Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (46 page)

The Zulus were far more prone than the Illyrians to press home the attack against solid ranks; nevertheless, Thucydides’ general contrast between yelling and spectacle versus holding firm in a line—“regular battle order”—is relevant to the Anglo-Zulu War. Those soldiers in both wars who could drill in formation, accept and pass on orders, and recognize a central chain of command were more likely to advance, stay put, and retreat in unison and formation. Across time and space such a systematic rather than haphazard movement of men proves the more effective in killing the enemy.

The
Classical
Paradigm

Aristotle, typically so, was the most systematic of Greek thinkers in dissecting the nature of courage and its relationship to self-interest, obedience, and discipline. He reaches almost the same conclusions as other Greek thinkers in explaining why certain types of bravery are preferable and lasting than others—and inseparable from the notion of the state and a trust in its government. In his careful analysis of five types of military bravery, Aristotle gives precedence to civic courage, which amateur citizen soldiers alone possess, due to their fear of cowardice before their commonwealth and fellow citizens and their desire for recognition of virtue that such public bodies offer to selfless men. “A man,” Aristotle notes in echoing Pericles, “should not be brave because he is forced to be, but because courage is itself a noble thing” (
Nicomachean Ethics
3.8.5).

Aristotle also recognizes a second apparent courage, that of better-trained or superior-equipped soldiers who can afford to be brave because they hold material advantages. But he warns us that such purportedly courageous men are not really so: once their transitory advantages cease, they are the likely to flee. Aristotle also acknowledges a third type of apparent bravery often mistaken for true courage, that of the berserker, who due either to pain, frenzy, or anger fights without reason and without regard for death—or the welfare of his peers. This, too, is a transitory courage that can flee when the spirit of audacity resides.

Nor do Aristotle’s fourth and fifth categories, those respectively of the blind optimist and of the ignorant, meet the criteria of courageousness. Their war spirit can be based on erroneous perceptions and is thus ephemeral. Some men are brave because they have carefully gauged the odds to be in their favor; but such fighters can be either mistaken in their assessment of the battlefield or unaware that advantage is fickle and prone to change in seconds. In either case their courage is not rooted in values and character, much less is it a product of a system, and thus neither lasting nor always dependable in the heat of battle.

By the same token the ignorant fight well only because they are under the mistaken impression that the advantage is with them; they flee when they gain knowledge of their real danger. Like the optimist, the unaware reflect a relative courage, not an absolute value. Plato in his dialogue
Laches
makes the same point when Socrates argues that true courage is the ability of a soldier to fight and stay in rank, even when he knows the odds are against him—in contrast to the apparent hero who battles bravely only when all the advantages are on his side.

Very early on in Western culture the notion of discipline was institutionalized as staying in rank and obeying the orders of superior officers, who gained their authority from constitutional prerogative. The annual oath of the Athenian ephebes—the young military recruits who for two years were to guard the port of Piraeus and hinterland of Attica—contained the following promise: “And I will not desert the man at my side wherever I am positioned in line . . . I will offer my ready obedience at any time to those who are exercising their authority prudently, and to the established laws and to those laws which will be judiciously in force in the future” (M. Tod,
Greek Historical Inscriptions,
[Oxford 1948] vol. 2, #204). Authors such as Xenophon and Polybius talked of armies as walls, each course an individual company, each brick a soldier—the mortar of discipline keeping men and companies in their exact places and ensuring the integrity of the bulwark. The alternative, in Xenophon’s words, was chaos “like a crowd leaving a theater” (
Cavalry Commander
7.2). Classical culture accepted that militiamen were to be neither terrified of their rulers nor recklessly brave. Rather, they were predictable in battle, both in the placement and movement of their own bodies and in their mental and spiritual readiness to accept commands. In the heat of combat all men are likely to lose their fear of a king before death. Bravery, as Aristotle saw, also can be a fickle emotion. Cossacks, as modern military historians have noted of all such nomad warriors, were reckless in pursuit, but often abjectly cowardly when roles were reversed and they found themselves in shock battle against enemy columns.

The Roman army sought further to bureaucratize civic courage through training and close adherence to close-order formation, regimental élan, and the recognition that bravery was not individual prowess. Josephus, the Jewish Roman historian of the early first century A.D., in a famous and often quoted observation, remarked of Roman battlefield superiority:

If one looks at the Roman military, it is seen that the Empire came into their hands as the result of their valour, not as a gift of fortune. For they do not wait for the outbreak of war to practise with weapons nor do they sit idle in peace mobilizing themselves only in time of need. Instead, they seem to have been born with weapons in their hands; never do they take a break from training or wait for emergencies to arise. . . . One would not be incorrect in saying that their maneuvers are like bloodless battles, and their battles bloody maneuvers. (
Jewish War
3.102–7)

Nearly four hundred years later Vegetius, the fourth-century-A.D. author of a manual on Roman military institutions, could once more see such training and organization at the root of Roman battle success: “Victory was granted not by mere numbers and innate courage, but by skill and training. We see that the Roman people owed the conquest of the world to no other cause than military training, discipline in their camps, and practice in warfare” (Vegetius
Epitoma rei militaris
1.1). Vegetius’s popularity with the Franks and other Germanic monarchies that evolved in western Europe during the Middle Ages arose from his emphasis on creating disciplined lines and columns. In their eyes, he showed how Teutonic furor might be properly channeled into creating spirited but disciplined foot soldiers.

Drill,
Rank,
Order,
and
Command

Discipline as it emerged in Europe is the attempt at the institutionalization of a particular type of courage through training and rote, and is manifested in the preservation of rank and order. This Western obsession with close-order drill is hinged on the fact that whereas all men are prone to bolt and run when the situation becomes hopeless, training and belief can alter such behavior. The key is not to make every man a hero, but to create men who by and large are braver than their untrained allies in withstanding an enemy charge, and in the heat of battle follow the orders of superiors to protect the men at their sides. Their obedience is given to a timeless and enduring civic system, not to a tribe, family, or friends of the moment.

How is discipline achieved and sustained over centuries? Greek, Roman, and later European armies found the answer through drill and a clear-cut written contract between soldier and state. Seventeenth-century commanders like William Louis of Nassau connected their preference for mass firepower directly to Greek and Roman writers of tactics who stressed the need for phalangites and legionaries to stay in close formation. The ability to march in order and line up in rank has immediate and more abstract advantages. Troops can be deployed and be given orders more quickly and efficiently when they march in close formations. Close-order columns and lines are the fountainheads of collective fire and make sequential volleys by rifle companies possible. But drill itself in a larger sense reinforces the soldier’s attention to commands. The willingness to march in step with his peers is at the source of a Western soldier’s readiness to do exactly what his commanding officer orders. A man who can find his spot in formation, march in cadence with his fellows, and keep rank is more likely to obey other more key orders, to use his weapons on command, and ultimately to defeat the enemy.

Westerners especially put a much greater emphasis on just this strange notion of keeping together in time:

But in fact close-order drill is conspicuous by its absence in most armies and military traditions. From a world perspective, indeed, the way Greeks and Romans and then modern Europeans exploited the psychological effect of keeping together in time was an oddity, not the norm of military history. Why should Europeans have specialized in exploiting the extraordinary possibilities of close-order drill? (W. McNeill, Keeping Together in
Time,
4)

McNeill goes on to give a variety of answers to his own question, but central to his entire discussion is the notion of civic community, or the idea that freemen enter a consensual contract with their military and thereby expect rights and accept responsibilities. In such an environment, drill is not seen necessarily as oppressive even to highly individualistic Westerners, but as an obvious manifestation of egalitarianism that brings all soldiers from widely varying backgrounds into a uniformly clothed, identical-appearing, and fluid-moving single body, where private identity and individual status is for a time shed. Drill, McNeill believes, was quite at home in “active, participatory citizenship that was the hallmark of the Greek and Roman concepts of freedom” (112). We might add that the close order of the Greek phalanx, where each man occupied a slot equidistant from another, was a reflection of the assembly hall, in which every male citizen held the same right as another—and both egalitarian bodies were ultimately fueled by the Greek countryside, where a checkerboard of farms, not vast estates, was the norm.

Adolescents who enter the freshman class at, for example, Virginia Military Institute are immediately shorn of their hair, deprived of their civilian clothes, and taught to drill and march in step—as prior class, race, or political loyalties fade into the columns of identically appearing, moving, and chanting cadets. Take the most vicious street or motorcycle gang, replete with Uzi machine guns and years of experience in shooting rival thugs, and it would not stand a chance in battle against a regiment of armed VMI classmates—none of whom have a single serious misdemeanor record of arrest or have fired a shot in anger their entire lives. Yet VMI cadets, unlike well-disciplined Nazis or Stalinist goose-stepping infantrymen, are fully apprised of the conditions of their service and are largely protected through a system of military justice from capricious punishment—and accept that gratuitous violence on their own part will be severely punished. Such is the power of drill and the discipline it spawns in creating civic loyalty from tribal and familial obligations.

Fighting in rank and formation is in some sense the ultimate manifestation of Western egalitarianism, as all hierarchy outside the battlefield fades before the anonymity of a phalanx of like-minded and trained peers. Presumably, the Carthaginians hired the Spartan drillmaster Xanthippus in the First Punic War for the same reason the Japanese enlisted French and German field instructors during the latter nineteenth century: to create soldiers, whether phalangites or riflemen, who could drill and march in rank and therefore fight in the deadly manner of Westerners—as both the Romans and the Americans were shortly to learn. Vegetius, some two millennia ago, outlined this peculiar Western emphasis on drill:

Right at the beginning of their training, recruits must be taught the military step. For on the march and in the battle line nothing should be kept safeguarded more diligently than that all the troops should keep in step. This can only be achieved through repeated practice by which they learn how to march quickly and in formation. An army which is split up and not in order is always in serious danger from the enemy. (
Epitoma rei militaris
1.1.9)

Central to the European tradition of military discipline is the emphasis on defense, or the belief, as we have seen from Herodotus, that it is better not to run than to be an accomplished killer. Aristotle in the
Politics
(7.1324b15ff) relates the strange customs of nonpolis peoples who put unusual emphasis on killing the enemy—Scythians cannot drink from a ceremonial cup until they have killed a man, Iberians put spits around warriors’ graves to mark the number of men they had slain in battle, Macedonians must wear a halter, not a belt, until they cut down a man in battle—as in sharp contrast with the mores of the city-state. The Zulu army also belonged to this long tribal tradition, as its warriors received necklaces of willow sticks signifying the number of “kills” each had confirmed.

As Aristotle also pointed out, the Western emphasis on defensive cohesion, closely associated with drill and order, puts the highest premium on maintaining the integrity of a position or formation. All codes of military justice in the West clearly define cowardice first as running from formation or abandoning rank, regardless of the situation, not as a failure to kill particular numbers of the enemy. If an Aztec warrior found prestige in overwhelming and capturing a string of noble prisoners, a Spanish harquebusier or pikeman was heralded for keeping his place in line and supporting the cohesion of the line or column as it rather anonymously mowed down the enemy. In the context of the Zulu wars the British, like the Zulus, possessed a method of attack and a predictable manner of fighting. But the British system accentuated formation, drill, and order, and called courageous those who upheld those very values. In an abstract sense, soldiers who fight as one—shoot in volleys, charge on order as a group, retire when ordered, and do not pursue rashly, prematurely, or for too long—defeat their enemies.