyed an actual advantage over their heavily laden British enemies, who for the most part wielded awkward single-shot Martini-Henry rifles designed to kill at a thousand yards, not five. “Gwas Unhlongo! Gwas Inglubi!”—“Stab the white men! Stab the pigs!” the Zulus yelled, as any British or native cavalryman still lucky enough to have a mount desperately rode
out to attempt to cut a way through the throng.

  Meanwhile, the British infantry front some six hundred yards to the northeast—about four hundred imperial riflemen of the veteran 24th Regiment were still alive there—began to break up into small isolated squares, islands of fifty or sixty men who methodically blasted away at the waves of Zulus that lapped around them on all sides. A few dozen, when their ammunition was exhausted, shook hands and then charged with their bayonets. Some used knives and captured assegais to take as many Zulus with them as they could. Zulus reported after the battle that some unarmed British soldiers finally died swinging their empty rifles and pounding the enemy with their fists. All were overwhelmed once they ran out of bullets for their guns, giving the Zulus the opportunity to attack them at a distance with thrown spears and their own sporadic rifle fire.

  The bravery of the 24th came as no surprise. The regiment had been described by contemporaries as “no boy recruits but war-worn matured men, mostly with beards. Possessed of splendid discipline and sure of success, they lay on their position making every round tell” (M. Barthorp, The Zulu War, 61). But after Lord Chelmsford had divided his forces, the remaining men of the 24th, too few and too short of easily accessible ammunition, were never formed into one large defensible square and were thus destined to be annihilated in pockets and small groups. It was as if their officers—like the Roman generals at Cannae—had done everything to ignore their intrinsic advantages of Western discipline and superior offensive power.

  Nearly 20,000 Zulu warriors roamed freely inside the extended British lines that had once ranged as far as 2,500 yards in a vast and haphazard semicircle around the slopes of the hill of Isandhlwana. Such a deployment, as the British commanders, Lieutenant Colonels Henry Pulleine and Anthony W. Durnford, at last realized in the moments before they were butchered, was no way to fight the Zulu nation. Methlagazulu, a Zulu veteran of the battle, later told the British of Colonel Durnford’s last minutes:

  They made a desperate resistance, some firing with pistols and others using swords. I repeatedly heard the word “fire” given by someone, but we proved too many for them, and killed them all where they stood. When all was over I had a look at these men, and saw an officer with his arm in a sling, and with a big moustache, surrounded by carbineers, soldiers, and other men I didn’t know. (Narrative of Field Operations Connected with the Zulu War of 1879, 38)

  By 2:00 in the afternoon of January 22, 1879, it was all over, a little less than two hours after the Zulu impis had first surrounded the camp. Of the six companies of the 24th Regiment, fewer than a dozen men escaped. Twenty-one officers were killed on the spot. Almost all of the original 1,800 troops at Isandhlwana died—950 regular British troops, colonial volunteers, and camp and wagon attendants, along with 850 native Africans in various Natal regiments. Only a few scattered survivors managed to ride to safety in the general confusion. Several hours later the troops of Lord Chelmsford’s center column of relief returned to the site of the slaughter:

  The dead lay everywhere, in windrows. Every body was mutilated, with the stomach slashed open, in order, the Zulus believed, to release the spirit of the dead. Here, a ghastly circle of soldiers’ heads was laid out; there, a drummer boy hanging from a wagon by his feet, with his throat cut. A Natal mounted policeman and a Zulu lay dead, locked together as they had fallen, the policeman uppermost. Two other combatants lay close together, the Zulu with a bayonet thrust through his skull and the white man with an assegai plunged into his chest. A soldier of the 24th lay speared through the back, with two other assegais by him, the blades bent double. It was the same all over the field. (D. Clammer, The Zulu War, 96–97)

  In fact, the British army never again put underage boys on active service—they had found at Isandhlwana five youths with their genitals cut off and placed in their mouths. Many Zulu warriors cut out the bearded jaws of the British dead as victory trophies. Others had stomped the intestines of the corpses to jelly and further desecrated the truncated torsos. Some heads were arranged in a circle. In turn, the grotesque blasts from the enormous .45-caliber slugs of the British Martini-Henry rifles—limbs blown away, cheeks and faces blasted apart, chests and stomachs shredded with gaping holes—marked the far more numerous Zulu dead and would identify the surviving wounded from Isandhlwana for a generation to come. Later European observers noted aging warriors still in agony decades after the battle, legs and arms missing and their bodies disfigured with hideous bullet scars.

  A century of fighting in South Africa had taught the Boer settlers that vastly outnumbered Europeans, even equipped with slow-firing and inaccurate flintlock muzzle-loaders, could defeat Zulu forces fifty to a hundred times their number—if a series of careful protocols was followed. Discipline was the key. A secure camp had to be established in the bush, with the clumsy supply wagons circled and then chained together into a fortified laager—a bothersome task requiring hours of strenuous labor to unhitch, maneuver, and interlock the wagons into an impenetrable wall. Scouts and patrols were to be sent at regular hourly intervals, given the Zulu propensity to crawl stealthily through the range grass in great numbers without being seen. Ammunition had to be stockpiled in the center and freely distributed among the wagons in the circle to ensure a continuous volley of fire from single-shot rifles that would keep the much faster Zulus away from the ramparts. Ideally, shooters would be placed shoulder-to-shoulder to provide a carpet of fire and to prevent Zulus from leaping between the defenders and pouring through gaps—as well as reinforcing group morale and facilitating talking to one another as soldiers fired.

  If there was time, the ground around the laager should be first cleared of major obstacles, allowing an open field of fire for riflemen—and then limbs of thornbushes and broken bottles scattered, or better yet, ditches and ramparts readied to slow down the rush of barefoot and exposed warriors. Field artillery—and primitive Gatling machine guns if available— should be anchored at vulnerable points of the laager to divert waves of the attackers toward rifle fire on the sides. All this was necessary to overcome the intrinsic advantages of enormous numerical superiority, speed, and surprise enjoyed by the Zulus. The vastly outnumbered Europeans, to be successful, had to kill Zulus yards distant, before the running warriors leaped into their lines. Yet at Isandhlwana the British followed none of their own carefully established protocols. Why?

  Isandhlwana was the first major encounter of the Zulu War, and the British officers in their initial arrogance had not appreciated how adept the Zulus were in moving thousands of their warriors long distances only to remain undetected within yards of British camps. While the Martini-Henry rifle was sighted to 1,500 yards, and fired a deadly .45-caliber bullet weighing 480 grains that lost little of its accuracy even at great distances, it was nevertheless a single-shot, not a repeating, weapon. True, experienced riflemen with the standard seventy cartridges in their pouches for a time could fire off up to twelve rounds a minute. But the need to load each bullet individually meant that dispersed lines of British soldiers, apart from fortifications or reinforced squares, might be overwhelmed by waves of sprinting Zulus, as dozens of the attackers swarmed individual riflemen fumbling for cartridges. Even the best riflemen might take five seconds to eject a cartridge, load a new one, aim, and fire—a mostly unsustainable rate over hours of shooting. If there were even slight interruptions in supplying cartridges—and there were several at Isandhlwana—then the ensuing hiatus of regular volleys might allow a fast-moving impi to close the critical distance through the killing zone to break into and obliterate British lines. Even with full pouches, a rapidfiring rifleman might exhaust his personal supply of cartridges within five or six minutes and then find himself outnumbered in hand-to-hand stabbing contests.

  In America, repeating Spencer and Henry rifles had been used in the last years of the Civil War; Union troops under Sherman had employed both on their marches through Georgia and the Carolinas in autumn 1864 and early 1865. The model 1873 Winchester lever-action repeat
ing .32-caliber rifle was ubiquitous on the American plains and could fire three times more rapidly than the Martini-Henry—well over thirty bullets a minute compared to the Martini’s ten or twelve. But innate British military conservatism (the earlier so-called Brown Bess flintlock musket had been retained as the standard infantry weapon for decades), the arrogance that repeating weapons were not critical in colonial wars against spear-carrying natives, shortsighted financial economies, and the desire for a heavy, powerful rifle that could shoot an enormous slug at great ranges—all these factors prevented the adoption of much more rapidfiring, smaller-caliber guns in the English army. The Anglo-Zulu War was about the last occasion in which European troops used single-shot rifles against native forces, and at Isandhlwana there were no Gatling guns to provide repeating fire for the garrison.

  Among the British officer corps on the morning of January 22 there was no awareness of the need for caution. Isandhlwana was to be the battle that the English commander in Zululand, Lord Chelmsford, had wanted and got: a chance to pit British riflemen, supported by cavalry and artillery, against the aggregate military strength of the Zulu nation. That desire for open battle may explain why Chelmsford ignored the stream of messages that reached him from his beleaguered camp during the late morning and early afternoon of the twenty-second. In his mind the presence of the Zulu army on a clear plain was something to be welcomed, not feared. The British had sought a decisive battle to end what they envisioned as a short and inexpensive campaign. They now had the high ground.