Read THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES Online

Authors: Philip Bobbitt

THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES (140 page)

BOOK: THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES
5.34Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

23
. Consider the following from Act II of Puccini's
Tosca
.

Sciarrone
: Oh such fearful news, your lordship?

Scarpia: Why this air of anxious hurry?

Sciarrone: All our armies are defeated….

Scarpia: All our troops are defeated? Where?

Sciarrone: At Marengo…

Scarpia
(impatiently)
: Yes, go on, man!

Sciarrone
: No! Melas was beaten!

(
Cavaradossi, who has been listening to Sciarrone with mounting agitation, now in his excitement finds the strength to stand up and confront Scarpia menacingly.
)

Cavaradossi
: Victorious! Victorious!

God of vengeance appear,

Fill the wicked with fear!

Surge up Liberty,

Crushing all tyranny!

Giacomo Puccini,
Tosca
, libretto by Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica after the play by Victorien Sardou, trans. Edmund Tracey (Riverman Press, 1982), 63 – 64.

24
. Quoted by André Fugier,
La Revolution francaise et l'Empire Napoleonien
(Hachette, 1954), 265; quoted in Robert Gildea,
Barricades and Borders, Europe 1800 – 1914
(Oxford University Press, 1987), 49.

25
. Michael Howard,
The Causes of War and Other Essays
(Temple Smith, 1983), 27.

26
. With the exception of the Russian and Habsburg armies, which were drawn from multinational states. Geoffrey Best,
War and Society in Revolutionary Europe, 1770 – 1870
(Leicester University Press, 1982), 255.

27
. “A wretch, never named but with curses and jeers!” Lord Byron,
The Poetical Works of Lord Byron
, “The Irish Avatar” (1910), 107 – 109.

28
. See e.g., Sir Charles Webster,
The Foreign Policy of Castlereagh
(Bell, 1950).

29
. See e.g., Henry Kissinger,
A World Restored
(Grosset & Dunlap, 1964).

30
. New Treaty of the Allied Powers, April 3,1815 (Vienna) (from the German Papers).

31
. Craig and George, 27.

32
. On September 21, 1809, Castlereagh fought a duel with Canning to defend his “honor and reputation” after he discovered that the intention to remove him from the cabinet had been long concealed. Canning, who was hit in the leg in the second round of the duel, had managed the concealment, and then denied doing so. Wendy Hinde,
Castlereagh
(Collins, 1981), 166.

33
. Ibid., 99.

34
. See Franklin Ford,
Europe 1780 – 1830
, 2nd ed. (Longman, 1989), 234.

35
. Ibid., 276.

36
. Quoted by Craig and George, 29.

37
. Quoted by Craig and George, 31.

38
. Craig and George, 31.

39
. Jacques Droz,
Europe between the Revolutions, 1815 – 1848
(New York: Harper & Row, 1967).

40
. Quoted in Droz, 217.

41
. Quoted in Craig and George, 32.

42
. Quoted in F. B. Artz,
Reaction and Revolution, 1814 – 1832
(Harper & Brothers, 1934), 161.

43
. Lieven to Nesselrode, December 4, 1820: St. Petersburg Archive.

44
. Quoted in Robert W. Seton-Watson,
Britain in Europe, 1789 – 1914
(Macmillan, 1937), 74.

45
. Harold Nicolson,
The Congress of Vienna
(Constable, 1946), 268.

46
. Chateaubriand to Montmorenci, August 13, 1822; see d‘Antioche, Chateaubriand, 342,348.

47
. Ford, 288.

48
. Paul Schroeder,
The Transformation of European Politics, 1763 – 1848
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).

49
. Brendan Simms, “The Transformation of European Politics,”
Historical Journal
37 (December 1995): 999 – 1000.

50
. Kissinger,
A World Restored
, 170 – 174.

51
. John Lynn, “The Great Question Concerning the Congress of Vienna Is This: Why Was It So Successful?”
Reader's Companion to Military History
, ed. Robert Cowley and Geoffrey Parker (Houghton Mifflin, 1996), 105.

52
. Lord Castlereagh, Second Marquis Londonderry, “Letter to Lord Camden,” September 25, 1793; see Sir Archibald Alsion,
Lives of Lord Castlereagh and Sir C. Stewart
(Blackwood, 1861), 23.

53
. Neumann to Esterhazy, September 21,1822: Vienna State Archives Berichte, 216, ix.

54
. Black,
European Warfare
, 234.

55
. Charles Tilly,
Coercion, Capital and European States, A.D. 900 – 1990
(Blackwell, 1990), 14; see also Harold Dorn, “The Military Revolution: Military History or History of Europe?”
Technology and Culture
32 (1991): 656, “The concept of the military revolution is primarily an attempt to account for the formation of the centralized nation-states of Europe by directing attention to the enormous costs and financial burdens associated with gunpowder weapons and the defensive systems they entailed, costs and burdens that only a politically centralized state could shoulder.”

56
. Brian Downing,
The Military Revolution and Political Change
(Princeton University Press, 1991), 14; see also David Kaiser,
Politics and War: European Conflict from Philip II to Hitler
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990).

57
. Christopher Davdeker,
Surveillance, Power, and Modernity
(New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990).

58
. The French royal army in 1788 – 1789, on the eve of the revolution, had about 150,000 men; by August 1793 it had reached 645,000 and the
leveé en masse
then doubled this number.

59
. Schroeder, 391.

60
. Black,
European Warfare
, 237.

61
. “The advanced technology of steam engines and machine made tools gave Europe decisive economic and military advantages. The improvements to the muzzle loading gun (percussion caps, rifling, etc.) were ominous enough; the coming of the breech loader vastly increasing the rate of fire was an even greater advance; and the Gatling guns, Maxims and light field artillery put the final touches to a new firepower revolu-tion which quite eradicated the chances of successful resistance by indigenous peoples reliant upon older weapons. Furthermore, the steam driven gunboat meant that European power, already supreme in open waters, could be extended inland via major waterways like the Niger, the Indus and the Yangtze.” Kennedy, 150.

62
. Black,
European Warfare
, 15 – 16, 201, n. 62. A recent study has concluded that the Maratha artillery was more advanced than the British on several counts but that their command structure was a shambles, with fatal consequences. At Assaye, Wellington's success owed much to a bayonet charge, scarcely confirming the standard image of Western armies gunning down masses of non-European troops relying on cold steel.

63
. Quoted in Michael Glover,
Napoleonic Wars
(Hippocrene Books, 1979), 129; Kennedy, 133.

64
. Mira Kamdar, “Rangoon: A Remembrance of Things Past,”
World Policy Journal
16 (Fall 1999): 89.

65
. Quoted by Jack R. Pole,
Political Representation in England and the Origins of the American Republic
(University of California Press, 1966), 441.

66
. Black,
European Warfare
, 195.

67
. Michael W. Doyle,
Empires
(Cornell University Press, 1986), 232.

68
. H. G. Wells,
The Outline of History
(Newnes, 1920), 618.

69
. Gildea, 178.

70
. Gildea, 179.

71
. Gildea, 181.

72
. Michael Doyle,
Empires
(Cornell University Press, 1986), 239.

73
. Kissinger,
A World Restored
, 6.

74
. Quoted by Helmut Bohme,
The Foundations of the German Empire
(Oxford University Press), 113 – 14.

75
. Hajo Holborn, “The Prusso-German School: Moltke and the Rise of the General Staff,” in
Makers of Modern Strategy
, ed. Paret, 286.

76
. Howard,
War in European History
, 102.

77
. Hew Strachan,
European Armies and the Conduct of War
(Allen & Unwin, 1983), 114.

78
. Quoted by Holborn, 288.

79
. Gunther Rothenberg, “Moltke, Schlieffen, and the Doctrine of Strategic Envelopment, in
Makers of Modern Strategy
, ed. Paret, 296.

80
. Howard,
War in European History
, 111.

81
. Quoted by Helmut Bohme,
Deutschlands Weg zur Grossmacht
(Cologne/Berlin, 1966), 84; in Gildea, 197.

82
. Lothar Gall,
Bismarck: The White Revolutionary
, vol. 1 (trans. J. A. Underwood) (Unwin Hyman 1986) 240

83
. Ibid., 239.

84
. “Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo!”
Die politischen Recen des Fursten Bismarck: Historischkritische Gesammtausg
, vol. 2, ed. Horst Kohl (Cotta, 1892 – 1905), 278.

85
. Gall, 300.

86
. See Georges Bonnin,
Bismarck and the Hohenzollern Candidature for the Spanish Throne
(Chatto & Windus, 1957), 70 – 71.

87
. Gall, 355.

88
. Quoted in Gall, 356, and cited there.

89
. Winston Churchill,
A History of the English-Speaking Peoples: The Great Democracies
, vol. 4, (Cassell, 1956 – 1958), 276.

90
. Quoted in Gall, 359.

91
. Quoted in John A. S. Grenville,
Europe Reshaped, 1848 – 1878
(Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1976), 358.

BOOK: THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES
5.34Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Arthur Christmas by Justine Fontes
Save Me by Laura L. Cline
Iron Dominance by Cari Silverwood
Among You by Wallen, Jack
The Englisher by Beverly Lewis
Demonkin by T. Eric Bakutis
A Midsummer Tempest by Poul Anderson
Beauty Queens by Bray, Libba
Silvertip's Search by Brand, Max