The German Genius

by Peter Watson

  In 1829 he was invited to explore Siberia as a guest of the Russian government. His 9,000-mile itinerary took in Kazan, the northern Urals, western Siberia as far as the Altai Mountains, and the edge of Chinese Tungusic territory. He successfully predicted the existence of diamonds in the Urals.

  In 1845, when Humboldt was seventy-six, he published the first volume of Kosmos, the second appearing two years later.34 This turned out to be a triumph, a popular scientific book in the best sense. “The entire material world from the galaxies to the geography of various mosses is presented ‘in pleasing language.’”35 Four volumes in all were published, and the singular nature of the book may be shown from the fact that, although it was a massive popular success, it contained more than 9,000 references.

  In his autobiography, Charles Darwin wrote: “During my last year at Cambridge, I read with care and profound interest Humboldt’s Personal Narrative. This work and Sir J. Herschel’s Introduction to the Study of Natural Philosophy stirred up in me a burning zeal to add even the most humble contribution to the noble structure of the natural sciences.” On the centenary of Humboldt’s birth in 1869 the New York Times devoted the whole of its front page to Humboldt (there were no pictures and no advertisements).36

  Humboldt also helped advance the careers of many young scientists, but perhaps his most enduring monument is that more places around the world have been named after Humboldt than anyone else—thirty-five in all: one city in Mexico, one in Canada, ten in the United States, three counties in the United States, nine bodies of water (including the Humboldt Current in the Pacific Ocean), seven mountains and glaciers (including Humboldt Mountains in China and New Zealand), four parks or forests (including the Humboldt National Park in Cuba). There is also the Mare Humboldtianum, on the moon.37

  A BREAK IN THE GREAT WALL OF LANGUAGES

  “Only after 1771 does the world become truly round; half the intellectual map is no longer blank.” These are the words of Raymond Schwab, the French scholar, in his book The Oriental Renaissance; what he meant was that the decipherment of the “Great Wall of Asian languages”—Sanskrit, Hindi, the hieroglyphics, and cuneiform scripts—was, in his words, “one of the great events of the mind.” C. W. Ceram agreed. The decipherment of the cuneiform script, according to him, “was one of the human mind’s most masterly accomplishments,” a work of true genius.38 It came amid the golden age of translation, when many of the scripts of the ancient Near East, and India itself, were giving up their secrets. The overall impact of the age of translation on European thinking, and German thinking in particular, is discussed in Chapter 8.

  Aside from its intrinsic importance, the decipherment of cuneiform has attracted interest for two colorful reasons. One, the original effort was made as the result of a wager; and two, the working out of the decipherment is starkly clear and simple: the sheer cleverness is there for all to see. The man who made the bet and did the deciphering, Georg Friedrich Grotefend, was born on June 9, 1775, at Münden in Hanover. He studied philology at Göttingen, where he became friendly with Christian Gottlob Heyne (see Chapter 1). On Heyne’s recommendation, in 1797 Grotefend became an assistant master at the Gymnasium in Göttingen, later promoted to vice principal of the Frankfurt am Main grammar school.

  His early interest was in Latin, but in his late twenties he became fascinated by cuneiform scripts that had been discovered in the seventeenth century but were not yet understood. The idea for the wager occurred to Grotefend while he was drinking at an inn with colleagues. Never believing he could pull it off, they accepted his proposal immediately, the more so as the only scripts available to him were some poor copies of the inscriptions discovered in the ruins of Persepolis. He wasn’t deterred and tackled head-on a problem that the best scholars of the day had found insurmountable.39

  He probably would not have made the breakthrough he did without having had the traditional education in Germany which, as we have seen, stressed the classics and philology. Grotefend noted that on some of the Persepolitan tablets there were three different scripts, written side by side in three separate columns.40 Knowing a certain amount of ancient Persian history, through his study of the Greek writers, he was aware that Cyrus had laid waste to the Babylonians around 540 B.C., and this had allowed the rise of the first great Persian kingdom. Grotefend therefore inferred that at least one of the scripts on the tablet would be written in the language of the conqueror. He judged that that would be the middle column since in antiquity the most important script was always put there.

  That was his starting point. He next noticed a complete absence of curved lines in cuneiform, provoking the thought that the characters had not actually been “written,” as such, but instead impressed in wet clay. We now know that cuneiform writing (from the Latin cuneus, meaning wedge-shaped) had originally been pictographic but had become progressively more stylized—for ease and rapidity of writing—and later Persian was almost an alphabetic system, reduced to about thirty-six characters from the original six hundred. With all this as background, Grotefend observed that most of the points of the wedges ran either downward or to the right. Furthermore, the angles formed where two wedges met always opened to the right. The implication was clear: cuneiform was written horizontally, not vertically, and it read from left to right, not the other way round.41

  The actual act of decipherment began when he further observed that one group of signs, and another single sign, recurred frequently throughout the text. He inferred that this group of signs was the word “king” and the single sign—a simple wedge slanting upward from left to right—was a device that separated one word from another, in effect an ancient space bar. His next inference—and perhaps his greatest—was to assume that particular mannerisms could be found in the inscriptions, mannerisms that would have remained unchanged over generations. Here he drew a parallel with the practice, in his own time, of using the phrase “Rest in peace.” This, he pointed out, had been carved unchanged on gravestones for centuries. Probably, something similar would have been used on the Old Persian texts. From his knowledge of such ancient texts as he had encountered through his Greek and Latin studies, he thought that, in any inscription, such phrases as “great king,” “king of kings,” “son of…” would be found. These dynastic formulas should be repeated in all three columns of the tablet. The actual phrase was familiar from languages already known:

  X, Great King, King of Kings, King of A and B, Son of Y, Great King, King of Kings.

  If such a syntax did exist, Grotefend inferred that the first word must be a king’s name. Following that would be the word divider, and then two words, one of which ought to be “king,” which should be easily identified because it would be often repeated.42 Looking down the inscriptions, Grotefend observed that there were just two versions of the same cuneiform groups at the beginnings of the columns—the same words were used each time but in a different order. If he was right about the word for “king,” then what was written was as follows:

  X (king), son of Z

  Y (king), son of X (king)

  Again assuming he was correct, this inscription referred to a dynastic succession in which father and son were kings but not the grandfather. He therefore set himself to find a royal succession that fit such a picture. Looking down the king lists for Persian kings, known from other studies, he quickly concluded that it could not be Cyrus and Cambyses, because the two names in cuneiform did not begin with the same letter, and the inscriptions could not refer to Cyrus and Artaxerxes, because these names were too dissimilar in length. That left Darius and Xerxes, each with the same number of letters, each beginning with a different initial. “They fitted so easily,” said Grotefend, “that I had no doubt about making the right choice.”43 This success was underlined by the fact that Xerxes’s father was Darius, and both of them were kings, but Darius’s father, Hystaspes, was not a king. This is exactly what the inscription said.

  Publication of Grotefend’s discoveries was delayed for a while because h
e was felt to be too young to have made such an important breakthrough and because he was “only” a schoolteacher rather than a full-fledged university academic. In fact, another thirty years were to pass before anyone added anything of substance to Grotefend’s discoveries, when the Frenchman Émile Burnouf and the Norwegian-German Christian Lassen made further inroads into the decipherment of cuneiform.

  THE TRANSFORMATION OF WAR

  Vom Kriege (On War), a long and not altogether cohesive work by an otherwise unknown Prussian general of the Napoleonic era, Carl Philipp Gottlieb von Clausewitz, has achieved a supreme position in Western thinking about warfare. Dismissed by some as a narrow-minded pedant, an out-and-out militarist obsessed with war “as an instrument of policy,” he has also been attacked for treating war “as a rational act.”44 On the other hand, for Bernard Brodie, the American strategist of the nuclear era, On War is “not simply the greatest book on war but the one truly great book on that subject yet written.” It has been compared with Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and Darwin’s Origin of Species in the force of its impact.45

  The book has undoubtedly become a classic, but it didn’t happen immediately. On War was a product of its time, and it is true to say that the book owes almost as much to Napoleon as to its German author. We should not forget that, at the time the book’s main ideas were being conceived, Prussia’s survival as an independent nation was under threat. Napoleon had disturbed the European balance of power fundamentally, and the French ideas of revolution and individual rights threatened the ancient regimes everywhere.46 The emperor’s advances had sparked vituperative essays by such writers as Friedrich von Gentz but these “squibs” could do little to counter the new reality: that, so far as war was concerned, Napoleon had enlisted the aid of the general population, inventing a new mass army. Prussia and its forces, Clausewitz realized, must reform in order to combat these new circumstances. Like Wilhelm von Humboldt (see Chapter 10), Clausewitz realized that major reforms were needed, that the age of absolutism was well and truly over, and that the reforms needed to be related to the people.

  His early career was amazing from a modern standpoint. Clausewitz came from a military family and was a soldier at the age of twelve, remaining one until his death in 1831. He saw combat before his thirteenth birthday and had fought in five campaigns against France by the age of thirty-five.47

  His capacity for reflection did not go unnoticed, and he was taken under the wing of Gerhard von Scharnhorst (1755–1813), co-opted into the exclusive Military Society that Scharnhorst founded, of which Prince August, nephew of Friedrich Wilhelm III, was another member and where the arts of war were discussed. Clausewitz fought at the Battle of Jena in 1806 where he did well but was taken prisoner.48 When he was released, he clamored for reform and began publishing articles advocating change, at first anonymously.

  After those five campaigns, and despite military service with the tsar, because the Prussian king had sided with the hated French against the Russians, Clausewitz was eventually reinstated, promoted to colonel, and nominated as superintendent of the War College in Berlin.49 Now he started work on a lengthy study of war that he had first conceived in 1816. By 1827, says Hugh Smith, in his study of Clausewitz, a draft of the first six books of On War was in existence—about 1,000 pages of manuscript.50 The book was never completed. Clausewitz succumbed to cholera after putting down an insurrection in Poland in 1830. It fell to Clausewitz’s widow, Marie, to complete the mammoth task of preparing her husband’s manuscripts for publication.

  A NEW, MORE BRUTAL KIND OF ARMY

  On War should be read against several significant changes in warfare that took place during Clausewitz’s lifetime.51 In his first engagement in 1793, for example, when he was just twelve, eighteenth-century strategy was still being used as armies maneuvered for limited objectives and preferred tactical skirmishes over full-fledged battles. As was often the case then, neither side emerged victorious. By the time of his second campaign, however, the battles of Jena and Auerstedt in 1806, Napoleon had changed all the rules of engagement.52

  Battles of the Napoleonic era had a higher ratio of casualties than those of the eighteenth century because the nature of armies had changed. In the eighteenth century, armies were, in effect, a royal possession, their officers drawn from the aristocracy with a personal allegiance to the monarch. Most wars, therefore, did not involve the general population as combatants hardly at all. Troops were professional soldiers, mercenaries, and foreigners. Desertion was high.

  Then came the French Revolution and Napoleon. After 1789, for France, war became “the business of the people—a people of thirty millions, all of whom considered themselves to be citizens.” Because Frenchmen now identified with the nation, they allowed themselves to be called to arms in far greater numbers. “Before 1789 an army in the field rarely exceeded 50,000 men. Within a decade or so conscription and militia systems were able to raise forces of over 100,000, and in 1812 France could assemble 600,000 men for its Russian adventure.”53 With such a supply of troops, major battles could be risked more often. “Between 1790 and 1820 Europe saw 713 battles, an average of twenty-three a year compared with eight or nine a year over the previous three centuries.”54

  In line with this, and following the humiliating peace at the end of the Seven Years’ War, the French army began to change its structure. Traditionally, the battalion or regiment, roughly 1,000 men, was the basic unit, but now a distinctly larger formation, the division, was conceived. This consisted of 10,000–12,000 men under independent command, comprising infantry, cavalry, and artillery, with engineering, medical, and communications support. Napoleon also put divisions together to create “corps” of up to 30,000 soldiers and then put corps together to create armies. The importance of sheer size was shown in the fact that a corps of 20,000–30,000 men, it was said, “could not be eliminated in an afternoon, being able to resist long enough for relief to arrive.”55 Sheer size meant that commanders could more easily pursue an opponent and force him to fight. Traveling was safer because the larger numbers could be spread over different roads and were therefore harder to attack. Napoleon also discovered that by pursuing defeated troops, giving his cavalry their head, he could significantly “magnify the scale of the original victory.”56 Despite these manifold advances, it was only on the eve of war, in 1806, that Prussia established permanent divisions.

  And so, militarily, when Clausewitz came to maturity, war was becoming far more brutal. This profoundly shaped On War and made many of the theorists who immediately preceded him—Adam Heinrich Dietrich von Bülow, Georg Heinrich von Berenhorst, Antoine Henri de Jomini, and even Scharnhorst—look dated, though it was Scharnhorst who had first called for the introduction of divisions into the Germany army.57 All agreed that chance was an important factor in war, and so was morale, but beyond that there was little agreement. If one writer influenced Clausewitz more than anyone else it was probably Niccolò Machiavelli, whose view about the unchanging nature of the human condition, and politics—constant conflict—he shared.

  On War is a big book that at times is “inconsistent, obscure and opaque” yet it has stayed influential “because it illuminates by simplifying complex issues and dramatising the human element of war…[Clausewitz] is passionately involved in the subject and at the same time detached and objective.”58 The key elements are probably that there are two types of war—one to overthrow the enemy, the other to secure limited objectives; and that war needs to be understood not as an independent variable but as a function of policy. If Clausewitz has one message it is that “only major engagements involving all forces lead to major success…On War never fully escapes the spirit of all-out war that values the great, decisive battle.”59 This argument—which may seem obvious and commonsensical—was newer then than it seems now, because in the eighteenth century it had always been exceptional for one battle to settle an entire war. It was as if the lesson of Napoleon had been learned most by the people he had humiliated. (This
too was one of Clausewitz’s arguments—that the defeated feel defeat more keenly than victors enjoy their victory, an observation that was to echo down the nineteenth century, and all the way up to 1939.)

  Clausewitz also introduced the concept of “centers of gravity.” This was his way of confirming that strategies “require some link between military activity and political objectives.” He identifies four centers of gravity: territory, the capital of a country, its armed forces, and its alliances.60 Among these, the pre-eminent center of gravity is a nation’s army. That must be destroyed for decisive victory.

  In a sense, Clausewitz’s achievement was to clear the air. He realized that, with the change from engagements between battalions and regiments to engagements between divisions, corps, or armies, the whole concept of war became more terrible, and that with the growth of conscription and mass armies, commanders had to face up to the new realities.

  Since the publication of On War between 1832 and 1834, Clausewitz has become a key figure in understanding war.61 At the outset he was criticized, not least by de Jomini, whose reputation outshone Clausewitz’s for much of the nineteenth century. But Clausewitz’s book gradually won support from those who realized what he was getting at. Friedrich Engels recommended Clausewitz to Marx around the middle of the nineteenth century, and Marx familiarized himself with the main ideas of On War without reading the book itself. But the initial print run of 1,500 copies was still not fully sold by then, and it is fair to say that Clausewitz had fallen into “respectful oblivion.” Despite this, the publishers, Dümmler of Berlin, put out a second edition in 1853 and its reception was better. In Prussia the book was taken up in earnest in the 1860s by leading generals, Helmuth von Moltke in particular. He was impressed by what he took to be Clausewitz’s advocacy of “Napoleonic” war, with its emphasis on size, morale, patriotism, and leadership. Moltke’s own victories against Austria in 1866 and France in 1870–71 helped to shape the view that war was “a practical, proper and glorious instrument of national policy.”62 Moltke embroidered Clausewitz’s idea, even arguing that soldiers should take over from politicians in wartime.