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

by Victor Davis Hanson

  In the minutes before the attack on Rorke’s Drift, not a single regular British soldier fled to join the hundreds of colonials and native troops that took off before the approach of thousands of Zulus. Instead, fewer than one hundred able-bodied men continuously fired more than 20,000 rifle rounds and were at the ramparts for some sixteen hours. At the bloodbath at Isandhlwana hours earlier, nearly all the regular companies of the 24th Regiment of the British regular army were overwhelmed in situ rather than dispersed in flight. Uguku, a Zulu veteran of the slaughter, later recalled of that British final stand:

  They were completely surrounded on all sides, and stood back to back, and surrounding some men who were in the centre. Their ammunition was now done, except that they had some revolvers which they fired at us at close quarters. We were quite unable to break their square until we had killed a great many of them, by throwing our assegais at short distances. We eventually overcame them in this way. (F. Colenso, History of the Zulu War and Its Origin, 413)

  At Rorke’s Drift in the moments before the Zulu arrival, Lieutenant Chard’s men shot a European sergeant who fled with Captain Stephenson’s Natal Native Contingent. Chard felt no need to mention the shooting in his report, and the British officer corps undertook no investigation into the apparently justified killing of a colonial noncommissioned officer who left his post. Sir Garnet Wolseley later even criticized Lieutenants Melville and Coghill, the valiant duo who tried to save the queen’s color at Isandhlwana. In Wolseley’s view under no circumstances were British officers ever to ride out of camp while their beleaguered men were alive and still fighting—despite the sanctity of the regimental banner. The few mounted troops who got away from Isandhlwana after the collapse of the infantry’s resistance naturally came under later suspicion.

  After the minor disaster at the Intombi River, Lieutenant Harward was court-marshaled for riding off for help while his soldiers were still surrounded by Zulus. Although Harward was acquitted by a military court of justice, General Wolseley insisted that his own dissent be read at the head of every regiment in the army. Wolseley’s disgust at the idea of a British officer leaving his men framed his apology to the rank and file and illustrated the trust that lay at the heart of the army’s legendary discipline:

  The more helpless the position in which an officer finds his men, the more it is his bound duty to stay and share their fortune, whether for good or ill. It is because the British officer has always done so that he occupies the position in which he is held in the estimation of the world, and that he possesses the influence he does in the ranks of our army. The soldier has learned to feel that, come what may, he can in the direst moment of danger look with implicit faith to his officer, knowing that he will never desert him under any possible circumstances. It is to this faith of the British soldier in his officers that we owe most of the gallant deeds recorded in our military annals; and it is because the verdict of this Court-Martial strikes at the root of this faith, that I feel it necessary to mark officially my emphatic dissent from the theory upon which the verdict has been founded. (D. Clammer, The Zulu War, 143)

  The great strength of the British army was to form in lines and squares. In the former formation each row of three or four lines of soldiers —often prone, kneeling, and standing—fired on command, reloaded, and then again shot five to ten seconds later. The exact sequence of shots from the entire company ensured a near steady curtain of fire even from single-shot Martini-Henry rifles. In a box four right angles ensured a safe center for baggage, refuge for the wounded, and reserves—the integrity of the entire square predicated on the idea that no British soldier would give way at any point along the perimeter. Often to ensure fire control, stakes were placed at one-hundred-yard intervals in the killing field to allow gunnery sergeants to hone the sequence of firing and individual riflemen to calibrate their aim.

  The onslaught of a British lancer attack against the Zulus was equally frightening in its carefully disciplined stages:

  The 17th Lancers—the Duke of Cambridge’s Own—were a proud regiment. “Death or Glory” was their motto, and Balaclava was amongst their battle honours. Drury-Lowe [colonel of the regiment] drew them up meticulously, as if on parade. . . . Watching the troopers on their big English horses, with their blue uniforms and white facings, they appeared a machine, so precise was their dressing. Drury-Lowe advanced his regiment at the walk in a column of troops, and, as the ground leveled, gave the orders: “Trot—Form squadrons—Form Line!” then, with the men drawn up two deep, “Gallop!” the horses leapt forward, and as the line of steel-lipped lances came to the rest, pennons streaming, “Charge!” and a cheer broke from the square. The regiment rapidly overtook the retreating Zulus, and the lances, as unsparing as the assegais, rose and fell as the troopers impaled warrior after warrior, and flicked the bodies from the points. (D. Clammer, The Zulu War, 214)

  What Is Western Discipline?

  The display of courage while under attack is a human trait common to fighters everywhere. All warriors can exhibit extraordinary bravery. Nor is the ancillary of courage, obedience to command, a peculiarly Western characteristic. Both tribal and civilized militaries find success from the fear, even terror, that fighters hold for their leader, general, king, or autocrat. Individual Zulus who grasped the red-hot barrels of Martini-Henry rifles on the north rampart at Rorke’s Drift were as brave as the Englishmen who calmly blew them to pieces seconds later with .45-caliber rifle slugs. They were nearly as obedient to their particular generals as well, charging on command in human wave attacks against fortified positions.

  But in the end the Zulus—who could be executed on a nod from their king—not the British, ran away from Rorke’s Drift:

  It seems paradoxical to us that men who were so brave in their attacks would run away in panic when their attacks eventually failed. It did not seem paradoxical to the Zulus. They expected to run away if their attacks eventually failed. . . . Once a body of men began to run away, the effect on other men was contagious, as it is in most armies. Shaka’s regiments sometimes ran away like this too. It was the traditional end to a Zulu battle. They either destroyed their enemies or ran away. (R. Edgerton, Like Lions They Fought, 188)

  Hours earlier, after the moment of their greatest victory at Isandhlwana, most of the impis dispersed home with booty—far different were they in triumph from the murderous British lancers who six months later after the slaughter at Ulundi still rode down the defeated Zulus for hours on end. Why did brave and obedient Zulus in both victory and defeat lack the discipline of brave and obedient British soldiers?

  From the Greeks onward, Westerners have sought to distinguish moments of individual courage and obedience to leaders from a broader, more institutionalized bravery that derives from the harmony of discipline, training, and egalitarian values among men and officers. Beginning with the Hellenic tradition, Europeans were careful to organize types of purported courage into a hierarchy, from the singular rashness of bold individual acts to the cohesive shared bravery along a battle line—insisting that the former was only occasionally critical to victory, the latter always.

  Herodotus, for example, after the battle at Plataea (479 B.C.) noted that the Spartans did not bestow the award of valor to Aristodemus, who rushed out from the formation in near suicidal charges to stab away at the Persians. Instead, the Spartans gave the prize to one Posidonius, who fought alongside his fellow hoplites in the phalanx bravely but “without any wish to be killed” (9.71). Herodotus goes on to imply that Aristodemus had not fought with reason, but as a berserker to redeem his sullied reputation incurred from missing out on the glorious last stand at Thermopylae the summer before.

  The Greek standard of courage is inextricably tied to training and discipline: the hoplite is to fight with cold reason, not from frenzy. He holds his own life dear, not cheap, and yet is willing to offer it for the polis. His success in battle is gauged not entirely on how many men he kills or how much personal valor he displays, but to the degre
e his own battleworthiness aids the advance of his comrades, the maintenance of order in defeat, or the preservation of the formation under attack.

  This emphasis on the sanctity of the group was not just a Spartan ethos, but a generally held code throughout the Greek city-states. Frequently in Greek literature we hear that same theme of group cohesion among average soldiers—all citizens can be good fighters if they dedicate themselves to the defense of their peers and culture at large. In Thucydides’ second book the Athenian general Pericles reminds the Assembly during his funeral oration that truly brave men are not those berserkers who are in “evil circumstances and thus have the best excuse to be unsparing of their lives.” Such men, he says, “have no hope of better days.” Rather, the truly courageous are those “to whom it makes an enormous difference if they suffer disaster” (Thucydides 2.43.6).

  We hear throughout Greek literature of the necessity of staying in rank, of rote and discipline as more important than mere strength and bravado. Men carry their shields, Plutarch wrote, “for the sake of the entire line” (Moralia 220A). Real strength and bravery were for carrying a shield in formation, not for killing dozens of the enemy in individual combat, which was properly the stuff of epic and mythology. Xenophon reminds us that from freeholding property owners comes such group cohesion and discipline: “In fighting, just as in working the soil, it is necessary to have the help of other people” (Oeconomicus 5.14). Punishments were given only to those who threw down their shields, broke rank, or caused panic, never to those who failed to kill enough of the enemy.

  Similarly, there is nothing but disdain for gaudy tribal fighters, loud yelling, or terrifying noise if such show is not accompanied by the discipline to march and stay in rank. “Images don’t inflict wounds,” Aeschylus says (Seven Against Thebes, 397–99). Thucydides has the Spartan general Brasidas, in his attack against Illyrian villagers, sum up the early Western contempt for tribal warfare:

  They hold terror in the onset of their attack for those who have no experience with them. They are indeed dreadful looking due to their sheer numbers; the very din of their yelling is intolerable; and they create an image of terror even in their empty brandishing of their weapons. But they are not what they seem when it comes time to fighting hand-to-hand with those who can endure such threats. Since they have no regular battle order, they are not ashamed to abandon any position once they are hard pressed; and since both fleeing and attacking are thought to be equally honorable, their courage cannot ever really be tested. . . . Such mobs as these, if one will only withstand their first charge, will only make a boast of courage from afar with threats. But for those who give in to them, they pursue right on their heels, eager to display courage when the situation appears safe. (4.126.5–7)

  The Zulus were far more prone than the Illyrians to press home the attack against solid ranks; nevertheless, Thucydides’ general contrast between yelling and spectacle versus holding firm in a line—“regular battle order”—is relevant to the Anglo-Zulu War. Those soldiers in both wars who could drill in formation, accept and pass on orders, and recognize a central chain of command were more likely to advance, stay put, and retreat in unison and formation. Across time and space such a systematic rather than haphazard movement of men proves the more effective in killing the enemy.

  The Classical Paradigm

  Aristotle, typically so, was the most systematic of Greek thinkers in dissecting the nature of courage and its relationship to self-interest, obedience, and discipline. He reaches almost the same conclusions as other Greek thinkers in explaining why certain types of bravery are preferable and lasting than others—and inseparable from the notion of the state and a trust in its government. In his careful analysis of five types of military bravery, Aristotle gives precedence to civic courage, which amateur citizen soldiers alone possess, due to their fear of cowardice before their commonwealth and fellow citizens and their desire for recognition of virtue that such public bodies offer to selfless men. “A man,” Aristotle notes in echoing Pericles, “should not be brave because he is forced to be, but because courage is itself a noble thing” (Nicomachean Ethics 3.8.5).

  Aristotle also recognizes a second apparent courage, that of better-trained or superior-equipped soldiers who can afford to be brave because they hold material advantages. But he warns us that such purportedly courageous men are not really so: once their transitory advantages cease, they are the likely to flee. Aristotle also acknowledges a third type of apparent bravery often mistaken for true courage, that of the berserker, who due either to pain, frenzy, or anger fights without reason and without regard for death—or the welfare of his peers. This, too, is a transitory courage that can flee when the spirit of audacity resides.

  Nor do Aristotle’s fourth and fifth categories, those respectively of the blind optimist and of the ignorant, meet the criteria of courageousness. Their war spirit can be based on erroneous perceptions and is thus ephemeral. Some men are brave because they have carefully gauged the odds to be in their favor; but such fighters can be either mistaken in their assessment of the battlefield or unaware that advantage is fickle and prone to change in seconds. In either case their courage is not rooted in values and character, much less is it a product of a system, and thus neither lasting nor always dependable in the heat of battle.

  By the same token the ignorant fight well only because they are under the mistaken impression that the advantage is with them; they flee when they gain knowledge of their real danger. Like the optimist, the unaware reflect a relative courage, not an absolute value. Plato in his dialogue Laches makes the same point when Socrates argues that true courage is the ability of a soldier to fight and stay in rank, even when he knows the odds are against him—in contrast to the apparent hero who battles bravely only when all the advantages are on his side.

  Very early on in Western culture the notion of discipline was institutionalized as staying in rank and obeying the orders of superior officers, who gained their authority from constitutional prerogative. The annual oath of the Athenian ephebes—the young military recruits who for two years were to guard the port of Piraeus and hinterland of Attica—contained the following promise: “And I will not desert the man at my side wherever I am positioned in line . . . I will offer my ready obedience at any time to those who are exercising their authority prudently, and to the established laws and to those laws which will be judiciously in force in the future” (M. Tod, Greek Historical Inscriptions, [Oxford 1948] vol. 2, #204). Authors such as Xenophon and Polybius talked of armies as walls, each course an individual company, each brick a soldier—the mortar of discipline keeping men and companies in their exact places and ensuring the integrity of the bulwark. The alternative, in Xenophon’s words, was chaos “like a crowd leaving a theater” (Cavalry Commander 7.2). Classical culture accepted that militiamen were to be neither terrified of their rulers nor recklessly brave. Rather, they were predictable in battle, both in the placement and movement of their own bodies and in their mental and spiritual readiness to accept commands. In the heat of combat all men are likely to lose their fear of a king before death. Bravery, as Aristotle saw, also can be a fickle emotion. Cossacks, as modern military historians have noted of all such nomad warriors, were reckless in pursuit, but often abjectly cowardly when roles were reversed and they found themselves in shock battle against enemy columns.

  The Roman army sought further to bureaucratize civic courage through training and close adherence to close-order formation, regimental élan, and the recognition that bravery was not individual prowess. Josephus, the Jewish Roman historian of the early first century A.D., in a famous and often quoted observation, remarked of Roman battlefield superiority:

  If one looks at the Roman military, it is seen that the Empire came into their hands as the result of their valour, not as a gift of fortune. For they do not wait for the outbreak of war to practise with weapons nor do they sit idle in peace mobilizing themselves only in time of need. Instead, they seem to have been bor
n with weapons in their hands; never do they take a break from training or wait for emergencies to arise. . . . One would not be incorrect in saying that their maneuvers are like bloodless battles, and their battles bloody maneuvers. (Jewish War 3.102–7)

  Nearly four hundred years later Vegetius, the fourth-century-A.D. author of a manual on Roman military institutions, could once more see such training and organization at the root of Roman battle success: “Victory was granted not by mere numbers and innate courage, but by skill and training. We see that the Roman people owed the conquest of the world to no other cause than military training, discipline in their camps, and practice in warfare” (Vegetius Epitoma rei militaris 1.1). Vegetius’s popularity with the Franks and other Germanic monarchies that evolved in western Europe during the Middle Ages arose from his emphasis on creating disciplined lines and columns. In their eyes, he showed how Teutonic furor might be properly channeled into creating spirited but disciplined foot soldiers.