Peace and progress

It is a relatively modern conceit to assert that man is peaceful until he proves otherwise. In our enthusiasm for progress and our success in achieving forms of wealth and welfare, we have become committed to perfectibility and aspire to its wellsprings as ardently as at least one of our ancestors sailed after the fountain of youth.

And yet we do fight; we always have fought, though most of the time we do not fight but tend our fields and flocks. Kings have always had barons to marshal foot soldiers; parliaments have always sought the power to raise armies; Russian communists came to power through violence; to protect their people and interests a state that was supposed to wither away supported a vast militia that was in theory unnecessary.

In constitutional terms, Americans were to be free to pursue liberty and happiness — even equality — and to carry guns and raise armies in small states. This grievously benign self-image has led to Guatemalas, Vietnams, and a stack of pious treaties. Switzerland is a neutral country whose male citizens train in the military three weeks each year. Neutral Sweden, the tough mecca of skilled optimists, has airplane factories carved into mountains, and troops who (with well-schooled Irish forces too) spent months in effortful schemes to bring peace to the Congo.

Violence

The claim that we would live at peace if only there were no causes for war is a legitimate claim, but as pungent and provident a comment about reality as the affirmation that without disease there need be no hospitals. There is disease, there are hospitals; there is violence, and there are wars. We have saved millions because we accept that disease is real. We kill millions because we decide that we are good and the enemy is evil. In our rage at warriors we too easily fail to recall that they are human too.

Humanity has not changed; it goes on doing with more ruthless efficiency what it has been doing for the whole of its existence. But perhaps because of this, and because we now face the prospect of complete destruction for the species, we desperately maintain that this cannot be inevitable, that men are not in some deep way irrevocably committed to violence.

If we accept that they are, and given the instruments of violence at their command, there is no hope for us. Indeed, it does seem to many that there is no longer hope of restraining or containing violence. The Pax Britannica and the Pax Romanum are things of the past. We cannot depend on superpowers using their instruments of violence to keep the peace of the world — if this is ever what they really did. Nor can we depend on ‘rules of war’, for in atomic wars there are no rules, only equivocal results.

The intellectuals and aggression

Many intellectuals rush to quell our fears by telling us that theoretically none of this has to happen, that violence is not part of human nature, that it occurs only because of evil intentions and circumstances that we can eradicate it if we try. They are the Christian Scientists of sociology; and they have not as yet solved the paradox: if we are not by nature violent creatures, why do we seem inevitably to create situations that lead to violence?

If it is in our natures constantly to provoke violence in what is an essentially non-violent organism, then we cannot win, however we play the game. The preliminary answer is clear: we are creatures who are in fact and by nature easily aroused to violence, we easily learn it, and we are wired to create situations in which the arousal and learning readily take place and in which violence becomes a necessity.

Gallons of printer’s ink have been spent discussing “the problem of aggression.” But there is no problem. Aggression in the human species is the same as aggression in any other animal species. It springs from the same causes and serves the same functions. It is a necessary force in the evolutionary processes taking place in any sexually reproducing species.

There has to be competition in order for natural selection to occur. One animal has to strive to outdo another for nest sites, territory, food, mates, dominance, so that selection can take place. Selection can of course favour timidity where a species is oriented toward camouflage or hiding and fleeing behaviour; only by inspecting the behaviour of particular species can we discover which way the pendulum has swing. In the successful and gregarious higher mammals (among others) it has swung decidedly in favour of aggression, and there is no warrant, and above all no evidence, to suggest that the human species is an exception.

A delicate balance of forces

That a species is characterized by aggression does not mean that its members do not cooperate and are never helpful or loyal or loving — quite the contrary. Aggression is an essential component of these virtues, and ethologists have argued very cogently that we should view it as a constructive motive, a positive force acting for the benefit of the species. Only when this positive force spills over into violence does it threaten internal order and survival. Even then, violence against predators can be seen as another constructive device.

There is a delicate balance to be achieved here; ethological studies have brought out brilliantly how various animal populations manage it. There must be sufficient aggression between members of the same species in the same population to ensure that selection takes place and various functions are served; this must be contained — usually by the process of “ritualization” — so that it does not develop into internal violence and destroy the population; violent opposition to threats from without the population must nevertheless be fostered.

Nonviolent aggression within, and violent opposition on the outside, have constantly to be balanced in any human society: members must be capable of violence in order to preserve its integrity, but toward one another they should be non-violently competitive.

A naturally aggressive species

We are not concerned with the causes of armed conflict. It has as many causes and justifications as it has instances. To those who fight them, all wars are just wars. We are concerned with the weight of evidence that indicates that groups of men banded together in some interest will readily resort to violence against other groups of men who are seen as opposed to that interest. The interest itself does not seem to matter: violence can serve any master.

From the historical perspective adopted here, it seems to us that we are a naturally aggressive species easily aroused to violence; that we have invented the means to practice violence effectively on a large scale; that our cultural systems constantly provoke us to violence; that these systems always contain groups of males whose proclivity is violent; that within the last few thousand years of human history, violence has been taken out of its small-scale evolutionary context; and that there are few evolutionary precedents for the control of violence on the scale on which it now occurs.

The atavistic stimuli to violence still exist, but the means of ritualising violence that evolved in the small-scale skirmishing days of our ancestors simply cannot operate effectively in the huge, complex, and heavily armed international world of today.

Human vulnerability

Where human vulnerability most revealed itself was when the attack came by surprise. This was very different from the conditions prevailing among animals. Not only is it more difficult among most animal species to get close to a rival without being noticed, because of more acute senses, but it is also more difficult to finish off your fellow man in one stroke even if surprise is achieved.

An animal’s ‘weapon’ is its body, and that body is very strongly built. Such a weapon is always ready for use. By contrast, if humans are caught unarmed they are at a serious disadvantage and are extremely vulnerable. Humans thus became quintessential first-strikers. As with other animal species, they normally did not seriously fight fellow humans on the open battlefield for fear of being hurt themselves. However, unlike other animals, they were able to kill adults of their own species by ambushing the unarmed and vulnerable.

Fighting among hunter-gatherers

And kill they did. Reported estimates of hunter-gatherer mortality rates in fighting are inherently tenuous, but those we have show a remarkable agreement across time and space. For the Murngin of Australia’s Arnhem Land during a period of 20 years, Warner estimated this rate at 200 men of a total male population of 700. This amounts to about 30 percent of the fighting population.

Pilling’s estimate of at least 10 percent killed among Tiwi Aboriginal men in one decade comes within the same range. Kimber’s estimate, for a generation, of 5 percent mortality in fighting in arid areas and about 6.5 percent in well-watered ones refers to violent mortality in relation to the entire population’s overall mortality rates.

The Plains Indians showed a deficit of 50 percent for the men in the Blackfoot tribe in 1805 and a 33 percent deficit in 1858. Even among the Eskimos of the central Canadian Arctic, who lacked group warfare, violent death, in so-called blood feuds and homicide, was estimated by one authority at one per 1,000 per year, 10 times the US peak rate in 1990. As Jean Briggs has revealingly written: “Readers of Canadian Inuit ethnography, my own Never in Anger (1970) in particular, have sometimes concluded that Inuit are always and everywhere pacific. Nothing could be farther from the truth.”

Fighting among agriculturalists

The data for early agriculturalists tells much the same story as it does for hunter-gatherers. About 15 percent of adult Yanomamo died as a result of inter- and intragroup violence: 24 percent of the males and 7 percent of the females. The Waorani (Auca) of the Ecuadorian Amazon hold the registered world record: more than 60 percent of adult deaths over five generations were caused by feuding and warfare. In highland Papua New Guinea independent estimates are again very similar: among the Dani, 28.5 percent of the men and 2.4 percent of the women have been reckoned to have died violently.

Among the Enga 34.8 percent of the men were estimated to have met the same fate; Meggitt had records of 34 wars among them in 50 years; among the Hewa, killing was estimated at 7.78 per 1,000 per year; among the Goilala, whose total population was barely over 150, there were 29 (predominantly men) killed during a period of 35 years; among the lowland Gebusi, 35.2 percent of the men and 29.3 percent of the women fell victim to homicide; the high rate for the women may be explained by the fact that killing was mainly related to failure to reciprocate in sister exchange marriage.

The Balkans

Violent death in tribal Montenegro at the beginning of the twentieth century was estimated at 25 percent. Archaeology unearths similar finds. In the late prehistoric Indian site of Madisonville, Ohio, 22 percent of the adult male skulls had wounds and 8 percent were fractured. In a prehistoric cemetery site in Illinois, 16 percent of the individuals had met a violent death.

All this suggests that average human violent mortality rates among adults in the ‘state of nature’ may have been in the order of 15 percent (25 percent for the men); extremely sparse populations living in areas where resources were diffuse probably occupied the lower part of the scale, but not by a very wide margin.

Furthermore, as Meggitt observes of both Australian Aborigines and New Guinea Enga highlanders, most of the men carried wound marks and scars, and regarded them as a matter of course. Chagnon says the same of the Yanomamo. In this respect Hobbes was closer to the truth than Rousseau. (129-131)

The Reign of Terror in Corcyra, 427 BC

During seven days that Eurymedon stayed with his sixty ships, the Corcyreans were engaged in butchering those of their fellow-citizens whom they regarded as their enemies: and although the crime imputed was that of attempting to put down the democracy, some were slain also for private hatred, others by their debtors because of the monies owed to them.

Death thus raged in every shape; and, as usually happens at such times, there was no length to which violence did not go; sons were killed by their fathers, and suppliants dragged from the altar or slain upon it; while some were even walled up in the temple of Dionysus and died there.

Revolutionary war

So bloody was the march of the revolution, and the impression which it made was the greater as it was one of the first to occur. Later on, one may say, the whole Hellenic world was convulsed; struggles being everywhere made by the popular chiefs to bring in the Athenians, and by the oligarchs to introduce the Lacedaemonians.

In peace there would have been neither the pretext nor the wish to make such an invitation; but in war, with an alliance always at the command of either faction for the hurt of their adversaries and their own corresponding advantage, opportunities for bringing in the foreigner were never wanting to the revolutionary parties.

The sufferings which revolution entailed upon the cities were many and terrible, such as have occurred and always will occur, as long as the nature of mankind remains the same; though in a severer or milder form, and varying in their symptoms, according to the variety of the particular causes.

In peace and prosperity states and individuals have better sentiments, because they do not find themselves suddenly confronted with imperious necessities; but war takes away the easy supply of daily wants, and so proves a rough master, that brings most men’s characters to a level with their fortunes.

Revolution thus ran its course from city to city, and the places which it arrived at last, from having heard what had been done before, carried to a still greater excess the refinement of their inventions, as manifested in the cunning of their enterprises and the atrocity of their reprisals.

The corruption of language

Words changed their meanings. Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal ally; prudent hesitation became specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; those able to see all sides of a question were seen as indecisive.

Frantic violence became the attribute of manliness; cautious plotting was a justifiable means of self-defence. The advocate of extreme measures was always trustworthy; his opponent was a man to be suspected. To succeed in a plot was to have a shrewd head, to divine a plot a still shrewder; but to try to provide against having to do either was to break with your party and be afraid of your enemies.

In fine, to forestall an intending criminal, or to suggest the idea of a crime where it was wanting, was equally commended, until even blood became a weaker tie than party, from the superior readiness of those united by the latter to dare everything without reserve; for such associations had not in view the blessings derivable from established institutions but were formed by ambition for their overthrow; and the confidence of their members in each other rested less on any religious sanction than upon complicity in crime. The fair proposals of an adversary were met with jealous precautions by the stronger of the two, and not with a generous confidence.

Vengeance at all costs

Revenge also was held of more account than self-preservation. Oaths of reconciliation, being only proffered on either side to meet an immediate difficulty, only held good so long as no other weapons was at hand; but when opportunity offered, he who first ventured to seize it and to take his enemy off his guard, thought this perfidious vengeance sweeter than an open one, since, considerations of safety apart, success by treachery won him the palm of superior intelligence.

Indeed it is generally the case that men are readier to call rogues clever than simpletons honest, and are as ashamed of being the second as they are proud of being the first.

The cause of all these evils was the lust for power arising from greed and ambition; and from these passions proceeded the violence of parties once engaged in contention. The leaders in the cities, each provided with the fairest professions, on the one side with the cry of political equality of the people, on the other of a moderate aristocracy, sought prizes for themselves in those public interests which they pretended to cherish, and, recoiling from no means in their struggles for ascendancy, engaged in the direst excesses.

In their acts of vengeance they went to even greater lengths, not stopping at what justice or the good of the state demanded, but making the party caprice of the moment their only standard, and invoking with equal readiness the condemnation of an unjust verdict or the authority of a strong arm to glut the animosities of the hour.

Thus religion was in honour with neither party; but the use of fair phrases to arrive at guilty ends was in high reputation. Meanwhile the moderate part of the citizens perished between the two, either for not joining in the quarrel, or because envy would not suffer them to escape.

Social anarchy

So it was that every form of iniquity took root in the Hellenic countries. The ancient simplicity into which honour so largely entered was laughed down and disappeared; and society became divided into camps in which no man trusted his fellow.

To put an end to this, there was neither promise to be depended upon, nor oath that could command respect; but all parties dwelling rather in their calculation upon the hopelessness of a permanent state of things, were more intent upon self-defence than capable of confidence.

In this contest the blunter wits were most successful. Apprehensive of their own deficiencies and of the cleverness of their antagonists, they feared to be worsted in debate and to be surprised by the combinations of their more versatile opponents, and so at once boldly had recourse to action: while their adversaries, arrogantly thinking that they should know in time, and that it was unnecessary to secure by action what policy afforded, often fell victims to their want of precaution.

War and its horrors

It is likely that ever since the origins of human society, men — or at least some men, and most women — have intermittently lamented the existence of war… Erasmus’s diatribes contain many lamentations about its incidental horrors which were not in themselves unusual. He did not himself have any significant experience of war. He did indeed write an account of a battle, a kind of literary parallel to Uccello’s picture ‘The Rout of San Romano’, but this appears to have been based on a letter from a friend describing Henry VIII’s expedition to France in 1512.

…The barbarous cohorts whose very faces and shouts strike terror to the heart; the iron-clad troops drawn up in battle-array, the terrifying clash and flash of arms, the hateful noise and bustle of a great multitude, the threatening looks, harsh bugles, startling peal of trumpets, thunder of bombards… a mad uproar, the furious shock of battle, and then wholesale butchery, the cruel face of the killers and the killed, the slaughtered lying in heaps, the fields running with gore, the rivers dyed with human blood…

Erasmus’s disgust at war in fact was probably provoked, as is so often the case, far more by a purely personal, emotional shock: the death of his beloved pupil Alexander, son of King James IV of Scotland, a beautiful, wise, learned young man who was killed with his father at the Battle of Flodden: ‘Tell me’, lamented Erasmus in his threnody, ‘what had you to do with Mars, the stupidest of all the poet’s gods, you who were consecrated to the Muses, nay to Christ? Your youth, your beauty, your gentle nature, your honest mind — what had they to do with the flourishing of trumpets, the bombards, the swords?’

Contempt for the military

‘The stupidest of all the gods’: that surely is a new note. War was stupid. It was irrational. It was neither glorious nor necessary. Those who conducted it were worthy not of admiration but of contempt. Erasmus despised the profession of arms with a scorn which generations of intellectuals were to inherit. ‘Military idiots,’ he called them, ‘thick-headed lords… not even human except in appearance.’ ‘Among the soldiers,’ he wrote bitterly, ‘the one who conducted himself with the most savagery is the one who is thought worthy to be captain in the next war.’

Such a view went against the whole grain of contemporary culture. Virtù, the all-round excellence to which Renaissance Man aspired, displayed itself as much on the battlefield as in the study and the boudoir, as Baldassare Castiglione’s Cortigiano makes clear; while more popular images of chivalry were still based on the romances of Malory, of Ariosto and of Amadis de Gaul.

Erasmus’s attack on war was emotional rather than reasoned. ‘There is nothing more wicked,’ he wrote, ‘more disastrous, more widely destructive, more deeply tenacious, more loathsome, in a word more unworthy of man, not to say a Christian.’ The priority is interesting. It is primarily on grounds of humanity that Erasmus condemns war, not those of religion; in the same way as he saw his pupil consecrated to the Muses, with Christ added almost as an afterthought.

The birth of pacifism

But he also developed rational arguments against war which were later to become the commonplaces of liberal pacifism. Princes who wished to display their power and glory, suggested Erasmus, would be better employed developing the welfare of their own kingdoms rather than extending their boundaries at the price of untold suffering.

War, he suggested, was ‘unnatural’: animals did not make war on one another. ‘Whoever herd of a hundred thousand animals rushing together to butcher each other, as men do everywhere?’ It was a mask behind which governments could extend their powers over their subjects, since ‘once war has been declared, then all the affairs of the State are at the mercy of the appetites of a few.’

Even ‘just’ wars he regarded as unacceptable, for reasons which are of continuing relevance. ‘If a claim to possession is to be reckoned sufficient reason for going to war,’ he wrote, ‘then in such a disturbed state of human affairs, so full of change, there is no one who does not possess such a claim. What people has not, at one time or another, been driven out of its lands, or driven others out?’ And were not the costs of defending even a righteous cause likely to be excessive? If you find, by balancing one set of advantages and disadvantages with another, that an unjust peace is preferable to a just war, why do you want to try the fortunes of Mars ?’

War unnatural and irrational

These are arguments which we will repeatedly meet again: war is both unnatural and irrational; it is a wasteful diversion of resources from welfare to destruction; it is engineered by governments for evil reasons of their own; even the most apparently laudable of ends can never justify the means involved. Erasmus did not concede, indeed, that there could be any circumstances under which war would be justified, and when one considers the nature of the wars being fought in the Europe of his time — the extravagant parades of Henry VIII and Francis I, the bellicose trumpetings of Pope Julius II — one can understand why.

The medieval ideal, that force could be justly used only by Christian chivalry for the defence of Christendom and for the maintenance of God’s justice within its borders, was virtually dead. The modern concept of force as a necessary instrument in preserving an orderly system of states was only beginning to appear — in the most shadowy of forms — in the work of Machiavelli. War in Europe at the dawn of the sixteenth century was largely a matter of competitive display of virtù in its most debased and ludicrous form.

Beyond these surface manifestations, with all their terrible consequences, Erasmus did not enquire. With all his genius he was not a profound political analyst, nor did he ever have to exercise the responsibilities of power. Rather he was the first in that long line of humanitarian thinkers for whom it was enough to chronicle the horrors of war in order to condemn it; men who may command one’s instinctive agreement, but provide little constructive advice as to how to deal with the phenomenon which they find so abhorrent to nature and reason. (13-16)

The passages below are free German-English to readable-English ‘translations’ meant to clarify Clausewitz for the general reader. They are based on material in A Short Guide to Clausewitz on War, edited by R. L. Leonard (1967).

Definition

War is nothing but a duel on an extensive scale. If we would conceive as a unit the countless duels making up a War, we should think of two wrestlers. Each strives by physical force to compel the other to overthrow his adversary, and render him incapable of further resistance. War is therefore an act of violence meant to compel our opponent to fulfil our will.

Utmost use of force

Philanthropists may easily imagine there is a method of disarming and overcoming an enemy without great bloodshed, and that this is properly the Art of War. This is a serious mistake. In such a dangerous business as War, the errors which proceed from a spirit of benevolence are the worst. Who uses least force dies: that is how things stand, and it is foolish to avert one’s eyes from this fact because the horrors of War are repugnant.

War and politics

War is not merely a political act but also a political instrument — a continuation of politics by other means. The political view is the object, War is the means, and in our understanding the means must always include the object.

Defense and attack

Although defense may be considered a “negative” means in contrast to a “positive” attack, it would be wrong to suppose that defense precludes the destruction of the enemy’s military force, or recommends a bloodless solution. Very many Generals have fallen into this error and been ruined by it.

War and character

War entails physical exertion and suffering. In order not to be overcome, strength of body and mind is required, which produces endurance and stoicism. With these a man is ready for War; and they are also the qualities generally found among wild and half-civilized tribes.

Going further, we find the importance of intellectual factors. War is the province of uncertainty: three quarters of those things upon which action in War must be calculated are more or less hidden in clouds of uncertainty. A fine and penetrating mind is required to search out the truth and make decisive judgments.

War and chance

War is likewise the domain of chance. From the uncertainty of all intelligence and suppositions, and the continual play of chance, the actor in War constantly finds his expectations betrayed. If this renders his plan worthless, then a new one must be found. But the needed information may be lacking, while circumstances press for immediate decision — allowing no time to look for fresh data, no time for mature consideration.

At the front

Let us accompany the novice to the battlefield. As we approach, the thunder of cannon is soon followed by the howling of shot. Balls begin to strike the ground close to us, before and behind. We hasten to the hill where the General stands with his Staff. Here the crash of cannon balls and the bursting of shells make the seriousness of life and death felt to the young imagination.

Adding to all this, the sight of the maimed and fallen strikes the beating heart with pity… Indeed, a young soldier must be very extraordinary if he is not to find quick decisions difficult to make. It is true that habit soon blunts such impressions; in half an hour we begin to be more or less indifferent to whatever is going on around us: but it is a situation where most ordinary men never achieve complete coolness and mental elasticity.

War and information

Much of the information obtained in War is contradictory, a still greater part is false, and by far the greatest part is doubtful. What an officer needs are powers of discrimination — discrimination which only knowledge of men and things and good judgment can give.

The law of probability must be his guide… It is all the worse for an inexperienced officer when one communiqué follows and supports another, confirms it, magnifies and colors it, though before long all these reports are found to be lies, exaggerations, errors…

In brief, most reports are false, and the timidity of men acts as a multiplier of lies and untruths. As a general rule, everyone is more inclined to believe the bad than the good. Now the Chief must stand like a rock against which the sea breaks furiously in vain. The role is not easy; he who is not by nature of a buoyant disposition, or trained by experience in War, must force himself to hope rather than to fear. Only then will he preserve his balance.

Decisive battles: bloody but necessary

The battle is the bloodiest solution. True, its effect is often more a killing of the enemy’s courage than of the enemy’s soldiers, but blood is always its price and slaughter its character — and from this a humane General sometimes recoils with horror. Yet only great victories in battle have led to lasting success in War.

Let us not hear of Generals who conquer without bloodshed. If a bloody slaughter is a horrible sight, then that is a ground for paying more respect to War, but not for making the sword we wear blunter and blunter by degrees from feelings of humanity, until someone steps in with one that is sharp and lops off the arm from our body.

by Warren Kozak

[This first appeared as an Opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, Dec 22 2009]

Five years ago a particularly gruesome image made its way to our television screens from the war in Iraq. Four U.S. civilian contractors working in Fallujah were ambushed and killed by al Qaeda. Their bodies were burned, then dragged through the streets. Two of the charred bodies were hung from the Euphrates Bridge and left dangling.

This barbaric act left an impression that our military did not forget: In a special operation earlier this year, Navy SEALs captured the mastermind of that attack, Ahmed Hashim Abed. But after he was taken into custody in September, Abed claimed he was punched by his captors. He showed a fat lip to prove it. Three of the SEALS are now awaiting a courts-martial on charges ranging from assault to dereliction of duty and making false statements.

This incident and its twisted irony takes me back to an oddly serene setting many years ago. When I was in college, I joined my parents on a trip to retrace my father’s wartime experience in Europe. We drove from France, through Holland and Belgium and on to Germany—the same route he had taken with the U.S. Army in 1944-45. At a field outside the Belgian town of Malmedy, we got out of our rented car where my father described something I had never heard before.

During the Battle of the Bulge, in the bleak December of 1944, the Germans had quickly overrun the American lines. They took thousands of prisoners as they pushed through in a last chance gamble to turn the war around. One unit, part of the First SS Panzer Division, had captured over a hundred GIs. They were moving fast, and they didn’t care to be burdened by prisoners. So the SS troops put the American soldiers in that field and mowed them down with machine guns.

Around 90 Americans were killed in that barrage. The Germans then walked through the tangle of bodies, shooting those who were still alive in the back of the head. The few that survived were brought to where my father was located in the nearby town of Liege where word of the massacre quickly spread.

My father was never a talker. And in spite of the fact that we were on a trip to look at his past, he didn’t open up much, or couldn’t. When I asked him what the reaction was among the U.S. troops, he answered without emotion: “We didn’t take prisoners for two weeks.” I immediately understood what he meant, and had the sense not to press the issue any further. I just looked out at the field, now green and peaceful on a beautiful summer day, and realized he was looking at the same field and seeing something quite different.

In the weeks following the Malmedy massacre, U.S. troops clearly broke the rules of the Geneva Conventions. Justified or not, they were technically guilty of war crimes.My guess is that the American correspondents imbedded with those troops knew all about this and chose not to report it. So did their officers. They understood the gravity of the war, as well as the absolute importance of its outcome. And they understood that disclosing this information might ultimately help the enemy. In other words, they used common sense. Was the U.S. a lesser country because these GIs weren’t arrested? Was the Constitution jeopardized? Somehow it survived.

You don’t have to dig too deep to understand that war brings out behavior in people that they would never demonstrate in normal life. In Paul Fussell’s moving memoir, “The Boys’ Crusade,” the former infantryman relates a story about the liberation of Dachau. There were about 120 SS guards who had been captured by the Americans. Even though the Germans were being held at gunpoint, they still had the arrogance—or epic stupidity—to continue to heap verbal abuse and threats on the inmates. Their American guards, thoroughly disgusted by what they had already witnessed in the camp, had seen enough and opened fire on the SS. Some of the remaining SS guards were handed over to the inmates who tore them limb from limb. Another war crime? No doubt. Justified? It depends on your point of view. But before you weigh in, realize that you didn’t walk through the camp. You didn’t smell it. You didn’t witness the obscene horror of the Nazis.

Rules of war are important. They are something to strive for as they separate us from our distant ancestors. But when only one side follows these rules, they no longer elevate us. They create a very unlevel field and more than a little frustration. It is equally bizarre for any of us to judge someone’s behavior in war by the rules we follow in our very peaceful universe. We sit in homes that are air-conditioned in the summer and warmed in the winter. We have more than enough food in our bellies and we get enough sleep. The stress in our lives won’t ever match the stress of battle. Can we honestly begin to decide if a soldier acted in compliance with rules that work perfectly well on Main Street but not, say, in Malmedy or Fallujah?

In his book, Mr. Fussell probably sums up the feelings of many soldiers when he quotes a British captain, John Tonkin, who experienced a great deal of the war. “I have always felt,” Capt. Tonkin said, “that the Geneva Convention is a dangerous piece of stupidity, because it leads people to believe that war can be civilized. It can’t.”

Warren Kozak is the author of LeMay: The Life and Wars of General Curtis LeMay (Regnery, 2009)

In the Times Literary Supplement for November 20, 2009, the historian and commentator Christopher Coker reviewed two books — Patrick Hennessey’s The Junior Officer’s Reading Club, and James Fergusson’s A Million Bullets. In the heat and boredom of Iraq, Hennessey had set up a reading club and tried to do the same thing later while serving in Afghanistan. Fergusson, a freelance journalist, describes a soldier’s life in a war many of the British contingent regard as unwinnable. Coker’s review in the TLS provides a thumbnail interpretation of the Afghanistan war and what he sees as its likely outcome. A shortened version appears below.

The reading club that Hennessey and his friends set up flourished in the same boredom and heat that Winston Churchill once had to endure in Bangalore. (Coker describes how Churchill had embarked on a self-educative reading programme while on military duty in India, starting with Gibbon and Macaulay and going on to Plato, Schopenhauer, and Darwin.) They did not all read books: it was more a discussion club.

Hennessey himself failed to make it past the first hundred pages of Don Quixote, but he read Hunter S. Thompson’s Kingdom of Fear… These days of course most officers are apt to educate themselves about the modern face of war by watching DVDs. At Sandhurst 57 per cent of the course teaching material relies on scenes from war films for the instruction of warriors in the making. Gladiator is a favorite; so is Saving Private Ryan, and about half an hour of Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam war classic, Full Metal Jacket.

Yet it is not only the medium of instruction that has changed; so has the language, which is now very removed from the heroic language of books or films. Traditionally soldiers have read books to orientate themselves, either to make sense of their personal experience of war or to have a greater understanding of the larger picture, “what it’s all about”. Churchill tells us he was spurred on to study by catching himself using a good many words, the meaning of which he could not define properly.

But what would he make of war today?

As Matthew Parris pointed out in The Times, the NATO mission in Afghanistan is a semantic nightmare: “agent for change”; “asymmetric means of operation”; “capacity building”; “conditionality demand reduction”; “injectors of risk”; “kinetic situation”; “licit livelihood”; “light footprint”; “partnering and mentoring”; “reconciliation and reintegration”; “rolling out a touchdown approach”; “upskilling”. Today’s soldiers (or “stability enablers” as NATO prefers to call them) are lost in jargon.

No wonder the soldiers are confused. In Afghanistan they find themselves fighting a war which is more intensive in terms of firepower than any they have fought since Korea. It is the British Army’s fourth Afghan war, and in its own way just as frustrating as the others. They are training the Afghans to take over, as they tried to train the Iraqis — “leveraging local capacity”.

Hennessey does not mince his words. They had come “to play with the Afghans and to teach them to use their rifles for the time when the real soldiers had blown up all the Talibaddies and could hand over a peaceful, if not prosperous, province (Helmand) with smiles and handshakes and flag-ceremonies”.

Today’s soldiers, Fergusson points out, are as brave as ever. The first iPod generation of recruits are as reliable as the previous generation — they may make videos and drive by with gangster rap blaring out, but the best of them are still brave… Yet if soldiers are told they are on the “front line” of the War on Terror, they don’t know who they are fighting.

First, they were called Taliban, then the “Anti-Coalition Militia” (or ACM — another acronym), a convenient catch-all for everyone from al-Qaeda, hardliners and foreign jihadists to disgruntled poppy-farmers, co-opted villagers and adventurers looking for a bit of fun. Intelligence Officers later began to speak of “Tier One” and “Tier Two” Taliban in an attempt to distinguish between the committed ideologues who would probably never surrender and the opportunists who might be “folded into” future negotiations. The squaddies’ nickname for their opponents — “flip-flops” — captures a truth that often evades our politicians.

And many of them suspect that the whole operation is likely to end in tears. At one point Fergusson passed the site of one of the great British victories in 1842, just outside Kandahar. In the first two wars, the British won most of the battles, but lost the campaign. They managed to win the third war in 1919 — but to little avail.

Writing in the Toronto Daily Star in October 1922, Ernest Hemingway reminded his readers that the Royal Air Force had largely won the war by bombing Afghan cities behind the lines and destroying the mud forts where the hill-men congregated. But when they came to sign the Treaty, the British gave up every right they had always fought for in Afghanistan: for the first time they allowed it to sign treaties with other countries, including the Soviet Union. The war may have resulted in a British victory, but the peace was an Afghan one. As Hemingway concluded, “the Afghans had always hated England, but now they felt contempt for her.”

The American Surge may well work (brute force usually prevails for a while), but at the end of it they will still confront an enormous political vacuum, an unsustainable government, a jigsaw of tribal rivalries, and the Afghan people themselves. No one is likely to win the present struggle in Afghanistan. A few fortunate warriors like Hennessey may experience a personal victory: for them, triumph enough. As for the Afghans — they are suffering the most, but they also usually have the last word.

[From David Kilcullen’s The Accidental Guerrilla, Hurst, 2009, 29-32]

Al Qa’ida’s military strategy appears to be aimed at bleeding the United States to exhaustion and bankruptcy, forcing America to withdraw in disarray from the Muslim world so that its local allies collapse, and simultaneously to use the provoking and alienating effects of U.S. intervention as a form of provocation to incite a mass uprising in the Islamic world, or at least to generate and sustain popular support for AQ. In a statement released in late 2004, Usama bin Laden outlined this strategic approach as follows:

All that we have mentioned has made it easy to provoke and bait this [U.S.] Administration, All we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point East to raise a cloth on which is written al-Qaeda, in order to make the generals to race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without achieving for it anything of note… so we are continuing this policy of bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. Allah willing and nothing is too great for Allah.

In support of this strategy AQ applies four basic tactics that are standard for any insurgent movement, as follows:

Provocation

Insurgents throughout history have committed atrocities, carrying out extremely provocative events to prompt their opponents to react (or overreact) in ways that harm their interests. This may involve provoking government forces into repressive actions that alienate the population or provoking one tribal, religious, ethnic, or community group into attacking another in order to create and exploit instability.

Al Qa’ida or groups allied to it have carried out numerous provocation attacks… The most obvious example of a provocation attack is 9/11 itself, which was designed to provoke a massive U.S. retaliation and prompt a spontaneous uprising of the ummah. While the worldwide uprising failed to occur, subsequent U.S. actions could be seen as playing into the hands of this AQ agenda.

Intimidation

Insurgents seek to prevent local populations from cooperating with governments or coalition forces by publicly killing those who collaborate, intimidating others who might seek to work with the government, and co-opting others. This dynamic was highlighted by the classical insurgency theorist Bernard B. Fall, who served in the French Resistance in World War II. Fall wrote in 1965 that

any sound revolutionary warfare operator (the French underground, the Norwegian underground, or any other anti-Nazi European underground) most of the time used small-war tactics — not to destroy the German army, of which they were thoroughly incapable, but to establish a competitive system of control over the population. Of course, in order to do this, here and there they had to kill some of the occupying forces and attack some of the military targets. But above all they had to kill their own people who collaborated with the enemy.

As Fall notes, insurgents also intimidate government forces (especially police and local government officials) in order to force them into defensive actions that alienate the population or to deter them from taking active measures against the insurgents. Likewise, AQ and its allies have mounted terrorist attacks with the intention of intimidating Western countries and forcing them to cease their support of U.S.-led interventions in Iraq (such as the Madrid bombings of 2004, and the kidnapping of Filipino contractors in the same year, which successfully knocked Spain and the Philippines out of the coalition).

Protraction

Insurgents seek to prolong the conflict in order to exhaust their opponents’ resources, erode the government’s political will, sap public support for the conflict, and avoid losses. Typically, insurgents react to government countermeasures by going quiet (reducing activity and hiding in inaccessible terrain or within sympathetic or intimidated population groups) when pressure becomes too severe. They then emerge later to fight on.

This is one reason why an enemy-centric approach to counterinsurgency is often counterproductive: it tends to alienate and harm the innocent population, who become caught up in the fighting or suffer “collateral” damage, but does little harm to the enemy, who simply melt away when pressure becomes too great.

Exhaustion

Finally, exhaustion is an insurgent tactic that seeks to impose costs on the opponent government, overstress its support system, tire its troops, and waste lives, resources, and political capital, in order to convince the government that continuing the war is not worth the cost… In Iraq, the insurgents ambush and attack convoys and aircraft so that each vehicle has to be retrofitted with expensive protective equipment — armor that alienates our forces from the population — and electronic countermeasures, so that every activity takes much longer and costs much more effort, while carrying greater risk of death or injury.

This imposes what Clausewitz called “friction” on a counterinsurgent force, and ultimately causes the government and the domestic population to cease supporting the war. As noted, an exhaustion strategy of this type is precisely the approach AQ adopted and bin Laden outlined in 2004.

Waiting for rumours

The Battle of Arras began at 5.30 next morning. For two days we hung about the chateau, listening to the noise (of Military History being manufactured regardless of expense) and waiting for the latest rumours. With forced uneasy gaiety we talked loudly about the successes reported from the Line. ‘Our objectives gained at Neuville-Vitasse’, ‘five thousand prisoners taken’, and so on. But every one of us had something in his mind which he couldn’t utter, even to his best friend.

Meanwhile the weather was misbehaving itself badly. Snow showers passed by on a bitterly cold wind, and I began an intimate battle in which a chill on the intestines got the better of me. It wasn’t so easy to feel like a happy warrior turning his necessities to glorious gain, when doomed to go in company with gastritis, a sore throat, and several festering scratches on each hand. No more clean socks or handkerchiefs either.

A big mail came in on Tuesday — the first we’d had for a week — and this kept us quiet for an interval of flimsy consolation. My only letter was from Aunt Evelyn, who apologized as usual for having so little to say. She had been reading The Life of Disraeli — ’such a relief to get away from all these present-day horrors. What a wonderful man he was. Are you still in the Rest Camp? I do hope so.’

She added that spring-cleaning had been going on vigorously, with the usual floods of conversation from the maids… This didn’t help my gastritis, which was getting beyond a joke. The M.O. wasn’t back from leave yet, but one of his orderlies handed me an opium pill of such constipating omnipotence that my intestines were soon stabilized to a condition suitable for open warfare.

Slogging on

A heavy snowstorm set in soon after we started. A snowstorm on April 11th was the sort of thing that one expected in the War and it couldn’t be classed as a major misfortune. Nevertheless we could have done without it, since we were marching away from all comfort and safety; greatcoats had been left behind and we had nothing but what we stood up in. As we slogged along narrow winding lanes the snow melted on the shiny waterproof sheets which kept the men uncomfortably warm.

We were now in the devastated area; villages had been levelled to heaps of bricks; fruit trees, and even pollard-willows, had been hacked down, and there was still a chance that we might be the victims of a booby trap in the shape of a dynamite charge under a causeway. A signpost pointed to Blairville; but a couple of inches of snow was enough to blot out Blairville. The next village was Ficheux (the men called it ‘Fish Hooks’ — any joke being better than none in that snowstorm); but Ficheux wasn’t there at all; it had vanished from the landscape.

The snow had stopped when, after marching eight miles, we bivouacked in the dregs if daylight by a sunken road near Mercatel, a place which offered no shelter except the humanity of its name. After dark I found my way into a small dug-out occupied by a Trench Mortar Sergeant-Major and two signallers who were working a field-telephone. I considered myself lucky to be there, crouching by a brazier, while the Sergeant-Major regaled us, in omniscient tones, with the rumours about the desperate fighting at Wancourt and Heninel, names which meant nothing to me. I dozed through the night without ever being unaware of the coke fumes from the brazier and the tick-tack of the telephone.

Theoretical glory

Daylight discovered us blear-eyed and (to abbreviate a contemporary phrase) ‘fed up and far from home’. We got through the morning somehow and I issued some of my ‘emergency Woodbines’. Rifle-cleaning and inspection was the only occupation possible. Early in the afternoon the Battalion moved on four miles to St. Martin-Cojeul. The snow had melted, leaving much mud which rain made worse.

St. Martin was a demolished village about a mile behind the battle-line. As we entered it I noticed an English soldier lying by the road with a horribly smashed head; soon such sights would be too frequent to attract attention, but this first one was perceptibly unpleasant. At the risk of being thought squeamish or even unsoldierly, I still maintain that an ordinary human being has a right to be momentarily horrified by a mangled body seen on an afternoon walk, although people with sound common sense can always refute me by saying that life is full of gruesome sights and violent catastrophes.

But I am no believer in wild denunciations of the War; I am merely describing my own experiences of it; and in 1917 I was only beginning to learn that life, for the majority of the population, is an unlovely struggle against unfair odds, culminating in a cheap funeral. Anyhow, the man with his head bashed in had achieved theoretical glory by dying for his country in the Battle of Arras, and we who marched past him had an excellent chance of following his example.

Rabbit-hole life

B-Company Headquarters was a sort of rabbit-hole, just wide enough to accommodate Leake, a tiny stove, and myself. Leake occupied himself in enlarging it with a rusty entrenching tool. When dusk was falling I went out to the underground dressing-station to get my festering fingers attended to. I felt an interloper, for the place was crowded with groaning wounded.

As I made my way back to the trench a few shells exploded among the ruinous remains of brickwork. All this, I thought, is disgustingly unpleasant, abut it doesn’t really count as war experience. I knew that if I could get the better of my physical discomforts I should find the War intensely interesting. B-Company hadn’t arrived at the groaning stage yet; in fact, they were grimly cheerful, though they’d only had one meal that day and the next was tomorrow morning.

Leake and I had one small slice of ration bacon between us; I was frizzling my fragment when it fell off the fork and disappeared into the stove. Regardless of my unfortunate fingers I retrieved and ate it with great relish. The night was cold and sleep impossible, since there was no space to lie down in. Leake, however, had a talent for falling asleep in any position. Chiselling away at the walls by candlelight, I kept myself warm, and in a couple of hours I had scooped out sufficient space for the other two officers.

Officers & gentlemen

Rees and Shirley were a well contrasted pair. Rees was a garrulous and excitable little Welshman; it would be flattery to call him anything except uncouth, and he made no pretensions to being ‘a gentleman’. But he was good-natured and moderately efficient. Shirley, on the other hand, had been educated at Winchester, and the War had interrupted his first year at Oxford. He was a delicate-featured and fastidious young man, an only child, and heir to a comfortable estate in Flintshire.

Rees rather got on our nerves with his table manners, and Shirley deprecated the way he licked his thumb when dealing the cards for their games of nap. But social incompatibilities were now merged in communal discomfort. Both of them were new to the Line, so I felt that I ought to look after them, if possible.

I noticed that Rees kept his courage up by talking incessantly and making jokes about the battle; while Shirley, true to the traditions of his class, simulated nonchalance, discussing with Leake (also an Oxford man) the comparative merits of Magdalen and Christ Church, or Balliol and New College. But he couldn’t get the nonchalance into his eyes… Both Shirley and Rees were killed before autumn.

Unpleasant sights

There was another attack next morning. Rees was detailed for an ammunition-carrying party, and he returned noisier than ever. It had been his first experience of shell-fire… Later in the day I took Shirley for a walk up the hill; I wanted to educate him in unpleasant sights. The wind had dropped and the sunset sky was mountainous with calm clouds. We inspected a tank which had got stuck in the mud while crossing a wide trench. We succeeded in finding this ungainly monster interesting.

Higher up the hill the open ground was dotted with British dead. It was an unexpectedly tidy scene, since most of them had been killed by machine-gun fire. Stretcher-bearers had been identifying the bodies and had arranged them in happy warrior attitudes, hands crossed and heads pillowed on haversacks. Often the contents of a man’s haversack were scattered around him. There were letters lying about; the pathos of those last letters from home was obvious enough.

It was a queer thing, I thought, that I should be taking a young Oxford man for this conducted tour of a battlefield on a fine April evening. Here we were, walking about in a sort of visible fraction of the Roll of Honour, and my pupil was doing his best to behave as if it were all quite ordinary and part of the public-school tradition. He was being politely introduced to the horrors of war, and he made no comment on them.

Earlier in the day an attack on Fontaine-les-Croiselles had fizzled out in failure. Except for the intermittent chatter of machine-guns, the country ahead of us was quiet. Then, somewhere beyond the ridge, a huge explosion sent up a shapeless tower of yellow vapour. I remarked sagely that a German dump had probably been blown up. Shirley watched it intently as though the experience would be of use to him during future operations.

[From War and Peace, Volume IV, Part Two, VII]

Count Orlov-Denisov whispered the command: “Mount!” They formed up; they crossed themselves…

“God be with you!”

“Hurrah!” rang out through the forest, and one by one, as if pouring from a sack, hundreds of Cossacks, their lances atilt, flew merrily across the brook towards the camp.

One desperate frightened cry of the first Frenchman to see the Cossacks — and all who were in the camp, undressed, half-awake, abandoned cannon, muskets, horses, and ran off wherever they could.

If the Cossacks had pursued the French, paying no attention to what was behind and around them, they would have taken both Murat and everything that was there. The officers wanted that. But once the Cossacks got hold of the booty and the prisoners, they would not budge. No one obeyed orders. Fifteen hundred prisoners, thirty-eight cannon, standards, and, what was most important for the Cossacks, horses, saddles, blankets, and various objects were taken on the spot. All that had to be managed, the prisoners and cannon had to be taken in hand, the booty divided, with shouting and even fighting among themselves: the Cossacks were taken up with all that.

The French, no longer pursued, gradually began to recover, formed units, and started shooting. Orlov-Denisov waited for the rest of the columns and did not advance further.

Meanwhile, according to the disposition — “die erste Kolonne marschiert” and so on — the infantry of the belated columns, commanded by Bennigsen and directed by Toll, started out properly and, as always happens, got somewhere, but not where they were supposed to go. As always happens, the men, who had started out cheerfully, began to halt; displeasure was voiced, confusion was sensed, they began moving back somewhere.

Adjutants and generals galloped about, shouted, became angry, quarreled, said they had come to the wrong place and were late, denounced somebody, and so on; and finally they all waved their hands and went on, only so as to go somewhere. “We’ll get somewhere!” And indeed they did, but not to the right place, though some also got to the right place, but so late that they were of no use and only got themselves shot at.

Toll, who in this battle played the role of Weyrother at Austerlitz, galloped assiduously from place to place, and everywhere found things the wrong way round. Thus he ran into Bagovut’s corps in the forest when it was already quite light and that corps was supposed to have long been with Orlov-Denisov.

Agitated, upset by the failure, and supposing that someone was to blame for it, Toll rode up to the commander of the corps and began to upbraid him sternly, saying he ought to be shot. Bagovut, an old, calm, seasoned general, also worn out by all those halts, confusions, contradictions, to everyone’s surprise, and completely contrary to his character, flew into a rage and said all sorts of unpleasant things to Toll.

“I’m not going to take lessons from anybody, and I can die with my soldiers no worse than anybody else,” he said and marched on with a single division.

Coming into the field under French fire, the agitated and brave Bagovut, without considering whether his going into action now, with only one division, was useful or useless, marched straight ahead and led his troops under fire. Danger, cannonballs, bullets were what he needed in his wrathful state. One of the first bullets killed him, the bullets that followed killed many of his soldiers. And for some time his division went on standing uselessly under fire.

This excerpt is from the new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Vintage, 2007, pages 998-999.