2. A Defense of Military History (4)
The Historical Significance of the Schools of War
A new deduction now follows. Military events, as we have now pointed out, affect the history of the world in cataclysmic fashion; they have as a rule resulted from the appearance of the heroic individual figure. But it cannot be denied that occasionally the fortunes of war have been settled, and the world’s history deflected, not by a single commanding military genius, but by a school or succession of leaders not rising to any surprising personal eminence, but applying a system of tactics and organization developed as a national or professional heritage.
The best example of this phenomenon on record is the subjection first of Italy and then of the whole Mediterranean world by the consuls and pro-consuls of the Roman Republic. The men of outstanding ability among them were few, and we do not even know to whom we should ascribe the first foundation or the tactical organization of the legion, the great military machine with its peculiar and effective infantry tactics, which proved capable, when properly handled, of dealing with any possible enemy—with the formidable Macedonian phalanx, with the agile Numidian horse, with the furious onset of a Gallic or Teutonic tribal levy, or with the guerrilla tactics of the Ligurian or Iberian mountaineer. Military history must study not only the campaigns of Scipio, Sulla, or Julius Caesar, but the operations of many minor generals reared in the same great legionary school of tactics, if we would understand the rise of Rome to empire.
So similarly with more modern instances: we are bound, in order to understand the history of Europe, to study the rise and dominance of other schools of war, such as that of the Tartar or Mongol horse-bowman, the terror of Western Asia and Eastern Europe for more than a century, of the English archery of the XIVth and XVth centuries of the men who won Cressy and Agincourt. Nor must we neglect the history of the Swiss pikemen, who not only created their own small and anomalous confederacy, but were the arbiters of battle—to Machiavelli’s disgust—on a hundred stricken fields in Italy. The Ottoman Empire, essentially a military creation, is inexplicable without a knowledge of the tactics of the Janissaries and their comrades of the Turkish light horse, who beat both East and West—as witness Kossovo, Nicopolis and Mohács, Tchaldiran and Ridanieh—and built up an unnatural state which reached from Buda Pest to Bagdad, from Kaffa to Cairo. Many of their leaders, the sultans of the house of Othman, were men of capacity, but it was the machine and its tactics which created the empire, though the machine was destined to run down when it fell into the hands of degenerates and imbeciles.
Wherever a military discovery or innovation, in organization, armament, or tactics, has affected the general course of history, we must investigate and explain it with the same care with which modern historians treat economic and social discoveries and innovations. Otherwise we shall have a lopsided history of the world, as I fear is too much the case at present, when there are scores who study the development of the woollen industry or of steam navigation, for one who tries to make out the true history of the introduction of gunpowder into war, or of the rise of modern standing regular armies.
That this should be the case seems to me exceptionally strange when we are at the end of the greatest war that the world has ever known, a war that has shaken to pieces that long-established anomaly the Austrian Empire, which has turned Russia from an ill-administered monarchical state into a still worse administered communistic oligarchy of Commissars, and Germany from a military monarchy into a democratic republic, which has re-created lost states like Poland and Bohemia, and made small states like Rumania and Serbia into very large ones. All this was simply the result of fighting—cataclysmic phenomena on the largest scale. The optimist of the old Liberal and evolutionary creed may pretend to believe that the event of the Great War was inevitable from the first, that the cause of Liberty must triumph over the cause of Militarism, and so forth.
But the optimist is deceiving himself and his audience by plausible rhetoric. The future history of the world turned in 1914–18 on purely military problems. Would a great strategical conception—von Schlieffen’s “new Cannae” for enveloping the forces of France by a vast westward wheel in August-September 1914—succeed or not in the hands of the younger von Moltke? Was the submarine, ruthlessly used, capable of bringing a sea-girt state like Great Britain over the edge of starvation to surrender? Would air-raids by Zeppelins or smaller craft, or the employment of poison gas, or the invention of the tank, have any decisive effect, or any effect at all, on the settlement of a campaign? Is it possible to break by frontal attack a deep system of fortified positions, adequately manned by defenders who have line after line behind them to which they can fall back?
I do not hesitate to say that the history of the world turned on these practical military problems, and not on any ethical or metaphysical considerations. “Militarism,” over which we now intone edifying funeral orations, was at least twice on the edge of winning the war. Do not let us deceive ourselves by pretending that its failure was from the first inevitable.
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" Is it possible to break by frontal attack a deep system of fortified positions, adequately manned by defenders who have line after line behind them to which they can fall back?" Well we saw the answer to that in just the last year.