War: What is it good for?

by Ian Morris

  As was the custom, the English king stepped forward to cheer his men up before the slaughter. “This day is called the feast of Crispian,” Shakespeare imagined him telling them. On this day, said Henry V, they would win one of the great victories of all time, so great, indeed, that

  He that shall live this day, and see old age,

  Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,

  And say, “To-morrow is Saint Crispian”;

  Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,

  And say, “These wounds I had on Crispin’s day”

  …

  This story shall the good man teach his son;

  And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,

  From this day to the ending of the world,

  But we in it shall be rememberèd;

  We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.

  And so it turned out. By lunchtime, the English had killed ten thousand French for the loss of just twenty-nine of their own. French corpses, the chroniclers said, were stacked so high that men could not climb across them, with many a knight ennobled just that morning drowning in gore beneath a pile of the dead.

  Yet much as it pains someone who grew up in England to admit it, the story that the good man should really be teaching his son about 1415 involves an entirely different band of brothers, fighting under a fierce Mediterranean sun rather than a steady French drizzle. That summer, a flotilla had left Lisbon, crossed the narrow waters to Morocco, and stormed the city of Ceuta. This battle was even more one-sided than Agincourt, leaving several thousand Africans dead as against only eight Portuguese, but this was not what made it special. Ceuta’s importance, only recognized long afterward, was that this was the first time since the Roman Empire that European productive war had gone intercontinental.

  European warriors had crossed the seas before—Vikings to America, crusaders to the Holy Land—but they had always gone to get away from their masters and carve out their own little kingdoms, independent of any larger Leviathan. At Ceuta, by contrast, Portugal’s King John was expanding Lisbon’s rule into Africa. It was a small beginning, but over the next five hundred years Europeans would blast their way out of the cycle of productive and counterproductive wars to take three-quarters of the planet under their rule. Europeans were about to become the happy few.

  Footnotes

  1The opening scenes of the 2000 film Gladiator re-create in stirring style the last great battle of the Marcomannic War, in A.D. 180.

  4

  THE FIVE HUNDRED YEARS’ WAR: EUROPE (ALMOST) CONQUERS THE WORLD, 1415–1914

  The Men Who Would Be Kings

  One Saturday night in the 1880s—“a pitchy black night, as stifling as a June night can be,” says the storyteller—two Englishmen, Daniel Dravot and Peachey Carnehan, stride into a newspaper office in northern India. “The less said about our professions the better,” they announce; the only thing they care about tonight is how to get to Kafiristan (Figure 4.1).

  Figure 4.1. Locations in Asia mentioned in this chapter

  “By my reckoning,” says Dravot, “it’s the top right-hand corner of Afghanistan, not more than three hundred miles from Peshawar. They have two-and-thirty heathen idols there, and we’ll be the thirty-third and fourth … And that’s all we know, except that no one has gone there, and they fight; and in any place where they fight, a man who knows how to drill men can always be a King.”

  Disguised as a deranged Muslim priest and his servant, with twenty Martini-Henry rifles hidden on the backs of two camels, Dravot and Carnehan drag themselves through sandstorms and blizzards until, in a big level valley crusted with snow, they spy two bands of men shooting it out with bows and arrows. “‘This is the beginning of the business,’” says Dravot, “and with that he fires two rifles at the twenty men, and drops one of them at two hundred yards from the rock where he was sitting. The other men began to run, but Carnehan and Dravot sits on the [ammunition] boxes picking them off at all ranges, up and down the valley.”

  The survivors cower behind what cover they can find, but Dravot “walks over and kicks them, and then he lifts them up and shakes hands all round to make them friendly like. He calls them and gives them the boxes to carry, and waves his hand for all the world as though he was King already.”

  Dravot now sets about becoming a stationary bandit. First, “he and Carnehan takes the big boss of each village by the arm and walks them down into the valley, and shows them how to scratch a line with a spear right down the valley, and gives each a sod of turf from both sides of the line.” Then, rounding up the villagers, “Dravot says—‘Go and dig the land, and be fruitful and multiply,’ which they did.” Next, “Dravot leads the priest of each village up to the idol, and says he must sit there and judge the people, and if anything goes wrong he is to be shot.” Finally, “he and Carnehan picks out twenty good men and shows them how to click off a rifle, and form fours, and advance in line, and they was very pleased to do so.” In each village Carnehan and Dravot come to, “the Army explains that unless the people wants to be killed they had better not shoot their little matchlocks”; and soon enough, they have pacified Kafiristan, and Dravot is planning to present it to Queen Victoria.

  Rudyard Kipling made up Dravot, Carnehan, Kafiristan, and its two-and-thirty heathen idols in 1888 for his short story “The Man Who Would Be King,” to titillate readers hungry for ripping yarns of imperial derring-do. But what made the tale such a hit, and still worth reading today, was that the nineteenth century’s truth was really no stranger than Kipling’s fiction.

  Take, for instance, James Brooke, a wild young man who joined the British East India Company’s army at sixteen. After taking a bad wound fighting in Burma, he bought a ship, loaded it with cannons, and sailed it to Borneo in 1838. Once there, he helped the sultan of Brunei put down a rebellion. The grateful ruler made Brooke his governor in Sarawak Province, and by 1841 Brooke had parlayed this into his own kingdom. His descendants—the White Rajahs—ruled for three generations, finally handing Sarawak to the British government in 1946 in return for a (very) generous pension. To this day, the best-known pub in Sarawak—the Royalist—is named after Brooke’s ship.

  It was the hope of emulating Brooke, Kipling had his heroes say, that drew them to Kafiristan, “the [last] place now in the world that two strong men can Sar-a-whack.” But they were not the first to try Sar-a-whacking in central Asia. In 1838, the very year that Brooke arrived in Brunei, an American adventurer named Josiah Harlan had already had a go. After losing in love, Harlan had signed up as a surgeon with the British East India Company and served in the same Burmese War as Brooke. When this ended, he drifted across India, eventually talking the maharaja of Lahore into giving him two provinces to govern. From there Harlan led his own army into Afghanistan to depose the prince of Ghor, a notorious slave trader. Overawed by Harlan’s disciplined troops, the prince of Ghor offered him a deal: he would give Harlan his throne, so long as Harlan kept him on as his vizier.

  Harlan grabbed the chance and raised the Stars and Stripes in the mountains of central Asia. But his monarchical tenure turned out to be as short as Dravot’s in Kafiristan. Within weeks of his elevation to royalty, Britain occupied Afghanistan and threw the new-made prince out. Returning to the United States, Harlan almost persuaded Jefferson Davis (then secretary of war) to send him back to Afghanistan to buy camels for the army; once there, Harlan hoped, he could renew his tenure as prince of Ghor. When this fell through, he tried importing Afghan grapes into America and then raised a regiment for the Union in the Civil War, but an ugly court-martial cut this career short too. He died in San Francisco in 1871.

  Men like Brooke, Harlan, Dravot, and Carnehan would have been unimaginable in any age before the nineteenth century, but by that time the globe had changed out of all recognition. Between the Portuguese capture of Ceuta in 1415 and the era of “The Man Who Would Be King,” Europeans waged a Five Hundred Years’ War on the rest of the world.

  Th
e Five Hundred Years’ War was as ugly as any, full of trails of tears and wastelands. It was fiercely denounced by modern-day Calgacuses on every continent, but it had its Ciceros too, who constantly drove home one big point: that this was the most productive war in history. By 1914, Europeans and their colonists ruled 84 percent of the land and 100 percent of the sea. In their imperial heartlands, around the shores of the North Atlantic, rates of violent death had fallen lower than ever before and standards of living had risen higher. As always, the defeated fared less well than the victors, and in many places colonial conquest had devastating consequences. But once again, when we step back from the details to look at the larger picture, a broad pattern emerges. On the whole, the conquerors did suppress local wars, banditry, and private use of deadly force, and began making their subjects’ lives safer and richer. Productive war carried on working its perverse magic, but this time on a global scale.

  Top Guns

  What carried Europeans from Ceuta to Kafiristan was a new revolution in military affairs, fueled by two great inventions. Neither invention, though, was made in Europe.

  The first invention was the gun. I mentioned in the previous chapter that Chinese chemists had been experimenting with low-grade gunpowder since the ninth century, making fireworks and incendiaries. In the twelfth or thirteenth century, some now-anonymous tinkerer worked out how to add saltpeter to make real gunpowder. Instead of burning, this would explode when set alight, and if packed into a sufficiently strong chamber, it could blast a ball or arrow out of a tube fast enough to kill someone.

  Our first sighting of a true gun may be in the unlikely setting of a Buddhist shrine near Chongqing, China’s fastest-growing city. Sometime around 1150, worshippers decorated this sanctuary by carving figures into the cave walls. It is all very conventional stuff, showing lines of demons standing on banks of clouds, and in another conventional touch the sculptor gave several of the demons weapons. One has a bow, another an ax, another still a halberd, and four have swords. But one holds what looks for all the world like a crude cannon, spitting out a little cannonball in a blast of smoke and flame.

  This carving is controversial. Some historians think it proves that twelfth-century Chinese armies used guns; others, that it shows that guns existed but were so rare that the sculptor had never seen one (if you hold a metal bombard the way the carved demon is doing, they point out, it will fry the skin off your palms); others still, that the demon is actually holding a musical instrument and that guns had not yet been invented. But however we come down on this issue, no one can dispute that guns were in use a century or so later, because archaeologists have found one—a simple, foot-long bronze tube buried near a battlefield in Manchuria no later than 1288 (Figure 4.2).

  Figure 4.2. The start of something big: the oldest surviving genuine gun, abandoned on a Manchurian battlefield in 1288

  The 1288 gun would have been unpredictable, painfully slow to load, and wildly inaccurate, but bigger, better versions were soon in use. They were particularly popular in southern China, where much of the Yangzi Valley was in open rebellion against the country’s Mongol rulers by the 1330s. Innovations came thick and fast, and within a decade or two the rebels had learned how to get the best out of the newfangled weapons. The first trick was to deploy them in large numbers (by 1350 the rebel state of Wu had turned out hundreds of cast-iron cannons, dozens of which survive); the second, to adopt combined-arms tactics. On the eve of his decisive battle against the Mongols, fought on Lake Boyang in 1363, the rebel leader Zhu Yuanzhang laid out the correct methods for his captains. “When you approach the enemy ships,” he ordered, “first fire the firearms, then the bows and crossbows, and when you reach their ships, then attack them with hand-to-hand weapons.” Zhu’s men did what he said, and five years later he became the first emperor of the Ming dynasty.

  People on the receiving end of new weapons regularly copy them, and guns were no exception. Koreans had guns in their fortresses by 1356. It took another century for firearms to make their way around the Himalayas to India, but they were definitely used at the siege of Mandalgarh in 1456. By 1500, bronze cannons were being cast in Burma and Siam, and after a delay (caused, perhaps, by Korean officials’ efforts to keep firearms from them) Japanese too took up the gun in 1542.

  The most surprising story, though, is the gun’s rapid success in distant Europe. In 1326—less than forty years after the first definite example of a Chinese gun, and thirty years before the first definite Korean case—two officials in Florence, five thousand miles to the west, were already being ordered to obtain guns and ammunition (Figure 4.3). The next year, an illustrator in Oxford painted a picture of a small cannon in a manuscript. No invention had ever spread so quickly.

  Figure 4.3. Locations in Europe mentioned in this chapter (the borders of the Ottoman Empire are those of A.D. 1500)

  The supply side was crucial to this rapid diffusion. After their brutal thirteenth-century conquests, the Mongol khans created something of a Pax Mongolica on the steppes, which traders exploited to move goods from one end of Eurasia to the other. Marco Polo was merely the most famous of these merchants. By carryi ng around goods (above all, silk) and ideas (especially Christianity), they tied East and West together; by carryi ng microbes (the Black Death), they also brought disaster to all. But of all the blessings and curses they carried, none was quite as important as the gun.

  That said, the demand side was also important. Europeans were more enthusiastic about guns than anyone else on earth, immediately seeing ways to use them and throwing themselves into making improvements. In 1331, just five years after the first reference to firearms at Florence, other Italians were using cannons in sieges. In 1372, guns actually breached city walls in France.

  Something remarkable was happening. Innovation in gun use slowed in East Asia after about 1350, but in Europe it only accelerated. As demand grew, Europeans invented new ways to mine saltpeter, cutting its cost in half by the 1410s. Metalworkers responded by making bigger, cheaper wrought-iron guns that used more powder and could fire heavier cannonballs, and in the seven years after Agincourt, English gunners showed heavy artillery’s value by blasting the stone castles of Normandy into gravel.

  Their experiences also underlined the drawbacks of big guns, though. While they were fine for sieges, huge bombards were so heavy to move and slow to fire that they were basically useless on battlefields. Even if an army could drag its cannons into position, after firing a single shot, the guns could be overrun by cavalry long before they could be reloaded. It was no accident that despite using a dozen big guns to batter Harfleur into submission in 1415, Henry V took none to Agincourt itself.

  Within twenty years, the restless minds of artillerymen had hit on a brilliantly simple solution. Followers of the Czech religious rebel Jan Hus made dozens of small cannons and lashed them to wagons. They then pulled the wagons to the battlefield and chained them together, creating a miniature, mobile fortress (usually called by the Dutch word laager). The guns fired just as slowly as ever, but now pike- and swordsmen behind the wagons could hold off charging horsemen until the cannons were ready to shoot again.

  In 1444 laager tactics almost caused a major military upset. For a century and a half, the Ottomans—one of the many groups of Turkic steppe warriors that had migrated into the lucky latitudes during the Middle Ages—had been expanding from their base in Anatolia. After overrunning most of the Balkans, their mounted archers now threatened Hungary. The pope declared a crusade, and a Christian coalition (including a Transylvanian contingent led by the brother of Vlad “the Impaler” Dracul) blocked the Turks’ path at Varna in modern-day Bulgaria.

  The Turks were the best soldiers in Europe and outnumbered their enemies two to one, so the battle should have been a walkover. But as wave after wave of Ottoman riders were shot down trying to break into the Christian laager, Turkish morale began to crack. For a moment the battle hung in the balance, and had the young Hungarian king not decided to charge into
the heart of the Turkish line and get himself and five hundred knights killed, the Ottoman advance might actually have been stopped.

  As it was, the Ottomans not only swallowed up Hungary but also drew the right lessons from this close-run thing. They began hiring Christian gunners and by 1448 were ready to turn laager tactics back against the Hungarians. Another five years after that, a Hungarian gunnery expert on the Ottoman payroll deployed dozens of medium-sized cannons to pound holes in the walls of Constantinople, ending the Byzantine Empire.

  And still the improvements kept coming. Europeans learned to moisten gunpowder, leaving it to dry into granules (“corns”) that exploded much more fiercely. At first no cannons were strong enough to contain the force of corned powder, but by the 1470s an arms race between France and Burgundy produced shorter guns with thicker barrels, using corned powder to fire iron rather than stone balls. Hungarians found a different use for the stronger powder, putting tiny amounts into handheld guns called arquebuses (“hook guns,” so called after a hook used to reduce recoil).

  The new weapons got a spectacular trial run in 1494. That year the French king, Charles VIII, obsessed with launching a crusade to take back the Holy Land, took it into his head that invading Italy was the logical first step. In most ways his campaign was a disaster, but it showed that the new guns had revolutionized war. With a few dozen up-to-date, lightweight cannons, Charles blew away everything in his path. For centuries, losers on the battlefield had always had the option of hiding in a castle and hoping to sit out the resulting siege, but Italians now learned (as Machiavelli, who lived through the war, put it) that “no wall exists, however thick, that artillery cannot destroy in a few days.”