The Last Full Measure

by Michael Stephenson

  The most thankless task that can be undertaken by a nation is warfare against savage or semi-civilized peoples. In it there is usually little glory; nor is there any reward, save the consciousness of disagreeable duty well performed. The risk to the soldier is greater than in ordinary war, since the savages usually torture the wounded and the captured. Success can only be achieved by an arduous, persistent, wearing down process, which affords little opportunity for scientific fighting, yet which demands military talents of the highest order.

  Almost anybody can understand the strategy or the tactics of a pitched battle where the number engaged is large, the casualties heavy, and the results decisive; but very few non-professional critics appreciate a campaign of relentless pursuit by a small army of a smaller body of mobile hostiles, here and there capturing a little band, now and then killing or disabling a few, until in the final round-up the enemy, reduced to perhaps less than a score, surrenders. There is nothing spectacular about the performance, and everybody wonders why it took so long.1

  An exasperated US soldier of the Indian Wars put it this way: “I don’t care who does the fighting, I don’t want any more of it.… The boys out here have all come to the conclusion that fighting Indians is not what it is cracked up to be, especially when it is fighting on the open prarie [sic] against five to one, we always have to fight at such a disadvantage, we always have to shoot at them running, they wont stand and let a fellow shoot at them like a white man.”2

  Brady identifies tactics as a reflection of moral worth. If indigenous enemies will not fight the white man’s way, he suggests, it robs the white warrior of the honor associated with a certain confrontational style of war making. In the early days of the English colonization of North America, the whites deplored the natives’ “skulking way of war” as underhanded and unfair. The Indians, on the other hand, marveled at the whites’ willingness to sacrifice their lives in slugfest confrontations. In the end, they learned from each other. The settlers began to incorporate more loose-order combat techniques, and the Indians learned that “the traditional restraints which had limited deaths in aboriginal warfare were nothing more than liabilities in any serious conflict with the English colonists.”3

  At the center of colonial confrontation was a disparity in weapons technology. It made conquest possible and winning probable. The arquebus and cannon of the conquistadores were much more effective at greater distance than the atlatl, bow, and spear of the Aztecs; the Martini-Henry rifle could kill a Zulu warrior at more than 800 yards (whereas the thrown assegai might be deadly only up to 25 yards), and Gatling and Maxim guns cut great swaths through indigenous armies.

  This is not to say that native weaponry could not be effective against the European invaders. The atlatl, the dart-throwing “stick” of prehistoric origin, was much used by the Aztecs against the conquistadores, and Spanish sources claim that it was accurate up to 50 yards and its darts, tipped with obsidian, flint, copper, or fishbone, could pierce armor. The barbed version was particularly lethal because it had to be cut out of the wound, which greatly increased the risk of death from blood loss and infection.4 Bernal Diaz del Castillo particularly feared Aztec archery because arrows tipped with glasslike obsidian had an even greater tissue penetration than steel heads. He also feared the Aztec slingers armed with the tematlatl—a maguey-fiber sling that could hurl stones 200 yards to deadly effect. Aztec warriors used spears both for throwing and for stabbing, as well as war clubs. But almost unique among indigenous warriors, Aztec soldiers were armed with fearsome swords (macuahuitl), either single- or double-handed. The Spanish noted with awe that a blow from an obsidian-edged broadsword could decapitate a horse.

  In the end, however, what was essentially Stone Age weaponry could not prevail against steel armor, Toledo blades, gunpowder, and mounted lancers: “Perhaps it is hard for modern deskbound scholars to understand the utter dread that existed in the minds of those who were routinely sliced to pieces by Toledo steel, shredded by grapeshot, trampled by mailed knights, ripped to pieces by mastiffs [large dogs trained for combat], and had their limbs lacerated with impunity by musket balls and crossbow bolts.… Throughout contemporary oral Nahuatl and written Spanish accounts, there are dozens of grisly scenes of the dismemberment and disemboweling of Mesoamericans by Spanish steel and shot, accompanied by descriptions of the sheer terror that such mayhem invoked in indigenous populations.”5

  However, most successful colonial wars (from the viewpoint of the invader, at least) were won through attrition. Native Americans, for example, were finally vanquished at the end of the nineteenth century not in glorious set-piece battles (although there were plenty of bloody clashes) but through the sheer doggedness and strength in depth of a vastly more powerful invader who could make an investment not only in matériel but also in soldiers’ deaths that would have bankrupted the much more fragile infrastructure of his enemy. As a defeated and starving Sioux chieftain said to the victorious General Nelson Miles in early 1877: “We are poor compared with you and your force. We cannot make a rifle, a round of ammunition, or a knife. In fact, we are at the mercy of those who are taking possession of our country. Your terms are harsh and cruel, but we are going to accept them, and place ourselves at your mercy.”6

  Even in victory the costs to indigenous peoples could be crippling. When the Zulu king Cetshwayo inflicted a crushing defeat on a sizable British force at Isandlwana, annihilating six companies of the Second Warwickshires, a whole battalion of the Twenty-Fourth Regiment and other British units (about 670 men in all), as well as about 500 native auxiliaries, it was one of the most catastrophic defeats visited upon the British Army, but the cost in Zulu dead (something over 2,000) was so crippling that Cetshwayo described it as though an “assegai has been thrust into the belly of the nation.”7 The British brought yet more forces, and shortly thereafter, at the battle of Ulundi (the first battle in which the British employed Gatling guns),8 the Zulus lost 1,500 killed (compared with 15 British). A British corporal of the Fifty-Eighth Regiment describes how the Zulu dead fell “as though they had been tipped out of carts.”9 It was the end of the Zulu nation as a military power.

  The problem for military cultures based on the heroic model of mano-a-mano confrontation of (more or less) equals in pitched battle (what Victor Davis Hanson characterizes as “the Western way of war”) is that fighting an enemy who does not share that tradition robs the enterprise of its noble and glorious aura. And this is no small matter, because the idea of the heroic is not a disembodied Platonism floating beyond the blood and guts of human experience. On the contrary, it has been developed over millennia of human combat for a very specific practical purpose. It provides the narrative that encourages men to fight and allows them to come to terms with their possible, perhaps probable, death in battle. Colonial warfare against savages who did not fight by Western rules put stress on the received definition of the heroic.

  Aboriginal cultures tended to devise tactics in order to minimize the loss of warriors (although this is not a universal truth. The Zulus of the nineteenth century were particularly profligate with their warriors’ lives both on and off the battlefield). Europeans of the colonial era looked on this “oblique” way of waging war as proof of the moral turpitude of the savage. A strategy based on avoidance of mass confrontation, of subterfuge, ambush, and picking off stragglers, of cutting off small groups to be massacred—the “skulking way of war”—did not conform to a heroic template of forthright confrontation.

  For the indigenous peoples, colonial warfare was defined by possibility in the face of inevitability: the possibility of localized victories set against the certainty of eventual defeat. Those local successes, however, could be spectacular, like the massacre of Spanish troops by Aztecs on July 1, 1520—La Noche Triste—the Little Big Horn in 1876, the Zulu victory over the British at Isandlwana in 1879, the annihilation of Anglo-Egyptian forces by Dervishes at El Obeid in the Sudan in 1883, the Italian disaster at the hands of Ethiopian tribesmen at
Adowa in 1896, or the catastrophic defeat of Spanish troops by Riffian irregulars at Annual, Morocco, in 1921.

  And these extraordinary victories were crafted because indigenous forces had advantages denied to the invader. By playing to a superior knowledge of local terrain, they could outwit, surprise, and ambush the enemy. In 1883, Hicks “Pasha” (William Hicks), a British officer and a general in the Egyptian Army (although Hicks was essentially a British appointee), marched ten thousand troops (mainly Egyptian, but with a handful of European officers) out into the Sudanese desert to confront a Dervish army under the Mahdi. Hiding within the folds of wadis and hummocks at El Obeid, the Mahdists let the government troops come on and then fell on the unsuspecting invaders and killed every man jack of them, including the unfortunate Hicks, whose head was presented to the Mahdi (and through the years, now thoroughly mummified, became a powerful totem—a wiser head, one might say). “England was horrified and astonished. Lord Fitzmaurice told the House of Lords that there had not been such a complete destruction of so large an army since ‘Pharoah’s host perished in the Red Sea.’ ”10

  Defeating in detail was another tactical option available to the native, and a successful one. Colonel Richard Dodge of the US Army notes with some exasperation:

  His [the Indian’s] tactics are always the same; never to receive a charge, but by constantly breaking, to separate the enemy into detached fragments; then suddenly concentrating to overwhelm them in detail. Having no trains or impediments of any kind, he is always able to avoid battle if the ground or opportunity does not suit him. The heavier slowly-moving troops, encumbered with trains of supplies, must attack when they can, and therefore almost always at a disadvantage.… I know of no single instance where troops have gained any signal advantage over Indians in open fight, and this for the reason that the moment they gain even a slight advantage, the Indians disappear with a celerity that defies pursuit. On the other hand, if the Indians gain the advantage, they press it with a most masterful vigor, and there results a massacre.11

  The success of guerrilla bait-and-switch tactics is predicated on the willingness of someone to take the bait. The enemy has to be enticed, invited, drawn to his death. And that willingness is itself based on a convergence of factors, one of which is contempt for the “uncivilized” enemy; another is a thirst for the glory that is being denied by these “cowardly” tactics. And this aggressiveness turns around and gets him killed, as Captain W. J. Fetterman, US Cavalry, discovered.

  Fetterman was stationed at Fort Phil Kearny in northeastern Wyoming, and during the latter part of 1866 the post had been involved in a series of frustrating actions with hostile Sioux, usually in the form of ambushes on the fort’s woodcutting teams. Fetterman’s commanding officer, Colonel Henry B. Carrington, was a prudent and defensive soldier who refused to rise to the bait, much to the irritation of junior officers such as William Fetterman, who, according to anecdotal accounts, “offered with eighty men to ride through the whole Sioux nation!” Fetterman shared a general contempt for natives that was echoed by a contemporary soldier, J. E. Welch, writing of the warfare of 1869: “I have never seen Indians face the music like white men.… I think it just as impossible to make a civilized man of the Indian as it would be to make a shepherd dog of a wolf, or a manly man of a dude. They do not in my opinion possess a single trait that elevates a man above a brute.”12

  On December 21, 1866, yet another logging detail from the fort was ambushed and Fetterman begged for command of the relief force. His request was granted, and as irony would have it, eighty-one men—almost the exact number with which he had previously boasted he would subdue the whole Sioux nation—rode out. Instead of going directly to the aid of the wood train, as he had been strictly commanded to do, Fetterman, desperate to make a decisive impact and, perhaps, enraged by the mocking warriors who stood on their horses and mooned him, was lured farther and farther up a valley to be ambushed by a much larger Indian force. Everyone in Fetterman’s command, armed mainly with muzzle-loading muskets, was killed with what might be called “extreme prejudice.” For this was a powerful way in which the invaded might “dissuade” the invader: by leaving a horrific calling card in the shape of mutilated bodies. Fetterman’s men had “eyes torn out and laid on the rocks; noses cut off; ears cut off; chins hewn off; teeth chopped out … brains taken out and placed on rocks with other members of the body; hands cut off; feet cut off.”13 One body was reported to have more than one hundred arrows in it (ironically it was that of James Wheatley, one of two civilians who had joined the Fetterman party in order to demonstrate the lethality of their new Henry repeater rifles).

  The mutilation of bodies and the torture of prisoners, although obviously not an exclusive characteristic of colonial warfare, played a particularly important role in an imperial context. Among the colonizing nations it provided proof positive that the indigenous enemy inhabited a realm of savagery beyond the pale of the rules of civilized warfare. Native warriors became at once both utterly terrifying and completely contemptible. They were nothing but ravening beasts, and wars of conquest could now be recast as wars of moral necessity—the crusade of light and reason against the bloody and black heart of barbarism.

  Where our own barbarities are sanctioned by cultural familiarity, the practices of the “other” are always vile beyond belief. Without stumbling through a maze of moral relativism it is possible to recognize the rank hypocrisy behind this view. The conquistadores, for example, were “men who shared what to us now seems an uneven morality: slaughtering unarmed Indians in battle brought no odium, nor did turning an entire conquered population into gangs of indentured serfs. In contrast, human sacrifice, cannibalism, transvestitism, and sodomy provoked moral indignation and outrage.”14 A conquistador prisoner of war suffered the same ritualized death as did any other captive. Not that it was much consolation. Those Spanish soldiers unlucky enough to be captured during La Noche Triste were put to death in a public spectacle that the ancient Romans would have appreciated. Bernal Diaz del Castillo passed on an account he had heard from native witnesses:

  When they got them up to a small square in front of the oratory, where their accursed idols are kept, we saw them place plumes on the heads of many of them and with things like fans in their hands they forced them to dance before Huichilobos, and after they had danced they immediately placed them on their backs on some rather narrow stones which had been prepared as places for sacrifice, and with stone knives they sawed open their chests and drew out their palpitating hearts and offered them to the idols that were there, and they kicked the bodies down the steps, and Indian butchers who were waiting below cut off the arms and feet and flayed the skin off the faces, and prepared it afterwards like glove leather with the beards on … and the flesh they ate in chilmole.15

  The Spaniards also used the bodies of their slain enemies. They found that the fat from newly killed Indians “worked as an excellent salve and healing cream.”16

  Slain warriors retained a potency, and sometimes had to be killed again, spiritually, through mutilation, which will ensure that they could not enjoy the pleasures of the afterlife and, more important, would be rendered powerless to revenge themselves when their killer eventually took his own journey to the nether-world.17 Being scalped, for example, condemned a North American Indian warrior to wander the outer shades of the happy hunting ground, and for that reason it was a matter of the highest importance to retrieve a comrade’s body before it could be scalped. Whites adopted the scalping habit quite early on. Peter Oliver, writing in the summer of 1778, declared: “This Scalping Business hath been encouraged, in the Colonies, for more than a Century past. Premiums have been given, frequently, by the Massachusetts Assemblies, for the Scalps of Indians.”18

  Preventing scalping of Indians by US soldiers was sometimes a troublesome chore for officers. R. J. Smith was a teamster with Colonel Carrington’s Powder River expeditionary force of 1866 and was involved in the historic Wagon Box fight. Writing to Cyrus
Brady (the author of Indian Fights and Fighters) in 1904, he points out: “As to the Indians carrying off all their dead and wounded, here you are again mistaken, as many of our men carried away with them scalps etc., taken from the bodies of the dead Indians.… The Indians certainly hauled off all their dead and wounded that they could, but did not expose themselves very much in order to get the dead ones near the corral.”19 Sigmund Schlesinger, a scout with Major George Forsyth at the battle of Beecher’s Island on September 17, 1868, describes a gruesome incident in the aftermath:

  When I got there the Indians were being stripped of their equipment, scalps, etc. One of them was shot in the head and his hair was clotted with blood. I took hold of one of his braids and applied my knife to the skin above the ear to secure the scalp, but my hand coming in contact with the blood, I dropped the hair in disgust.

  Old Jim Lane saw my hesitation, and taking up the braid, said to me: “My boy, does it make you sick?” Then inserting the point of the knife under the skin, he cut around, took up the other braid, and jerked the scalp from the head.20

  The men who died with Custer at the Little Big Horn were thoroughly mutilated after death. Almost all (except George Custer) were scalped; some were decapitated and their heads taken to the Indian encampment (the Indians maintained that no men were tortured) but others were posthumously burned and further mutilated in the ritual celebrations following the battle.21 The wounded were dispatched either by warriors or by the women and youngsters who combed the battlefield afterward—a commonplace of battle in Europe up until the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Faces and penises, as might be imagined, were often the centers of attention—the faces bashed in, the penises either cut off or otherwise mutilated.

  An interpreter Isaiah Dorman was found, according to George Herendeen, a soldier who viewed the aftermath of the battle, with “his breast full of arrows and an iron picket pin thrusted through his testicles into the ground, pinning him down.… Dorman’s penis was cut off and stuffed in his mouth, which was regarded among the Indians as the deepest insult possible.”22 In the Fetterman massacre, many dead US soldiers were found with their severed genitals stuffed into their mouths, as were drummer boys of the Twenty-Fourth Regiment killed at Isandlwana.23 All of the British dead had been eviscerated.