A History of Warfare

by John Keegan

  Such ‘improving’ regiments were a source of deep pride to their colonels, not least because they seemed models of social perfection, an idea deeply attractive to men of the Enlightenment. Though the soldiers were virtually enslaved, and effectively imprisoned in the garrison towns lest they desert, they made en masse a splendid spectacle, seemingly drawn from a species different from the brutish villagers who populated the countryside; and long service did eventually inure them to their lot. There are pathetic descriptions of Prussian veterans, too old and infirm to take the field, hobbling after their regiments as they departed on campaign, since they knew no other life but that of the ranks. Colonels who had formed such soldiers, even if by the drill book and the lash, may well have convinced themselves that they were instruments of social virtue. If they did so, however, they deluded themselves, for the paradoxical reason that the regiments succeeded all too well on their own terms. They had been founded to isolate society’s disruptive elements for society’s good, though that had been forgotten. They ended by isolating themselves from society altogether, differentiated by their own rules, rituals and disciplines.

  The social failure of the Prussian army was unlikely to have troubled the young Clausewitz had it not also condemned the Prussian state to military catastrophe. Within a year of joining the army Clausewitz was pitched into battle against French soldiers animated by motives entirely different from those of the ex-serfs he was commanding. The armies of the French Revolution were bombarded by propaganda about the equality of Frenchmen as citizens of the Republic and about the duty of all citizens to bear arms. Their wars with Europe’s surviving monarchical armies were characterised as struggles to overthrow the aristocratic order wherever it was found, not only so that the Revolution might be defended at home but so that its liberating principles might be implanted wherever men were still unfree. For whatever reason — the subject is extremely complex — the Revolutionary armies proved almost impossible to beat, and their military dynamism persisted even after the good republican General Bonaparte had made himself the Emperor Napoleon.

  In 1806 Napoleon turned his attention to Prussia and overthrew its army in a few whirlwind weeks. Clausewitz found himself a prisoner on French soil and, when allowed to return home, an officer of a skeleton army that existed only by French tolerance. For a few years he conspired with his seniors, Generals Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, in a plot to flesh out the army under Napoleon’s nose, but in 1812 he rebelled against gradualism and took the path of the ‘double patriot’. ‘Double patriotism’ impelled him to disobey his king’s orders to serve under Napoleon in the invasion of Russia and instead to join the tsar’s army in the cause of Prussian freedom. As a tsarist officer he fought at Borodino and, still in Russian uniform, returned to Prussia to fight in its War of Liberation in 1813. ‘Double patriotism’, incidentally, was to be the code of the ultra-nationalist Japanese officers who disobeyed the moderate policies of the Emperor’s government before the Second World War in order, as they saw it, to obey the Emperor’s true interests.

  Only patriotic desperation could have driven Clausewitz to such a subversive course; having chosen that path he was thereby energised to embark on a career of intellectual subversion that had a worldwide effect. The disaster of 1806 had profoundly shaken his belief in the Prussian state; it had not, however, undermined his belief in the values of the regimental culture in which he had been raised. He had, indeed, no way of thinking of war except as a calling in which the soldier, by his conduct, and particularly the officer, defied nature. Nature argued for flight, for cowardice, for self-interest; nature made for Cossacking, whereby a man fought if he chose and not otherwise, and might turn to commerce on the battlefield if that suited his ends — this was ‘real war’ at its worst. The best-observed ideals of regimental culture, however — total obedience, single-minded courage, self-sacrifice, honour — most nearly approached that ‘true war’ which Clausewitz convinced himself a professional soldier should make his end.

  As Michael Howard has pointed out, the distinction between ‘real war’ and ‘true war’ was not original to Clausewitz.17 It was ‘in the air’ in the early nineteenth-century Prussian army, not least because it accorded with the idealist philosophy that pervaded Prussia’s universities and cultural life. Clausewitz had no formal philosophical training; ‘rather, he was a typical representative of his generation, who attended lectures on logic and ethics designed for the general public, read relevant nonprofessional books and articles, and drew scraps of ideas at second and third hand from the cultural environment.’18 The cultural environment was conducive to a military theory founded on a dialectic between true and real war; it further afforded Clausewitz the language, the arguments and the mode of presentation best calculated to commend his theory to his contemporaries.

  Clausewitz was in a dilemma after he returned to Prussia in Russian uniform in 1813. His career was blighted, yet he remained a fervent Prussian nationalist. He wished to design for his country’s army a theory of war that would ensure it victory in the future, yet his country showed no inclination to undergo the sort of internal change that had made France invincible during the Revolution. Clausewitz did not himself desire that it should; he despised the French, thought them inferior in national qualities to his own people — sly and glib where Prussians were truthful and noble — and remained too rooted in his monarchical and regimental upbringing to want revolutionary ideals transplanted to his kingdom. His rational powers told him, none the less, that it was the revolutionary fervour of the French armies that had brought them victory. In France during the Revolution, politics had been everything; in Prussia politics had been and very largely remained even after Napoleon’s defeat nothing but the whim of the king. The dilemma was therefore: how might one have the forms of warfare practised by the armies of the French Republic and Napoleon without the politics of revolution? How might one have popular warfare without a popular state? Could he but find the language to persuade the Prussian army that warfare was indeed a form of political activity, that the more nearly it could approximate to ‘true war’ the better it served a state’s political ends, and that any gap remaining between ‘true war’ and the imperfect form of ‘real war’ should be recognised simply as the deference that strategy paid to political necessity, then the Prussian soldier could be safely left in a state of political innocence, with the difference that he would thenceforward fight as if the fire of politics flowed in his veins.

  Clausewitz’s solution to his military dilemma approximates closely, in a sense, to the solution that Marx found to his political dilemma only a few years afterward. Both were raised in the same cultural environment of German idealism, though Marx had had the formal philosophical training that Clausewitz had not, and it is extremely significant that Clausewitz has always stood high in the favour of Marxist intellectuals, Lenin foremost among them. The reason is easy to see. Reductivism is the essence of Marxist methodology, and Clausewitz argued by reduction that in war the worse the better, because the worse is nearer to ‘true’ rather than ‘real’ war. Marx also was to argue that the worse the better, the worse in politics being the culmination of the class struggle, revolution, which overthrows the hollow world of ‘real’ politics and ushers in the ‘true’ society of proletarian victory.

  The motives that impelled Marx to argue as he did were not the same as those that animated Clausewitz. He was the bolder spirit; while Clausewitz clung to the role of insider, hoped — vainly — to be appointed ambassador to London or chief of the general staff, and gladly accepted promotions and decorations, Marx revelled in the role of outsider.19 Exile, poverty, execration by the Prussian state were grist to his mill. Life on the outside strengthened his hand, while Clausewitz believed that only by remaining inside the system could he change it. Yet, intellectually, more united than divided the two men, for both had to overcome a similar philosophical difficulty, that of persuading a chosen audience to a point of view to which it was highly resistant. Marx w
as an apostle of revolution to a society whose progressive elements were profoundly disillusioned by revolution, who remembered that the French Revolution and the 1830 revolution had failed, who were to see the 1848 revolution fail, and who were oppressed on all sides by the power of the monarchical or bourgeois state. Clausewitz was the apostle of a revolutionary philosophy of warmaking, which sought to depict war as a political activity to a caste that held politics to be anathema. Both eventually found a means to overcome the intellectual resistance of the audience each sought to convert. Marx conceived a set of what he considered scientific historical laws which laid down for progressives not merely the hope but the certainty, the inevitability, of the proletariat’s victory. Clausewitz conceived a theory which elevated the regimental officer’s values — total dedication to duty, even to dying in the cannon’s mouth — to the status of a political creed, thereby absolving him from deeper political reflection.

  On War and Kapital, different as they are in subject matter, may therefore be seen ultimately as two books of a kind. Clausewitz no doubt hoped that On War would achieve the same status as Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, that supreme work of the Enlightenment mind; he may indeed have thought that, like Smith, he had done no more than to observe, describe and categorise the phenomena before his eyes. Marx, too, did much describing, much of it accurate. Drawing on Adam Smith’s brilliant identification of industry’s division of labour, he went on to characterise the emotion such division engenders as ‘alienation’; so that where Smith saw in the processes of pre-mechanical pinmaking — when one man drew the wire, another cut it to length, a third pointed the shaft, a fourth forged the head — only the miraculous working of the ‘unseen hand’ that directed a market economy, Marx had the inspiration to diagnose that the desperation such work implants in a thinking and feeling man’s breast would lead to what he called ‘class war’. Marx drew the conclusion that the processes of mass production in an economic system where the worker did not own the means of production made revolution inevitable; and he was right enough in his observation for industrialists in our own times to persist in the search for means to make the process worker’s lot tolerable, even meaningful. Clausewitz, too, began with description. He took military uniforms, songs and drill for granted, and went on from that starting-point to argue that the soldier’s alienation (though he did not use the term) from his lot — hardship, wounds, death — was destined to lead armies to defeat and collapse, the military equivalent of revolution, if they could not be convinced that the terrible experience of ‘true war’ better served their state than the easier obligation of ‘real war’, with which all men-at-arms were familiar.

  Just as common sense tells us that protracted class war is intolerable to any society in which it persists, and that revolution causes ills beside which those of class war appear trivial, common sense also warns that ‘true war’ may prove worse than flesh and blood can bear. Of course, Clausewitz, as a thinker, never expected that the gap between ‘real war’ and ‘true war’ could be closed altogether. Indeed, the strength of his appeal to intellectuals, particularly Marxist intellectuals, has always lain in the delicacy of his emphasis on the intangible factors — chance, misunderstanding, incapacity, incompetence, political change of mind, failure of will or collapse of consensus — that make ‘real war’ rather than ‘true war’ the more likely form any actual war will take. ‘True war’ is indeed unbearable.

  And yet, despite the room for escape from the harshness of ‘true war’ that Clausewitz allowed, the paradox was that On War succeeded beyond what may have been his wildest expectations. He died a disappointed man in 1831, a victim of the last great European cholera pandemic, unpromoted and largely unhonoured in his own country; the text of On War saw the light of day only through the editorship of his devoted widow. Marx also died a disappointed man, twelve years after the defeat of the Paris commune of 1871, which appeared to spell finis to his confident prediction that revolution was the inevitable outcome of the oppression of Europe’s proletariat by Europe’s bourgeoisie. Yet, only thirty-four years later, in a country so backward that Marx dismissed its suitability as a revolutionary seedbed, revolution not merely took root but flowered into the first dictatorship of the proletariat. That was at the height of a great war among the bourgeois states, a war without which the circumstances of the Russian Revolution would not have been created. The terrible nature of that war, not the terrible nature of industrial capitalism, exerted the push to revolution in Russia, and the war’s terrible nature was, as much as anything else, the belated outcome of Clausewitz’s literary insistence that armies must strive to make ‘real war’ and ‘true war’ the same thing.

  On War had proved a book of long-delayed effect. Not until forty years after its publication in 1832–5 did it become widely known, and then in a roundabout way. Helmuth von Moltke, chief of the Prussian general staff, had apparently magical gifts of generalship which had toppled the power of the Austrian and then the French empires in campaigns of a few weeks in 1871. The world wanted to know his secret, of course, and when Moltke revealed that, beside the Bible and Homer, the book that had most influenced him was On War, Clausewitz’s posthumous fame was assured.20 That Moltke had been a student at Prussia’s war college when Clausewitz was its director was overlooked and in any case irrelevant; the world seized on the book itself, read it, translated it, often misunderstood it, but thereafter believed that it contained the essence of successful warmaking.

  On War’s onward march derived much of its force from its apparent validation by much that had happened in warfare since its composition. The most important of these developments was the spread of that regimentalism in which Clausewitz had been raised. ‘The business of war’, he laid down, in one of those characteristic modifications of his central idea of war as a political act, ‘will always be individual and distinct. Consequently, for as long as they practise this activity, soldiers will think of themselves as members of a kind of guild, in whose regulations, laws and customs the spirit of war is given pride of place.’ That ‘kind of guild’ was, of course, the regiment, whose spirit and values he then proceeded to categorise:

  An army that maintains its cohesion under the most murderous fire; that cannot be shaken by imaginary fears and resists well-found ones with all its might; that, proud of its victories, will not lose the strength to obey orders and its respect and trust for its officers even in defeat; whose physical power, like the muscles of an athlete, has been steeled by training in privation and effort … that is mindful of all these duties and qualities by virtue of the single powerful idea of the honour of its arms — such an army is imbued with the true military spirit.21

  For ‘army’ read ‘regiments’, its constituent parts. Prussia in the nineteenth century was positively swamped by regiments; in 1831 there had been only forty of them, but by 1871 there were more than a hundred, not counting rifle battalions or cavalry. Every fit Prussian was a member of a regiment, or had been in his hot youth, and all understood the ‘single powerful idea of the honour of its arms’.

  That ‘single powerful idea’ brought Prussian arms victory in wars against Austria and France, and immediately sent officers in other nations scurrying to raise regiments on the Prussian model, recruited from the best of a nation’s young men and supported by droves of older reservists who looked back on their conscript days as the rite de passage which ushered them from boyhood to manhood. This rite de passage became an important cultural form in European life, an experience common to almost all young European males and, through its universality, its ready acceptance by electorates as a social norm and its inescapable militarisation of society, a further validation of Clausewitz’s dictum that war was a continuation of political activity. If peoples voted for conscription or acquiesced in conscription laws, how could it be denied that war and politics indeed belonged together on the same continuum?

  And yet, the God of War is not mocked. When in 1914 the conscript regiments of Europe marche
d off to war, dragging their tails of reservists behind them, the war that embroiled them was worse by far than anything for which the citizens had bargained. In the First World War ‘real war’ and ‘true war’ rapidly became indistinguishable; the moderating influences which Clausewitz, as a dispassionate observer of military phenomena, had declared always operated to bring a war’s potential nature and actual purpose into adjustment dwindled into invisibility; Germans, French, British and Russians found themselves apparently fighting war for war’s sake. The war’s political objects — difficult enough to define in the first place — were forgotten, political restraints were overwhelmed, politicians who appealed to reason were execrated, politics even in the liberal democracies was rapidly reduced to a mere justification of bigger battles, longer casualty lists, costlier budgets, overflowing human misery.

  Politics played no part in the conduct of the First World War worth mentioning. The First World War was, on the contrary, an extraordinary, a monstrous cultural aberration, the outcome of an unwitting decision by Europeans in the century of Clausewitz — which began with his return from Russia in 1813 and ended in 1913, the last year of the long European peace — to turn Europe into a warrior society. Clausewitz was not the architect of that cultural decision, any more than Marx was the architect of the revolutionary impulse which perverted liberalism during the same period, but each bears weighty responsibility. Their great books, purporting to be works of science, were in fact heady works of ideology, laying down a vision of the world not as it actually was but as it might be.