A History of Warfare.

WAR, said Clausewitz, is the continuation of politics with the admixture of other means. An Old Soldier, being no military theorist and none too sure what Clausewitz was talking about, might reply: "Oh, is it? Well, maybe... sometimes," and wonder privately what particular political course Genghis Khan was continuing when he carried fire and sword across half of Asia for no obvious reason except that it happened to be there. His was the most extensive conquest in history, but he made nothing of it; he had no apparent desire for imperial dominion or establishing permanent rule, and it has been suggested that his principal purpose was to take revenge on insulting neighbors. If so, he carried it rather far. It may seem facetious to imagine that the Mongols' motive for devastating everything from China to Baghdad may have been no more than a case of "Well, what else is there to do?", but whatever the driving impulse within Genghis, or within those other all-conquering horse soldiers, Hulagu and Attila and Timur, it is hard to see how Clausewitz's dictum can be applied to them, unless one stretches the definition of politics to odd lengths.

It is comforting for the Old Soldier to find that the leading military historian and thinker of the day is on his side. John Keegan contradicts Clausewitz flatly at the outset: War is not the continuation of policy by other means, but an expression of culture; and this he demonstrates (to the Old Soldier's satisfaction, at any rate) in a lucid and comprehensive survey of approaches to war-making and styles of fighting, from the Neanderthal skeleton in Palestine bearing the unmistakable trace of a spear wound (which may, admittedly, have been the result of a hunting accident) to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is a brilliant feat of scholarly compression in which the author, a former lecturer in military history at Sandhurst, defense editor, and war correspondent, deploys the fruits of forty years of research, teaching, and thought on the subject of war; I do not know a work in which such an encyclopedic range of military knowledge is so well arranged, for while the general outline is chronological, Mr. Keegan does not hesitate to leap the centuries and continents to illustrate a point or make a telling comparison.

For example, in his chapter on Logistics and Supply we learn within a few pages that the length of railroad controlled by the Union in the Civil War was greater than the rest of the world's combined, that a Roman legion took 67 days to march from Rome to Cologne, that British artillery fired a million shells in the week before the Somme (against Napoleon's 24,600 rounds at Waterloo), that margarine was invented in France in the 1860s as a substitute for the military butter ration, and that Charlemagne prohibited the export of his cavalry's precious mail shirts.

Such information is icing on the cake to the military enthusiast; John Keegan's main theme is the examination of war as part of human culture, and the endless variety of ways in which it has been developed, organized, and waged. This leads him initially to a comparison of four widely differing societies: the Easter Islanders, the Zulus, the Mamelukes, and the Japanese samurai. On Easter Island the inhabitants lived in apparent harmony for many centuries, raising the strange stone heads which have so puzzled archaeologists, until population growth changed their environment, whereupon they fell into incessant strife and anarchy, which reduced a population of several thousand to just over one hundred. The Zulus, peaceful herdsmen, were transformed in a few years by one dynamic chief, Chaka, into the most disciplined and ferocious fighting nation in Africa, who inflicted at Isandhlwana the most disastrous defeat ever suffered by British imperial arms, and were only finally broken at Ulundi by Western artillery; they remain a potent force to this day. The Mamelukes, slave soldiers recruited from Central Asia, won a unique place in the Muslim world by their mastery of cavalry fighting, but fell at last through their inability to adapt to the new forms of warfare that followed the invention of gunpowder. On the other hand, the samurai, Japan's knightly class, made use of firearms to consolidate their dominance, and then saw to it that gunpowder was banned from the country for two centuries, until contact with the West forced its reintroduction only 140 years ago.

From this Mr. Keegan passes to consideration of why men fight and the origins of warfare in prehistory, examining the speculations of anthropologists, neurologists, psychologists, and others (some of whose theories may lead the Old Soldier, who has no firm views of cultural determinism or structural functionalism, to wonder if the contending academics have ever studied patterns of aggression on an infants' playground). Keegan, while he reviews their theories carefully and fairly, has his feet firmly on the ground, as befits one who has studied soldiers and soldiering quite as thoroughly as he has studied warfare, and never forgets the realities of combat. He gives vivid examples of primitive warfare--the chest-pounding duels of the Yanomamo of the modern Orinoco, the various grades of "fight" among the Marings of New Guinea, the brutal "revenge" warfare of the Maoris, the captive-taking battles of the Aztecs followed by executions--and passes on to what we can only call civilized warfare: the Sumerians, Egyptians, and Assyrians; the fortifications of ancient Jericho; and the emergence of the first war machine, the chariot, which with the composite bow was to revolutionize early warfare.

The Assyrians' was the first army capable of operating at long range, with supply depots and transport columns; it also appears to have been the first to recruit foreigners. The Assyrian empire fell with the arrival on the world scene in the seventh century B.C., of the horse warriors of the steppe, the Scythians, forerunners of the Huns, Mongols, and other "warriors for war's sake." A vital revolution was the technique introduced by the Greeks of the pitched battle, in which the hoplites stood literally shoulder to shoulder with the sole purpose of destroying the enemy phalanx. Alexander employed the phalanx plus cavalry in his great campaigns. The Roman army was based on the hoplite model, which proved unsuitable against the loose formations of the Gauls; so the Romans developed the maneuverable maniple (handful) of men armed with javelin and sword in place of the thrusting spear. Here at last is an army that the Old Soldier can recognize, thoroughly organized on the "regular" system (a legacy, apparently, from the Assyrians), with fulltime enlistment, discipline, regular pay, barracks, and depots, and drawing its strength from "the first body of professional fighting officers known to history," those long-serving veterans up from the ranks whose title still seems to denote all the military virtues: centurion. Mr. Keegan is particularly good on Rome, its army, and its empire; this is military history at its very best.

After the legions there were no autonomous and disciplined fighting bodies in Europe until the founding of those knightly orders, the Templars and Hospitalers, in whom the author sees the origins of later regimented armies; they were the mainstay of the Crusades, in which Christendom contended with that other military phenomenon, Islam, which "transfused warfare with a new force altogether, the force of an idea." Technology was transforming warfare, too, with the stirrup, the longship, the crossbow, and the longbow, and the most revolutionary invention of all, gunpowder.

By the time of Clausewitz, who served in the Napoleonic wars, "the real work of war," says Mr. Keegan, "was butchery." It was the time of the great massed armies slaughtered by cannon-fire, and of a new kind of fighting force, the "citizen army," with which France dominated the Continent for more than twenty years, and which convinced Clausewitz that the "political" state army was the army of the future. It was an idea that was to dominate military thinking in the generations before the First World War.

A great virtue of this book is that in dealing with the large themes, Mr. Keegan never loses sight of the minutiae of war; indeed, his text is littered with them, and to the Old Soldier (who would not know a Military Participation Ratio if it fell on him, but delights in the small change of his long-ago temporary profession), it is fascinating to discover that the preux chevalier Bayard had a policy of executing crossbowmen because he considered their weapon cowardly and unsporting; that there was a convention whereby a besieged city might save itself from pillage and slaughter if it surrendered when the first breach was made in its walls; that the Boer War was the last in which the British Army suffered more fatalities from sickness than from enemy action; and (a lovely little nugget) that in 1545 an Italian engineer exclaimed: "I don't know much about painting and sculpture, but I have gained great experience of fortification"--his name was Michelangelo. But perhaps most interesting of all is Mr. Keegan's suggestion of a "combat frontier" between East and West, those to the east preferring to practice evasion and "standoff' fighting, keeping their distance where possible (the Zulus and Japanese being notable exceptions), while the Western way of war, learned from the Greeks, has been face-to-face to the death.

Plainly, such a system cannot continue, and Mr. Keegan sees the hope of the future in the skillful and disciplined warrior as a protector of civilization whose way of war does not derive from the Western model only, but from the more restrained and even ritualistic styles of other cultures. The Old Soldier hopes he is right.