Wargames
Page 6
What set some of the Australian tribes apart was their use of a unique device, the boomerang. Elsewhere, long-range weapons consisted of throwing spears as well as bows and arrows. Yet whatever the weapons of choice, some measures were taken to make them less lethal than those used for “real” war as well as hunting. For example, the effective range of the bows used by the Huli, another New Guinean tribe, was about fifty yards. In “battle,” though, the two parties would exchange arrows at 50–100 yards, making it hard to hit one’s target and allowing one’s opponent plenty of time to dodge the arrows coming at him.66 In other cases the arrows were not provided with feathers, thus making them less accurate. In others still, special large shields were used, offering better protection than those commonly carried during raids; what made this possible, of course, was the fact that they did not have to be carried very far, as on raids. Finally, the Higi of the southwestern United States simply discarded the weapons normally used for hunting and war, using staffs instead.67
In the Marquesas Islands, as in French Polynesia as a whole, weapons were made of heavy hardwood studded with razor-sharp shark teeth. Internecine warfare tended to be ferocious and was marked by great cruelty, as warriors literally sawed each other to pieces, and by some accounts engaged in ritual cannibalism. Yet there were also occasions when the warriors put their weapons aside. Instead they formed skirmishing lines and pelted each other with chestnuts, young coconuts, young breadfruit, and even small stones. This method resulted in a very great reduction in the number of casualties, but it did not altogether eliminate them. Here and there a hit, fortunate or unfortunate as the case might be, led to a man being killed.68 In all the encounters discussed so far, not only were casualties very low in comparison with the length of time spent “fighting,” but the proceedings might end after a single warrior on either side died or was seriously wounded. To that extent it is even possible to speak of “victory points,” similar to those used in many other kinds of wargames.
William Buckley was an English convict who was deported to Australia in 1803. He escaped and spent the next thirty-two years living with the Aboriginal tribes. In his memoirs, dictated after he had returned to “civilization” (he himself was illiterate), he says that he witnessed about a dozen encounters of this kind. Though conducted with the aid of spears and boomerangs and lasting for hours, they were leisurely affairs that allowed for interruptions and regularly resulted in just one to three people dead.69 The aborigines were hardly unique in this respect; one seventeenth-century eyewitness of Algonquian Indian warfare claimed that, taking turns to fire their arrows, they might “fight for seven years without killing seven men.”70 According to the testimony of an old Blackfoot in 1787–8, a day-long engagement might leave several warriors injured but none killed. By dusk nobody had taken even a single scalp; since doing so was one of the main objectives of Blackfoot warfare, that fact was a miracle indeed.71 Much the same applied to the Eskimo of the Bering Strait, whose customs in this respect resembled those of the other tribes considered here.72
Clearly one thing the encounters did not aim to do was inflict large-scale slaughter. That much was admitted even by some pre-1914 German missionaries and administrators in Papua New Guinea, whose normal objective in writing was to show how uncivilized, how utterly barbarian, their charges were – and, by implication how strong their need to be ruled by Europeans in general and by Germans in particular.73 Nor do they fit easily into neo-Malthusian “ecological” theories that seek the origins of war in the need to keep a balance between population and resources, especially land. Indeed it has been suggested that land ownership, to the extent that it played any role, did not act as one of war’s causes but only underwent accidental change as a result of it.74
Some anthropologists see the encounters as a Machiavellian device in the hands of tribal elders, enabling young men to discharge their aggression at relatively low cost. Meanwhile the elders, working behind the scenes, kept their own influence intact. To students during the 1970s and 1980s they were part of an elaborate “male supremacist” complex. The goal was to keep women firmly in their place and willing to accept male decisions concerning such vital matters as marriage, property, custody over children, etc. It was done by providing a graphic, if comparatively harmless, display of what men could do should the appropriate circumstances arise, much in the same way as other forms of sport, wrestling and dueling specifically included, did.75 This would explain why women’s presence at the matches was tolerated, indeed encouraged; as we shall see, it was not the only time women enjoyed watching men pretending to kill each other or actually doing so. Others still saw mock warfare as a method for reinforcing group solidarity.76 If so, then it had something in common with the kind of modern educational institute, military or civilian, that maintains a football team.
Whatever the truth, the danger always existed that the skirmishing would get out of hand. Deliberately or not, it might turn into the real thing. Returning to the Mae, this was most likely to happen if one side pushed through its design of outflanking the other, made its way among the houses and gardens, and reemerged in the open; or else if the warriors who made the attempt were caught in the act. In the second case they were regarded as outlaws. Circumstances permitting, they might be killed and have their bodies left in the field as a warning to the rest. The same might happen if bystanders were killed either by accident or by design. Most serious of all, so-called “rubbish men,” meaning those whose social status was low, sometimes presumed to take on an opposing fight leader. In that case, so great was the danger of escalation that such a person, should he have killed the enemy, might be put to death by his own comrades.
Other peoples had their own ideas as to what was, and was not, acceptable. For example, sanctuaries might or might not be provided. Noncombatants might be allowed to assist their warriors by warning them, feeding them, and providing them with arrows, or they might not. The victorious party might be permitted to pursue – which might very well lead to a much larger number of casualties and permanently embitter relations between the two sides – or it might not. Some communities had rules that only allowed arrows to be fired at the opposing men’s legs.77 Though escalation was by no means inevitable, often Big Men and fight leaders must have had their hands full trying to prevent greater damage from being done. On other occasions, of course, they were looking at ways to cheat the opponent and get the better of him. A deliberate violation of the rules was always likely to lead to very serious consequences; the more so because, in contrast to many other types of wargames, there were no neutral referees to control the fighters or mediate between them.
The skirmishing, limited to daylight time and interrupted as each evening fell, might go on for weeks or even months on end, resulting in little if any bloodshed. Then one day a few warriors might lose their lives, incidentally proving that, until that point, it was restraint and not incapacity that had governed the proceedings. The outcome could be some of the most brutal warfare imaginable. Houses and gardens might be plundered and set on fire. Dozens if not hundreds might be killed without distinction of age or sex, and villages depopulated as their surviving inhabitants sought refuge among their friends and relatives in other tribes. Repairing the damage, if it was done at all, might take years.78 Yet using these facts to deny the existence of the kind of encounters we have described is equivalent to saying that, since the 1969 “100 hours war” between Honduras and El Salvador broke out after a football match had brought tensions between the two countries to a head, there is no such thing as football.
Closely linked with political, economic, and family grievances as they were, the encounters in question did not stand entirely on their own. To that extent they were clearly part of the “ordinary” life of the tribes in question. Yet they were also separated from that life by the arrangements that preceded them and enabled them to take place; as long as they lasted, “ordinary” life, both that of the participants and that of the spectators, was suspended. Compar
ed with the other forms of war practiced by the same societies, clearly the combats were governed by highly artificial rules in respect to the kind of weapons used, how they might be used, and against whom. Not only were they held at a location especially selected for the purpose, but they were organized in such a way as to match like with like, contain any damage that might result, and allow the participants to have some fun. Some of the objectives of “real” warfare, such as capturing women, were left out; whereas in predawn raids women and children often accounted for half or more of the casualties, in great fights such casualties were quite rare.79 Instead, great emphasis was put on sheer display, to the point where “war” almost turned into a ceremonial dance. The day having ended, the parties parted, or at any rate were supposed to part, as friends rather than as enemies.
In all these ways the fights were a perfect fit for games as defined by Huizinga and others. In so far as they mimicked battle and involved coping with opponents well able to respond in kind and even specially chosen for that purpose, they are rightly called wargames. As if to clinch the argument, some of the tribes that practiced the custom seem to have been well aware of the paradox it involved, or else one is hard pressed to understand why the Maring, another New Guinean tribe, when referring to what their Mae neighbors called “great fights,” called them “nothing fights” or “nonsense fights.”80 Apparently each of these two peoples, while engaged in very similar encounters, saw them from a completely different angle. Both, of course, had perfectly valid reasons for using the terminology they did. Yet together they expressed what may very well be the most outstanding single feature of games, the wargames played by men and animals alike included: namely, their extraordinary ability to combine light-heartedness with absolute − one is tempted to say deadly − seriousness. This may be carried to the point where not even the players can be sure which is which, as in the Trobriand Islands where war itself is regarded as one of the games men (as opposed to women) play.81 So it has been in the past, and so − though the way games are played has changed very much − it remains to the present day.
Combat of champions and single combat
Hunting aside, what the various kinds of combat sports, team sports, and sham fighting discussed so far had in common is that, in them, bloody slaughter was neither the main objective nor the principal instrument employed. On the contrary, it was in order to contain slaughter that challenges were issued, arrangements concerning time and place agreed on, certain weapons and/or tactics prohibited, sanctuaries provided, bystanders granted immunity, and the proceedings brought to an end by mutual agreement. Thus slaughter, to the extent that it took place at all, was largely incidental. In case too many men were killed, either the games would be brought to an end or, by leading to escalation, turned into something much more serious. However, there also exists a very different class of wargames, such as, seen from the point of view of the participants, could be quite as deadly as war itself and sometimes even more so. I am referring to combat of champions, single combat, and gladiatorial shows. Of these, the first two are treated in the present section, the third in the next chapter.
While there have been attempts to distinguish between combat of champions and single combats, they seem to lead nowhere; here the two terms will be used interchangeably. Some modern historians have confused them with feuding.82 In fact, however, they are the exact opposites. Feuding consists of intermittent, if normally small-scale (owing to the limited number of participants and their consequent inability to acquire and use heavy weapons), warfare between rival families or clans. Though it sometimes took the form of regular duels, very often it was, and in some places still is, conducted by the most underhand means available, including the ambush, the ruse de guerre, and even the treacherous banquet. In one recent case in Afghanistan, the place of the banquet was taken by a fake television crew. Carrying a bomb concealed inside their video camera, its three members applied for an interview with Sheikh Ahmad Massoud, a rival of Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. Granted access to him, they blew him up, along with two of their own number who also went to heaven.83
By contrast, to hold a combat of champions or single combat it was first of all necessary to suspend what hostilities were going on at the time. Often this was done by means of an explicit covenant crafted by spokesmen on both sides. Even when this did not happen, some kind of tacit agreement was needed if the enemies were temporarily to put down their arms, separate, create some kind of ring or arena, and permit the encounter to take place. As the contestants challenged and faced one another in the open, most of the strategies commonly used in feuding were rendered irrelevant. Another reason for this was the presence of spectators on both sides who, in case of a foul, could be counted upon to intervene and end the fight. Very often the declared objective of the exercise was to end the war without further bloodshed (an objective, as we shall see, that was rarely if ever achieved). In other cases it was simply a question of taking time off to admire an exceptional performance by exceptional fighters. In any case there can be no mistaking the game-like character of the encounters. They were isolated, clearly separated from “ordinary” warfare, and often enough allowed to run their course as if the latter did not exist.
Leaving aside the combats between fight leaders that sometimes opened the encounters described in the previous section, the earliest known account of an encounter of this kind is found in an Egyptian literary work dating to the twentieth century BC. It refers to events that supposedly took place not long before. The story is narrated in the first person by Sinuhe, formerly an Egyptian official of some rank. Sent into exile by the reigning Pharaoh, he lived in the Land of Canaan where he married the daughter of a local chief and ultimately rose to become a chief in his own right. Challenged to single combat by a local “mighty man,” he consulted his father-in-law before taking up the challenge. His preparations for the fight are described in some detail. Time and place having been duly agreed on, the two met. A large crowd, made up partly of local people and partly of Sinuhe’s own followers, was in attendance. Unusually in fights of this kind, the encounter was fought entirely with bows, i.e. without any hand-to-hand fighting. The contestants, presumably confronting one another in the open, exchanged shots until one of Sinuhe’s arrows pierced his opponent’s neck. Thereupon he used the man’s own battleaxe to deliver the coup de grâce “while every Asiatic roared.” The story ends when the Pharaoh, having heard of Sinuhe’s exploit, pardons him, allowing him to spend the evening of his life in his native land.84
Another early battle of champions is described in a Babylonian epic, the Enuma Elish.85 It was probably written somewhere between 1800 and 1600 BC, though some scholars believe that the correct date is closer to 1100 BC. This time the opposing forces consisted of divine beings, not men. On one side were the god Marduk, a four-eared, four-eyed creature (which probably means that he had two heads) and his allies. They were confronted by the sea-goddess Tiamat and her allies. Certainly Marduk, and possibly Tiamat as well, came under pressure from members of his or her own coalition. The two of them having agreed to meet and fight it out, things developed as follows:
Tiamat and the expert of the gods, Marduk, engaged,
Were tangled in single combat, joined in battle.
The lord spread his net encompassing her,
The tempest, following after, he loosed in her face,
He drove in the tempest lest she close her lips,
The fierce winds filled her belly,
Her insides congested and she opened wide her mouth,
he let fly an arrow, it split her belly,
cut through her inward parts and gashed the heart,
he held her fast, extinguished her life.
Other translations have Marduk cutting open and laying out the defeated Tiamat “as if she were a fish.” The story has been interpreted in various ways. Depending on the scholar, Marduk’s victory over Tiamat may have represented the triumph of order over chaos, of the land over the all-encom
passing sea, of the new over the old, of civilization over nature, or of the wicked male principal over the female one who, from then until the present, was condemned to eternal submission. Later, during the age of the Assyrian Empire, Marduk was identified with the god Asur. Some scholars believe that the combat was reenacted each year, with the king playing the role of Marduk/Asur;86 just who his opponent was, and what happened to him, we have no idea. Others have tried to link the story to the Egyptian god Osiris and to the Old Testament.87 To us, it does not matter. The decisive point is that two coalitions of divine beings were facing each other. Rather than engage in a pitched battle, two champions were chosen. They challenged one another and fought one another to the death.
To return from the world of gods to that of men, we have the famous story of David versus Goliath (strictly speaking Goliath versus David, because it was Goliath who first issued the challenge).88 The date, as far as it may be determined, was around 1065 BC. The Philistines and the Israelites, long-time enemies in a land to which both of them were destined to give their names, were drawn up in two opposing battle arrays in the Valley of Ellah, about twenty miles west of Jerusalem. Since the heavily armed Philistines were less able than their enemies to fight on hilly terrain, and vice versa, apparently neither side was keen to be the first to attack. The outcome was a stalemate that lasted for some time. Day after day, a Philistine giant by the name of Goliath marched into no-man’s-land and challenged the Israelites to a combat of champions. However, “when Saul” – the Israelite king – “and all Israel heard his words, they were dismayed, and greatly afraid.” None dared take up the challenge. Enter David, a shepherd lad from Bethlehem whom his father had sent to the Israelite camp to provision his older brothers who were stationed there. Having heard Goliath bellow, he went to Saul and, claiming that the Lord would be on his side and not on that of the Philistines, succeeded in persuading the king to allow the encounter to take place.