Celtic Warfare, 1595-1763.

PROFESSOR HILL'S compact and pithy volume shouldn't simply be relegated to the library stacks, where good history books so often go. Never mind its status as a professional historical study. Never mind its elaborate apparatus of notes and bibliography. Consider instead the work's emotional impact, its broad historical and cultural implications, and the tension imparted by its style. Mr. Hill's tone-the impeccably correct accent of the academic lecturer-clashes grandly with the bloody substance of his narrative. The torque of his style and method, twisting against the burden of his story, produces a powerful dramatic force.

This is a Hegelian vision of history without the metaphysics, Marx without the determinism, Wallerstein done militarily. Professor Hill is dealing with a "conflict of cultures" as, "from 1595 until 1746, the Celtic fringe served as a battleground on which the forces of modernity sought to expunge the anachronism of Celtic civilization."

Hill's study of Celtic warfare shows us the Irish leaders Hugh O'Neill and Hugh O'Donnell, and the progression of battles from Clontibret (1599), Yellow Ford, Moyry Pass, and on to Kinsale (1601). His analysis goes beyond tactics and strategy to a larger view of the conflict:

The objective that underlay the strategy of O'Neill and the Irish chieftains until 1601 was the defense of Ulster through the use of offensive tactics. The wars were fought largely within the borders of Ulster, and O'Neill's strategy was akin to that employed by the Confederate generals in the American Civil War. The Southern strategy was also based on the defense of the homeland against an invading army, and just as the Confederates marched from the familiar confines of the South to their defeat at Gettysburg, so too O'Neill and O'Donnell left Ulster and suffered irreversible defeat at Kinsale.

Hill's treatment of the civil war in Scotland (1644-47) focuses on the battles fought by those great but dissimilar allies, James Graham, Marquess of Montrose, and Alaisdair MacColla, the champion of Clan Donald:

The dual nature of the war is personified in the characters and backgrounds of the two Royalist leaders. Montrose, whose family lived in the Forth and Earn Valleys along the Highland frontier, was the epitome of the young, handsome, articulate cavalier, carrying himself as confidently in the courts of Europe as on the remote battlefields of Scotland. MacColla, on the other hand, was a product of the tumultuous Gaelic world of the western Highlands and Isles and Ireland. Born supposedly on the remote Hebridean island of Colonsay, the young MacColla was the archetypal Celtic warrior.

The grand and tragic conflict of cultures unfolds in its military form as John Graham, Viscount Dundee, is killed at Killiecrankie (1689), having led the clans to their last great victory, a bloody one that implied an end to the success of the Highland charge. During the 'Fifteen (the Jacobite uprising of 1715), John Erskine, Earl of Mar, led the Highlanders to defeat at Preston and Sheriffmuir, largely because he wanted to transform his force into a conventional army. The essence of this book is its assertion that the Scots could never win that way-as Scots. During the 'Forty-Five, the followers of Prince Charles were again misled to strategic disaster. The grim aftermath of Culloden unleashed Celtic energies upon the world through the improbable medium of the British army. Having known the Scots' pugnacity so well, the English knew what effective soldiers they could be. Meanwhile, back home:

In the next half-century the Scottish Highlands became sheep pasture, the clansmen became outlaws, British soldiers, or emigrants, and the once-proud clan chiefs became absentee landlords with luxurious dwellings in Edinburgh, Glasgow, and London. The subjugation of the Celtic fringe was a small step in the development of Anglo-Saxon commercialism, but to the Gaels in the British Isles it meant the end of their traditional way of life.

Hill does not let his story end until the Celtic military presence has been established in the New World:

The military careers of MacColla and O'Neill provide a comparison that points up the Gaelic inability to implement the fundamentals of modern warfare. . . . Each was plagued by frequent desertion and a lack of discipline among the troops. Most importantly, neither could win a victory significant enough to destroy the power and will of the enemy, Like many Celtic commanders before and after them, they won most of the battles but lost the war.

Here we can sense a connection between Culloden and Franklin; we remember that Faulkner collated Culloden and Shiloh; and we can sense this volume's relation to the "Celtic thesis" as elaborated in Grady McWhiney and Perry D. Jamieson's Attack and Die: Civil War Military Tactics and the Southern Heritage (1982), and as pursued elsewhere by Forrest McDonald. The clans are connected to Southern clannishness, and to Scots-Irish ethnicity, and to much else, including, come to think of it, the name of the first Klan and the practice of burning crosses-which we read about in Sir Walter Scott, whom Mark Twain blamed for causing the Civil War. Professor Hill's "military" history, then, brings home the idea of the American Civil War as an inverted continuation of the English one. The "Celtic thesis" gives us a way to look at history and the cruel dialectic of modernization that takes us back all the way to Julius Caesar.