2. A Defense of Military History (3)
The Personal Variable in the Historical Equation
A further deduction follows. Military history must be studied because it gives the explanation of many of the great cataclysms which break up the annals of the world into separate epochs. There have been a limited number of epoch-making campaigns and engagements whose result has changed the whole trend of national development in a section of the world, yet whose event could not have been foretold from any mere studying of constitutional tendencies, or economic conditions, or social institutions. The fighting man has occasionally put the clock forward or back in the most unforeseen fashion.
To take an obvious example from our own medieval history—the result of the campaign of Hastings in 1066 was by no means a foregone conclusion, and had the fate of that battle fallen otherwise than it did all the subsequent history of England would have borne a different aspect. It is easy to be wise after the event, and to say that Harold’s defeat was made possible by Anglo-Saxon localism, want of a strong executive, and employment of antiquated tactics. But, granted all this, it was still quite possible that the Norman invasion might have had another and a less successful end. If the English fleet had continued to hold the sea, as it had been doing till a few days before Duke William set sail, the overloaded Norman squadron might have been beaten before it ever saw the coast of Sussex. Had the invader been a less skilful general, had he been the ordinary feudal chief, and trusted for victory to the furious rush of his cavalry alone, his expedition would have miscarried—and Domesday Book would never have been written. Had Harold Godwineson used better tactics and succeeded in keeping his levies in better discipline, he might have founded a dynasty and died peaceably in his bed.
And suppose that the axe-blow, which, as we know, brained Duke William’s horse, had fallen instead on the head of its rider and slain him, it is certain that the battle would have been lost and that the Norman Conquest would never have been completed; for there was no other military figure beyond the Channel in that or the succeeding age who had the genius and the initiative required for the conduct of such an expedition. Both the Conqueror himself and his opportunity were unique; it seems safe to say that if he had fallen at Hastings, England would have remained a purely insular state, and would never have been tangled up with continental politics as she was during the reigns of the Norman and Angevin kings; so that her history would have borne a greater resemblance to that of the Scandinavian states, and would have proceeded on isolated lines of its own, as it had done for the last two centuries.
But let us take another and a more modern instance of the way in which military events govern the whole history not only of a country but of a whole continent. The final outcome of the wars of the French Revolution was quite uncertain till the appearance of Bonaparte. It is quite impossible to foresee what might have happened if he had fallen by some chance bullet at Montenotte or at Areola. A well-known historian once wrote that if Bonaparte had not been Bonaparte, Moreau would have been! In calling his epigram absurd I do not mean that the French Directorate was not fated to find its doom at the hands of a military dictator. But what ordinary dictator—whether Moreau or another—who had executed a coup d’état, would have been of the calibre sufficient to enact the after-career of Bonaparte: to wear the crown of Charlemagne and to carry his victorious arms to Vienna, Madrid, Berlin, and Moscow?
It was the personal equation of Napoleon—one of the most cataclysmic of historical personages—that was the all-important thing. The special combination of world-wide ambition, military genius, and power of organization in the Corsican made the first French Empire what it was, and gave the history of Europe the particular form that it was to take during fifteen eventful years of the early XIXth century. And not only so, but the results of what Bonaparte did, and of what he failed to do, were to exert their influence for long decades after his fall, and to set going many a problem that has not even yet received its solution. The whole history of Europe was deflected by the exploits of an exceptional personage working entirely by his exceptional military ability—making history by battles.
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