Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power

by Victor Davis Hanson

  DECISIVE BATTLE AND WESTERN WARFARE

  Ultimately, wars are best decided by men who approach each other face-to-face, stab, strike, or shoot at close range, and physically drive the enemy from the battlefield. Missile weapons can aid infantry battle but in themselves—whether blow darts, slings, or howitzers—cannot send an enemy into defeat and decide a war:

  Fire and fire only is hopeless if the enemy ever makes contact. Weapons of shock are the crushers and pincers which are held in the hands of the assailant. Shock weapons are the military instruments par excellence. They are not only employed by courageous fighters anxious to close with the enemy, deliver him a blow, and win a decision, but they are truly the deadly one. They win battles. (H. Turney-High, Primitive War: Its Practice and Concepts, 12)

  At the Granicus, Issus, and Gaugamela, the Persian army was stationary, waiting for Alexander’s arrival, intent on selecting superior terrain for a defense against the invaders. Stockades, riverbanks, caltrops, scythed chariots, and elephants were to stop what their men-at-arms could not. Alexander’s famous retort that he would fight Darius III openly by day rather than stealthily at night is one of the many anecdotes that illustrate the Hellenic desire for open, direct, and deadly confrontation. Curtius relates that Alexander also scoffed at the idea of a war of attrition, much less extended negotiations with Darius III: “To fight a war with captives and women is not my way; he must be armed for battle whom I hate” (History of Alexander 4.11.18).

  Before Gaugamela, Curtius recorded that Alexander worried only that Darius might not fight. When Parmenio woke him from a sound sleep on the morning of the battle, he arose in confidence and said, “When Darius was torching the countryside, burning villages, and destroying the food supply, I was beside myself. But now, what do I have to worry about since he is preparing to fight it out in open battle? By God, he has satisfied my every wish” (4.13.23). Plutarch adds that Alexander also explained on the morning of Gaugamela, “What is the matter? Don’t you think that now we already appear to have won, since no longer do we have to wander about in a vast and denuded country in pursuit of a Darius who avoids pitched battle?” (Alexander 32.3–4). That same morning Alexander went on to goad his troops that their vast enemies—“on their side more men are standing, on ours more will fight”—were not shock troops like themselves, scarred and maimed from hand-to-hand collisions. Persians, he told his men, were but “a mixed mob of barbarians, in which some threw javelins, others stones, and only a few used real [iusta] weapons” (Curtius History of Alexander 4.14.5). “Real weapons” in the Western mind meant pikes and swords that were to be used face-to-face at close quarters. During the battle itself the outnumbered Macedonians alone charged en masse to break the enemy line. When safely through the horde, they ignored the Persian camp and went directly for Darius’s chariot. Where the king fled, there Alexander’s men followed, nearly riding their horses to death as they sought to kill everyone on the battlefield and catch a fleeing king.

  Whence did this peculiar Western notion of decisive battle derive? Where did the idea arise that men would seek their enemy face-to-face, in a daylight collision of armies, without ruse or ambush, with the clear intent to destroy utterly the army across the plain or die honorably in the process? Decisive battle evolved in early-eighth-century Greece and was not found earlier or elsewhere. The earlier great crashes of Egyptian and Near Eastern armies of the second millennium B.C. were not shock collisions of heavily armed foot soldiers, but vast battles of maneuver between horsemen, charioteers, and bowmen. The circumstances of the birth of decisive battle—wars of small property-owning citizens, who voted for and then fought their own battles—account for its terrifying lethality. Only freemen who voted and enjoyed liberty were willing to endure such terrific infantry collisions, since shock alone proved an economical method of battle that allowed conflicts to be brief, clear-cut—and occasionally deadly.

  In the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. if a small Greek community was self-supporting and governed by its surrounding private landowners, then hoplite warfare, far better than fortification or garrisoning passes, made perfect sense: muster the largest, best-armed group of farmers to protect land in the quickest, cheapest, and most decisive way possible. It was far easier and more economical for farmers to defend farmland on farmland than to tax and hire landless others to guard passes—the sheer ubiquity of which in mountainous Greece ensured that they could be turned by enterprising invaders anyway. Raiding, ambush, and plundering were still common—such activities seem innate to the human species—but the choice of military response to win or protect territory was a civic matter, an issue to be voted on by free landowning infantrymen themselves. In that regard, other means of conflict resolution seemed unending, costly, and often indecisive.

  Hoplite fighting through shock collision in the tiny valleys of early Greece marks the true beginning of Western warfare, a formal idea fraught with legal, ethical, and political implications. Almost all these wars of a day between impatient yeomen of the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. were infantry encounters over land, usually disputed border strips signifying agrarian prestige more than prized fertility. Customarily, the army of one city-state, an Argos, Thebes, or Sparta, met its adversary in daylight in formal columnar formation—the word “phalanx” means rows or stacks of men—according to a recognized sequence of events, which allowed battle to be brutal, but not necessarily so deadly.

  There arose an entire vocabulary for horrific moments of fighting that is ubiquitous in Greek literature, reflecting the centrality of shock battle to Greek culture in a way not true of other methods of fighting elsewhere. Hoplite engagements themselves were known as “drawn-ups” (parataxeis), “battles by agreement” (machai ex homologou), “battles in the plain” (machai en to pediō), or battles that were “just and open” (machai ek tou dikaiaou kai phanerou). Stations and areas of the battlefield—the front ranks (prōtostatai or promachoi), no-man’s land (metaixmion), the close-in fighting (sustadon)—were carefully delineated. Clear stages—the initial run (dromō), the clash and breaking of the line (pararrēxis), spear thrusting (doratismos), hand-to-hand (en chersi), push (ōthismos), encirclement (kuklōsis), and rout (egklima or trophē)— were also formally recognized. Such nomenclature suggests that the mechanics of hoplite battle itself entered into the popular culture in a way unknown of mounted or light-infantry warfare.

  The Greeks of the city-state acknowledged that decisive land warfare of their age was different from earlier practice. For example, the historian Thucydides begins his history with the recognition that the earlier Greeks did not fight as they did in his own time, and he presents a picture of the close tie between agrarian societies and land warfare. Capital, stationary agrarian populations on the mainland, and permanent crops, in Thucydides’ description, led to the predominance of decisive land warfare. Aristotle much more concretely mapped out the evolution of Greek warfare, and likewise put great emphasis on the later emergence of infantry battle in general and hoplite infantrymen in particular. Early Greek states that evolved after monarchies, he said, were primarily run by aristocratic horsemen. Thus, their war lay with cavalry, since hoplites were not yet effective troops, possessing neither “orderly formation” nor the “experience and knowledge of troop deployment.” Later, hoplites became stronger, which led to social transformation and the rise of constitutional governments (Politics 4.1297b16–24).

  Aristotle implies that early Greek warfare was once primarily fought by mounted troops, but at the dawn of the city-state evolved into battles between heavily armed infantry. The rise of such soldiers, and presumably the manner in which they fought, gave the hoplites political preeminence in their poleis, leading to the spread of constitutional governments. Whereas mass collisions were a part of Mediterranean warfare at every age and locale, in Greece they became the exclusive domain of heavily armed infantrymen, who fought in file and rank, charged and crashed together in a truly shock fashion. Moreover, the militias of th
e polis Greeks were subject to a general set of protocols that had political and cultural implications beyond the battlefield: set battles might decide entire wars, even when the war-making potential of the loser was not exhausted by defeat.

  As we have seen, Philip put a final end to hoplite battle as arbitrarily resolving conflict itself. In the process he took the Greek discovery of shock infantry battle and applied it to a new Western concept of total war. At the twilight of the free city-state and in the shadow of Philip II, the orator Demosthenes, in his Third Philippic (48–52), composed sometime around 341 B.C., lamented on how decisive battle had transmogrified into something terrifying: “whereas all the arts have made great advances, and nothing is the same as it was in the past, I believe that nothing has been more altered and improved than matters of war.” He goes on to remind his audience that in the past “the Lacedaemonians, like all the others, used to spend four or five months—the summer season—invading and ravaging the territory of their enemy with hoplites and civic armies and retire home again.” Finally, Demosthenes points out that hoplite armies were “so bound by tradition or rather such good citizens of the polis that they did not use money to seek advantage, but rather their war was by rules and out in the open.”

  In contrast to this evolving Greco-Macedonian tradition, Darius drew on a distinguished but very different heritage, one that went back to Cyrus the Great and was enriched by fighting Scythian and Bactrian heavy horsemen, the chariot armies of Egypt, and tribal contingents to the east and mountainous north. The Persian army relied on mobility, speed, and ruse, and was thus especially strong in horsemen and archers—and weak in heavy infantrymen, as was befitting a nomadic people of the steppes, who had no agrarian city-state traditions and never a history of consensual government. The warrior ethos in Asia was not that of the yeoman farmer. No Mede, Scythian, or Bactrian trudged into the Assembly, voted to muster, pulled his armor off the wall, joined in his local regiment, and with his “general” at his side, marched off to challenge his opposing phalanx to a brutal collision—and then hurried back home to defend his own property and to conduct a public audit of the battle performance of the army and its generals.

  Persians, Medes, Bactrians, Armenians, Cilicians, and Lydians, who either enjoyed tribal rule or were subject to imperial governments, relied on superior manpower, aerial bombardment by missile troops and archers, and vast encircling movements of hordes of horsemen and chariots. If a Western army—the later Romans at Carrhae (53 B.C.) are a good example—was foolish enough to fight in the sweeping plains of Asia without adequate mounted support, it might well be surrounded and overwhelmed by such forces. Usually, the superiority of Western infantry and its preference for shock battle meant that if the army was led properly—by a Pausanias at Plataea (479 B.C.), Caesar in Gaul (59–50 B.C.), or Alexander at Gaugamela—there were no forces in the world that could stand its onslaught.

  The Hellenistic autocrats who followed Alexander the Great had found their phalanxes unconquerable against Asiatic troops, and were adequate enough against one another. They were eventually to learn that Rome brought to each battle a haughty new bellicosity and bureaucracy of war that were the material and spiritual dividends of a united and politically stable Italy and a revived idea of civic militarism that had helped the Greeks win at Salamis so long ago. Unlike Hellenistic battle practice, Roman decisive warfare was always presented as a legal necessity (ius ad bellum), a purportedly defensive undertaking that was forced by belligerents upon the rural folk of Italy. Whereas their generals may have killed for laus and gloria, the republican legionaries themselves felt confident that they fought to preserve the traditions of their ancestors (mos maiorum) and in accordance with the constitutional decrees of an elected government. Roman armies continued to win because they added their own novel contributions of regularization to decisive war. As we shall see with the unrivaled slaughter at Cannae, Roman militarism was based on mass confrontation in pitched battles, and on applying the entire engine of Hellenic-inspired science, economic practice, and political structure to exploit such battlefield aggressiveness in annihilating the enemy in a single day if possible—or being nearly consumed in the process.

  The Greek way of war was not dead with the rise and passing of the Hellenistic kingdoms (323–31 B.C.) that followed the division of Alexander’s empire. Far from it. For the next two millennia in Europe, battle would be energized as never before by those who were not Greeks, but who inherited their peculiarly Western dilemma of being able to do what they knew they sometimes should not. Alexander the Great for a time created a deadly army by separating decisive battle from civic militarism; the Romans crafted an even deadlier military by returning the notion of shock battle to its original womb of constitutional government in ways far beyond even the Hellenic imagination.

  This Western propensity for shock battle survived Rome as well, in the Byzantines’ century-long wars against nomadic and Islamic horsemen, and the deadly internecine struggles between the Franks and then against the Muslims. The Teutonic Knights of the Middle Ages adapted the idea of face-to-face fighting to mass heavy-cavalry charges, which had served their outnumbered forces well during the Crusades in the Middle East. Phalanxes—unique to Europe—were to reappear in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Switzerland, Germany, Spain, and Italy. Renaissance abstract thinkers sought to apply ancient discussions of stratēgia (“generalship”) and taktika (the arrangement of troops) to improving the crash of contemporary pikemen. Pragmatists as diverse as Machiavelli, Lipsius, and Grotius also envisioned such armies in constitutional service to the state, realizing that heavy infantrymen, mustered from yeomen free citizens, were the most effective shock troops when engaged in mass collision. These small armies of central Europe followed in the classical tradition of shock land battles. By the sixteenth century the West was convulsed in an era of shock battles as professional armies sought to destroy one another’s ability to resist, in a manner not found in China, Africa, or the Americas. Between 1500 and 1900 thousands more infantry collisions took place inside Europe than in the rest of the world.

  The Aztecs, who tried to pull Cortés and his men off their warhorses and bind his conquistadors as sacrificial offerings on the Great Pyramid, were of an entirely different heritage, one that did not see battle as the occasion to meet the enemy and settle the dispute instantaneously through the destruction of its ability to resist. In contrast, when Cortés at last took Mexico City, he advanced by destroying the city block by block, intent on annihilating all Aztec adversaries until they capitulated or were no more. The Zulus thought that after their sole victory at Isandhlwana, the British would retreat, having been defeated in open battle. They had no conception that the Western way of war meant a series of such battles until the will—or culture—of the adversary was crushed. The Ottoman Janissaries, who learned and mastered the European art of firearms, never embraced the corresponding Western idea of fighting as shock troops in disciplined columns, in which individual heroism was subjugated to the larger goal of achieving mass firepower and collision which alone might obliterate the enemy. The Marings on New Guinea, the Maoris of New Zealand, the mythical Homeric heroes of the pre-polis Greek past, and most other tribal peoples sought from war social recognition, religious salvation, or cultural status—anything other than the dismemberment of the enemy on the battlefield by the collective effort of shock encounter.

  The idea of decisive battle continues in the West. The classical notion that pitched, shock confrontation is the only way to resolve wars in part explains why Americans consider it honorable and effective to bomb the Libyans when they have committed a terrorist act in Europe; or to rain down enormous battleship projectiles upon Palestinian villages openly and “fairly” from offshore when a few of their residents are alleged to have bombed in a “cowardly” fashion American marines asleep in their barracks. As long as Westerners engaged the enemy in an open contest of firepower, the ensuing carnage was seen as relatively immaterial: terrorist
s who shamelessly killed a few women and children, or states that surprised us on Sunday morning in a bombing attack on our fleet, usually found mechanized murderous armies of retaliation on their soil and daylight fleets of bombers over their skies.

  Due to our Hellenic traditions, we in the West call the few casualties we suffer from terrorism and surprise “cowardly,” the frightful losses we inflict through open and direct assault “fair.” The real atrocity for the Westerner is not the number of corpses, but the manner in which soldiers died and the protocols under which they were killed. We can comprehend the insanity of a Verdun or Omaha Beach, but never accept the logic of far fewer killed through ambush, terrorism, or the execution of prisoners and noncombatants. Incinerating thousands of Japanese civilians on March 11, 1945, is seen by Westerners as not nearly so gruesome an act as beheading on capture parachuting B-29 fliers.

  Will such a paradox always be true? Between the hoplite battlefields of classical antiquity and the present age lie the trenches of World War I, the carpet bombing and death camps of World War II, and the apocalyptic threat of World War III. Modern Western man finds himself in a military dilemma of sorts. His excellence at frontal assault and decisive battle—expanded to theaters above the earth’s atmosphere and below the sea— could end all that he holds dear despite the nobility of his cause and the moral nature of his war making. We in the West may have to fight as non-Westerners—in jungles, stealthily at night, and as counterterrorists—to combat enemies who dare not face us in shock battle. In consequence, we may not always fully draw on our great Hellenic traditions of superior technology and the discipline and ardor of our free citizen soldiers in shock battle—unless we are to face another Western power in a murderous collision of like armies. Alexander the Great, remember, fought mostly non-Greeks in short, decisive battles in which he suffered little. When he did meet other Westerners—whether in the pitched battle of Chaeronea or against the Greek mercenaries in Asia Minor—the result was frightful carnage.