by John Keegan
It was not only the kaleidoscope of medals that entranced me. It was also the kaleidoscope of uniforms and all that they signified. Many of my university contemporaries had brought with them scraps of military glory — regimental blazers or British Warm overcoats. Those who had been cavalry officers continued to wear with evening dress the morocco-topped patent-leather boots, slotted at the heel for spurs, that belonged to their Lancer or Hussar uniforms. That had alerted me to the paradox that uniform was not uniform, but that regiments dressed differently. How differently Sandhurst taught me on the first mess evening I spent there. There were Lancers and Hussars in blue and scarlet, but also Household Cavalrymen crushed by the weight of their gold lace, Riflemen in green so dark it was almost black, Gunners in tight trousers, Guardsmen in stiff shirts, Highlanders in six different patterns of tartan, Lowlanders in plaid trews and infantrymen of the county regiments with yellow, white, grey, purple or buff facings to their jackets.
I had thought the army was one army. After that evening I realised it was not. I still had to learn that the outward differences of dress spoke of inward differences of much greater importance. Regiments, I discovered, defined themselves above all by their individuality and it was their individuality which made them into the fighting organisations whose effectiveness in combat was proclaimed by the medals and crosses I saw all about me. My regimental friends — the ready friendship extended by warriors is one of their most endearing qualities — were brothers-in-arms; but they were brothers only up to a point. Regimental loyalty was the touchstone of their lives. A personal difference might be forgiven the next day. A slur on the regiment would never be forgotten, indeed would never be uttered, so deeply would such a thing touch the values of the tribe.
Tribalism — that was what I had encountered. The veterans I met at Sandhurst in the 1960s were by many external tests no different from professional men in other walks of life. They came from the same schools, sometimes the same universities, they were devoted to their families, they had the same hopes for their children as other men, they worried about money in the same way. Money, however, was not an ultimate or defining value, nor even was promotion within the military system. Officers, of course, hankered for advancement, but it was not the value by which they measured themselves. A general might be admired, or he might not. Admiration derived from something other than his badges of superior rank. It came from the reputation he held as a man among other men and that reputation had been built over many years under the eyes of his regimental tribe. That tribe was one not only of fellow officers but of sergeants and ordinary soldiers as well. ‘Not good with soldiers’ was an ultimate condemnation. An officer might be clever, competent, hard-working. If his fellow soldiers reserved doubt about him, none of those qualities countervailed. He was not one of the tribe.
The British army is tribal to an extreme degree; some of its regiments have histories which go back to the seventeenth century, when modern armies were only beginning to take shape from the feudal hosts of warriors whose forebears had entered western Europe during the invasions that overthrew the Roman empire. I have encountered the same warrior values of the tribe in many other armies, however, over the years since I first joined Sandhurst in my youth. I have sensed the tribal aura about French officers who fought the war in Algeria, leading Muslim soldiers whose traditions belong with those of the ghazi, Islam’s frontier marauders. I have sensed it, too, in the recollections of German officers, re-enlisted to build Germany’s post-war army, who had fought the Russians on the steppe and preserved a pride in the ordeal they had undergone that harked back to the wars of their medieval ancestors. I have sensed it strongly among Indian officers, above all in their quickness to insist that they are Rajputs or Dogras, descendants of the invaders who conquered India before its history had begun to be written. I have sensed it among American officers who served in Vietnam or the Lebanon or the Gulf, exponents of a code of courage and duty that belongs to the origins of their republic.
Soldiers are not as other men — that is the lesson that I have learned from a life cast among warriors. The lesson has taught me to view with extreme suspicion all theories and representations of war that equate it with any other activity in human affairs. War undoubtedly connects, as the theorists demonstrate, with economics and diplomacy and politics. Connection does not amount to identity or even to similarity. War is wholly unlike diplomacy or politics because it must be fought by men whose values and skills are not those of politicians or diplomats. They are those of a world apart, a very ancient world, which exists in parallel with the everyday world but does not belong to it. Both worlds change over time, and the warrior world adapts in step to the civilian. It follows it, however, at a distance. The distance can never be closed, for the culture of the warrior can never be that of civilisation itself. All civilisations owe their origins to the warrior; their cultures nurture the warriors who defend them, and the differences between them will make those of one very different in externals from those of another. It is, indeed, a theme of this book that in externals there are three distinct warrior traditions. Ultimately, however, there is only one warrior culture. Its evolution and transformation over time and place, from man’s beginnings to his arrival in the contemporary world, is the history of warfare.
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War in Human History
WHAT IS WAR?
WAR IS NOT THE continuation of policy by other means. The world would be a simpler place to understand if this dictum of Clausewitz’s were true. Clausewitz, a Prussian veteran of the Napoleonic wars who used his years of retirement to compose what was destined to become the most famous book on war — called On War — ever written, actually wrote that war is the continuation ‘of political intercourse’ (des politischen Verkehrs) ‘with the intermixing of other means’ (mit Einmischung anderer Mittel).1 The original German expresses a more subtle and complex idea than the English words in which it is so frequently quoted. In either form, however, Clausewitz’s thought is incomplete. It implies the existence of states, of state interests and of rational calculation about how they may be achieved. Yet war antedates the state, diplomacy and strategy by many millennia. Warfare is almost as old as man himself, and reaches into the most secret places of the human heart, places where self dissolves rational purpose, where pride reigns, where emotion is paramount, where instinct is king. ‘Man is a political animal,’ said Aristotle. Clausewitz, a child of Aristotle, went no further than to say that a political animal is a warmaking animal. Neither dared confront the thought that man is a thinking animal in whom the intellect directs the urge to hunt and the ability to kill.
This is not an idea any easier for modern man to confront than it was for a Prussian officer, born the grandson of a clergyman and raised in the spirit of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. For all the effect that Freud, Jung and Adler have had on our outlook, our moral values remain those of the great monotheistic religions, which condemn the killing of fellow souls in all but the most constrained circumstances. Anthropology tells us and archaeology implies that our uncivilised ancestors could be red in tooth and claw; psychoanalysis seeks to persuade us that the savage in all of us lurks not far below the skin. We prefer, none the less, to recognise human nature as we find it displayed in the everyday behaviour of the civilised majority in modern life — imperfect, no doubt, but certainly cooperative and frequently benevolent. Culture to us seems the great determinant of how human beings conduct themselves; in the relentless academic debate between ‘nature and nurture’, it is the ‘nurture’ school which commands greater support from the bystanders. We are cultural animals and it is the richness of our culture which allows us to accept our undoubted potentiality for violence but to believe nevertheless that its expression is a cultural aberration. History lessons remind us that the states in which we live, their institutions, even their laws, have come to us through conflict, often of the most bloodthirsty sort. Our daily diet of news brings us reports of the shedding of blood, often in re
gions quite close to our homelands, in circumstances that deny our conception of cultural normality altogether. We succeed, all the same, in consigning the lessons both of history and of reportage to a special and separate category of ‘otherness’ which invalidates our expectations of how our own world will be tomorrow and the day after not at all. Our institutions and our laws, we tell ourselves, have set the human potentiality for violence about with such restraints that violence in everyday life will be punished as criminal by our laws, while its use by our institutions of state will take the particular form of ‘civilised warfare’.
The bounds of civilised warfare are defined by two antithetical human types, the pacifist and the ‘lawful bearer of arms’. The lawful bearer of arms has always been respected, if only because he has the means to make himself so; the pacifist has come to be valued in the two thousand years of the Christian era. Their mutuality is caught in the dialogue between the founder of Christianity and the professional Roman soldier who had asked for his healing word to cure a servant. ‘I also am a man set under authority,’ the centurion explained.2 Christ exclaimed at the centurion’s belief in the power of virtue, which the soldier saw as the complement to the force of law which he personified. May we guess that Christ was conceding the moral position of the lawful bearer of arms, who must surrender his life at the demand of authority, and therefore bears comparison with the pacifist who will surrender his life rather than violate the authority of his own creed? It is a complicated thought, but not one which Western culture finds difficult to accommodate. Within it the professional soldier and the committed pacifist find room to co-exist — sometimes cheek-by-jowl: in 3 Commando, one of Britain’s toughest Second World War units, the stretcher-bearers were all pacifists but were held by the commanding officer in the highest regard for their bravery and readiness for self-sacrifice. Western culture would, indeed, not be what it is unless it could respect both the lawful bearer of arms and the person who holds the bearing of arms intrinsically unlawful. Our culture looks for compromises and the compromise at which it has arrived over the issue of public violence is to deprecate its manifestation but to legitimise its use. Pacifism has been elevated as an ideal; the lawful bearing of arms — under a strict code of military justice and within a corpus of humanitarian law — has been accepted as a practical necessity.
‘War as the continuation of policy’ was the form Clausewitz chose to express the compromise for which the states he knew had settled. It accorded respect to their prevailing ethics — of absolute sovereignty, ordered diplomacy and legally binding treaties — while making allowance for the overriding principle of state interest. If it did not admit the ideal of pacifism, which the Prussian philosopher Kant was only just translating from the religious to the political sphere, it certainly distinguished sharply between the lawful bearer of arms and the rebel, the freebooter and the brigand. It presupposed a high level of military discipline and an awesome degree of obedience by subordinates to their lawful superiors. It expected that war would take certain narrowly definable forms — siege, pitched battle, skirmish, raid, reconnaissance, patrol and outpost duties — each of which had its own recognised conventions. It assumed that wars had a beginning and an end. What it made no allowance for at all was war without beginning or end, the endemic warfare of non-state, even pre-state peoples, in which there was no distinction between lawful and unlawful bearers of arms, since all males were warriors; a form of warfare which had prevailed during long periods of human history and which, at the margins, still encroached on the life of civilised states and was, indeed, turned to their use through the common practice of recruiting its practitioners as ‘irregular’ light cavalry and infantrymen. From the unlawful and uncivilised means by which these irregular warriors rewarded themselves on campaign and from their barbaric methods of fighting, the officers of the civilised states averted their gaze; yet without the services they offered, the over-drilled armies in which Clausewitz and his kin had been raised would scarcely have been able to keep the field. All regular armies, even the armies of the French Revolution, recruited irregulars to patrol, reconnoitre and skirmish for them; during the eighteenth century the expansion of such forces — Cossacks, ‘hunters’, Highlanders, ‘borderers’, Hussars — had been one of the most noted contemporary military developments. Over their habits of loot, pillage, rape, murder, kidnap, extortion and systematic vandalism their civilised employers chose to draw a veil. That it was an older and more widespread form of warfare than that which they themselves practised they preferred not to admit; ‘war … the continuation of policy’, once Clausewitz had formulated the thought, proved to offer the thinking officer a convenient philosophical bolt-hole from contemplation of the older, darker and fundamental aspects of his profession.
Yet Clausewitz himself saw with half an eye that war was not altogether what he claimed it to be. ‘If the wars of civilised peoples are less cruel and destructive than those of savages’, he conditionally began one of his most famous passages. It was a thought he did not pursue because, with all the considerable philosophical force at his disposal, he was struggling to advance a universal theory of what war ought to be, rather than what it actually was and had been. To a very great degree he succeeded. In the practice of warmaking it is to the principles of Clausewitz that the statesman and the supreme commander still turn; in the truthful description of war, however, the eye-witness and the historian must flee from Clausewitz’s methods, despite the fact that Clausewitz himself was both an eye-witness and a historian of war, who must have seen and could have written of a great deal that found no place in his theories. ‘Without a theory the facts are silent,’ the economist F.A. Hayek has written. That may be true of the cold facts of economics, but the facts of war are not cold. They burn with the heat of the fires of hell. In old age General William Tecumseh Sherman, who had burned Atlanta and put a great swathe of the American South to the torch, bitterly delivered himself of exactly that thought, in words that have become almost as famous as those of Clausewitz: ‘I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine … War is hell.’3
Clausewitz had seen the hellish fires of war, had indeed seen Moscow burn. The burning of Moscow was the single greatest material catastrophe of the Napoleonic wars, an event of European significance akin in its psychological effect to that of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. In an age of belief the destruction of Lisbon had seemed awful evidence of the power of the Almighty and had been the stimulus of a religious revival throughout Portugal and Spain; in the age of revolution the destruction of Moscow was seen to testify to the power of man, as indeed it did. It was taken to be a deliberate act — Rostopchin, the city governor, claimed credit for it, while Napoleon had the alleged incendiarists hunted down and executed — but Clausewitz, strangely, could not convince himself that the burning was a deliberate policy, a scorching designed to deny Napoleon the prize of victory. On the contrary: ‘that the French were not the agents I was firmly convinced,’ he wrote, ‘that the Russian authorities had done the act appeared to me, at least, not proven.’ He believed it instead to be an accident.
The confusion which I saw in the streets as the [Russian] rearguard moved out; the fact that the smoke was first seen to rise from the outer edge of the suburbs where the Cossacks were active, both convinced me that the Moscow fire was a result of the disorder, and the habit the Cossacks had of first thoroughly pillaging and then setting fire to all the houses before the enemy could make use of them … It was one of the strangest happenings of history that an event which so influenced the fate of Russia should be like a bastard born from an illicit love affair, without a father to acknowledge it.4
Yet Clausewitz must have known that there was nothing truly accidental about the fatherless act of Moscow’s burning or any of the other numberless illegitimacies that attended Napoleon’s campaign in Russia in 1812. The involvement of the Cossacks was in itself a guarantee that incendiarism, pillage, rape, murder and a hundred other outrages would abound, for
to the Cossacks war was not politics, but a culture and a way of life.
The Cossacks were soldiers of the tsar and at the same time rebels against tsarist absolutism. The story of their origins has been called a myth and there is no doubt that they did mythologise their own beginnings as time drew on.5 Yet the essence of the myth is both simple and true. Cossacks — the name derives from the Turkic word for freeman — were Christian fugitives from servitude under the rulers of Poland, Lithuania and Russia, who preferred to take their chance — to ‘go Cossacking’ — on the rich but lawless surface of the great Central Asian steppe.
By the time that Clausewitz came to know the Cossacks, the myth of their birth in freedom had grown in the telling but diminished in reality. At the outset they had founded genuinely egalitarian societies — lordless, womanless, propertyless, living embodiments of the free and free-ranging warrior band that is such a powerful and eternal ingredient of saga across the world. In 1570 Ivan the Terrible had had to barter gunpowder, lead and money — three things the steppe did not produce — in return for Cossack help in liberating Russian prisoners from Muslim enslavement, but before the end of his reign he had begun to use force to bring them within the tsarist system.6 His successors sustained the pressure. During Russia’s wars with Napoleon, regular Cossack regiments were raised, a contradiction in terms though all of a part with the contemporary European fashion for incorporating units of forest, mountain and horse peoples in the different states’ orders of battle. In 1837 Tsar Nicholas I completed the process by proclaiming his son ‘Ataman of All Cossacks’, whose followers were represented in the Imperial Guard Corps by regiments of Cossacks of the Don, the Urals and the Black Sea, differentiated from other units of tamed frontiersmen, Lesquines, Musalmans and Caucasian Mountaineers, only by the details of their exotic uniforms.
