2. A Defense of Military History (2)
History’s Cataclysmic Heroes
But enough of this misconception of history as a thing that is practically unaffected by wars. I look upon war as merely the greatest of the influences that make history “cataclysmic”. There are others, natural phenomena sometimes—such as earthquakes, inundations, the desiccation of lands once well watered, and changes of climate. Pestilence again has several times left its mark on the history of the world—the great plagues in the time of Marcus Aurelius had no mean effect on the enfeebling of the Roman Empire—the Black Death in the XIVth century absolutely wiped out the Viking settlement in Greenland, and probably thereby retarded for a century and a half the rediscovery of America. But the cataclysm in history is not so frequently due to the result of mere physical phenomena as to the appearance of some individual human being of unusual endowments—and here Carlyle was not so very far wrong in his general theory that the decisive marks in the annals of the world are the “Heroes”, as he called them, the outstanding figures of men who left their impress on their own time, and often on the future also.
Take, for example, Mohammed: I have never yet come across any historian who has made the attempt to prove that the Prophet of Mecca was no more than a logical and inevitable product of the intellectual and economic conditions of Arabia in the VIIth century after Christ, and that if he had never lived some other prophet must have arisen to launch the Saracen invasion upon the Roman and Persian Empires. There have been many prophets of the fighting sort, from Simon Bar-Cochba to the Sudanese Mahdi—but it required a prophet of very exceptional type to frame a theory of militant religion which should sweep over half the civilized world, from no better base than the deserts of Arabia. It is worth while remembering that in the whole of human annals that great peninsula has never again produced a man who has exercised any notable influence outside its limits; Mohammed was anything but a normal product of his time and race. At the most all the advocate of evolution can plead is that he had an exceptionally lucky chance before him, at the moment when the Roman and Persian Empires had just bled each other to a desperate pitch of exhaustion after a war of twenty years. But such opportunities had occurred before, only there was no Mohammed to take advantage of them.
The founder of Islam was undoubtedly a cataclysmic personage, whose career could not have been foretold from any careful consideration of antecedent causes; but there have been others—take, for example, Alexander the Great. It would be absurd to say that the Macedonian conquest of the Near East, which added Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt to the European block of states for nine hundred years, was in any way a necessary development from the existing state of affairs in the Levant in 335 B.C. It was only the brain and energy of Alexander which created the Hellenic East. Consider the circumstances: we have only to suppose that Philip II on his assassination had been followed by a son of poor or moderate ability—let us say by Alexander’s actual successor, his incapable half-brother, Philip Arrhidaeus. Can anyone doubt that the result of such a succession would have been the break-up of the recently acquired Macedonian overlordship over the states of Greece and a time of chaos? There would have been no Macedonian conquest of Western Asia, no Hellenization of Syria and Asia Minor, no Greek kingdoms established so far east as the Indus and the Sutlej. Not merely three hundred but a thousand years of history, beyond the Bosphorus, might have taken a completely different aspect. Or again, supposing Alexander killed at his first Asiatic victory on the Granicus, where he exposed himself most recklessly, or smitten down by the chance of war a year or two later, before his career was fully developed—like Maurice of Saxony, or Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden—it is certain that his imbecile brother and his jealous and factious captains would have failed to carry out the vast scheme that he had designed. Everything turned on the great personality of one man, and his ability for war and organization.
To cite further instances of “cataclysmic” personalities would be easy and superfluous. But if once we grant that the fate of kingdoms—nay, of whole continents—may turn on the appearance of a great military figure, and on his application of strategy and tactics and organization to the problems of his day, we cannot refuse to concede that not only his personality but his methods of war must be studied as an important item in world-history. To ignore them, and to hand them over to the study of the military specialist, is unphilosophic and unworthy of the self-respecting historian.
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