The Last Full Measure (2 page)
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Authors: Michael Stephenson
War is about many things, but at its core it is about killing or getting killed. It is not chess, or a computer game, or a movie, or a book
about
death. It is, implacably and nonnegotiably, the thing itself. Henri Barbusse, in
Le feu
(
Under Fire
, 1916), his great memoir of combat in World War I, puts it this way: “We leave by the trench at right angles … towards the moving, living and awful frontier of now.” In our “virtual” or ersatz culture we all too often confuse the pretend and the real. In a way unprecedented in history, most of us today are able to get by with acting out rather than acting. Warmed by the glow of the screen, we can choose to inhabit a simulacrum, while a few—comparatively very few—live and die in the searing light of a reality we would much rather read about or game-play than experience.
“Military history must never stray from the tragic story of killing,” says Victor Davis Hanson with characteristic forthrightness. “Wars are the sum of battles, battles the tally of individual human beings killing and dying.… To write of conflict is not to describe merely the superior rifles of imperial troops or the matchless edge of the Roman
gladius
, but ultimately the collision of a machine-gun bullet with the brow of an adolescent, or the carving and ripping of artery and organ in the belly of an anonymous Gaul. To speak of war in any other fashion brings with it a sort of immorality. Euphemism in battle narrative or the omission of graphic killing altogether is a near criminal offense of the military historian.”
In this regard I was acutely aware of the tightrope I had to walk in making this book. There is no way one can write about violent death without describing horrific scenes. Men do not always die with a decorous sigh and fall with composed grace. They often quit this world in a shit-storm of screams and blood, often literally blown to kingdom come. How does one do justice to that without pandering to Rambo-style porno-violence? Tightropes are demanding. I edged along mine as best I could.
The amazingly obvious but generally overlooked point is that we who write or comment, or indeed read, of this melancholy subject are—by the ministrations of the kindly Fates—alive! We have the good luck to be lolling on the sunny bank of the Styx, and although our journey is definitely booked and confirmed, we are still only looking, if humbly and sadly, at the legion upon legion of shades already gathered on the dark side.
THE LAST FULL MEASURE
,
through considerations of length and the stamina, not to say the sanity, of the author, limits itself to ground warfare. In no way are valiant sailors and airmen—among whom was an uncle, USAAF sergeant George Taylor, a left-waist gunner killed in his B-17G over Posen on April 11, 1944—denigrated by omission. What might be called the technological context of their deaths compared with that of soldiers makes the separation possible and, perhaps, logical. In addition, although recognizing that disease, cold, heat, and starvation have killed more soldiers than any weapon, and that death delivered by these Four Horsemen is a direct consequence of warfare, I decided to focus on the sharp end of battle—death caused directly by fighting rather than as a consequence of being in an army during wartime.
F
IRST
B
LOOD
Death and the Heroic in Ancient Combat
The Greeks, as I have learned, are accustomed to wage wars in the most stupid fashion due to their silliness and folly. For once they have declared war against each other, they search out the finest and most level plain and there fight it out. The result is that even the victorious come away with great losses; and of the defeated, I say only that they are utterly annihilated.
—Herodotus,
The Histories
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H
ERODOTUS: HISTORIAN OR LIAR
? Researcher or fabricator? Famously denounced by Cicero as a fraudster, depicted by some modern historians as a fictionalizer, he can be seen as the precursor of some rather distinguished modern historians who have had, to put it delicately, a little difficulty with the all too often indistinct boundary between history and “imagined history.” But in looking back to the earliest evidence of warfare
and the fates that befell warriors on those prehistoric and ancient killing grounds, the Herodotian dilemma—that confused swirl of myth and fact, of dispassionate observation and passionate “interpretation”—may serve us well, for the reality is that we walk on uncertain ground, and we would be well advised to tread it gingerly.
As the quote that heads this chapter suggests, Herodotus looked at the warfare of his age (fifth century BCE) and saw anything but a heroic clash of arms. Greek warriors could be almost lemminglike in their tunnel-visioned stampede to oblivion. His view echoes the modern debate—a hawks-versus-doves standoff—about our ancient and prehistoric ancestors.
Was it a clash between those who saw their interests best served by ruthless violence and those who saw their interests served by avoiding bloody conflict and reaching some kind of peaceful accommodation? The hawks see primitive man as truly primitive. This hawks-and-doves dichotomy is reflected in modern studies of early battlefield lethality. There are those who contend that early combat was merely ritualistic, full of sound and fury signifying nothing—a great deal of prancing and empty threats that were designed to minimize the body count. The argument is that in societies of low birthrate and high natural mortality, bloodletting, which could only harm both antagonists, would be avoided. Instead of real warfare they organized a mutually agreed-upon charade in which theatrical gesture replaced killing—an argument anthropologist Lawrence H. Keeley dismisses as “the increasingly irrational meandering in a neo-Rousseauian, post-modernist ‘woo-woo land.’ ”
2
However, the “flower-war” school gained traction in the 1960s and 1970s, perhaps as a reaction to what was seen as the military brutalism of much of the twentieth century, which, despite its self-congratulatory “modernity” and humanism, set a new benchmark for savagery.
John Keegan in
A History of Warfare
(1993) promotes the idea of
self-restraining warfare being a characteristic of “primitives” who “have recourse to all sorts of devices which spare both themselves and their enemies from the worst of what might be inflicted.… Most important of such devices is that of ritual, which defines the nature of combat itself and requires that, once defined rituals have been performed, the contestants shall recognise the fact of their satisfaction and have recourse to conciliation, arbitration and peacemaking.”
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But before we can rest in the comfortable assumption that primitive warriors were simply thwarted peacemakers, Keegan puts us right: “It is important … not to idealise primitive warfare. It may take a very violent turn.” Indeed, Keegan adds, a little euphemistically, it may “have material effects undesired by those who suffer them”—undesired as in being tortured before being eaten. Our primitive forebears could be unfussy diners.
Robert L. O’Connell in his influential 1989 survey of war and aggression also promotes a view of primitive battle as essentially one of low lethality:
Most probably fighting was, as it is now among contemporary hunting-and-gathering people, a sporadic, highly personalized affair, homicidal in intent and, occasionally, in effect, but lacking a sustained economic and political motivation beyond that of revenge and, sometimes, women. Under such conditions, ambush and raiding are the preferred modes of operation, and the target often is a single “enemy.” Pitched battles, when they occur, represent tactical failure. The object of the foray is rout, not prolonged combat. In such an environment the attacking party will close only if surprise is reasonably certain; otherwise the aim is to stay at long range and exchange missiles.
4
The distinction O’Connell and Keegan make between “formal” battle and ambush or surprise attack is critical in understanding
the risk primitive warriors ran. It has been posited that in formal battle the total casualty rate (wounded and killed) could be quite high—perhaps in the 30 to 40 percent range—compared with, say, an “average” American Civil War battle casualty rate of 12 to 15 percent (although casualties in certain battles, like Gettysburg, ran to almost 25 percent). But because these primitive battles were often standoffs employing relatively unsophisticated missile weaponry, the
death
rate was low compared with that of modern battle: one killed for about thirty wounded; whereas by comparison, one man was killed for about every five wounded at Gettysburg, and at the battle of the Somme in 1916 some British battalions took one killed for every two men wounded.
5
However, some primitive pitched battles could be quite deadly if the protagonists closed with shock weapons such as clubs, axes, and lances (a pattern that would become characteristic of Greek and Roman warfare). For example, combat among the woodland tribes of eastern North America (before Europeans introduced firearms), in which up-close shock weapons such as clubs and axes predominated, could be highly lethal. However, if we look only at pitched battle the true picture of primitive-warrior fatality would be severely distorted because the favored mode of battle was what we might term “irregular”: ambushes and raids. The loss rate of each incident may have been quite low relative to modern warfare, but their frequency and ferocity elevated the cumulative kill to “catastrophic mortalities” so that “a member of a typical tribal society, especially a male, had a far higher probability of dying in combat than the citizen of an average modern state.”
6
The picture, then, of our warrior ancestors does not fit notions of heroic warfare in which one warrior meets and defeats another as an equal. Much more likely, the style of doing battle was opportunistic and motivated largely by an intuitive risk/benefit analysis. When life is squeezed into the tight margin of survivability, grandiose gestures will give way to careful calculation. A sure kill by a
mob swarming, in a brief moment of advantage, over a numerically inferior enemy may not be pretty, but it cuts the odds of harm to the attackers significantly. Early humans were no different from most hunting packs. This was the way they had learned to overcome animal prey, and it was a tactic equally effective against human enemies. In some ways it is not so different from insurgent warfare of our era, which is also based on isolating and overrunning small groups of the enemy in ambushes and traps—in fact on any opportunistic tactic that increases the odds of success, no matter how “underhanded” it might be. Whether it be Europeans fighting natives in North America (settlers referred to the natives’ style of combat as “the skulking way of war”); the French fighting Spanish guerrillas during the Peninsular War of the Napoleonic era; the French and Americans fighting communists in Vietnam in the twentieth century; or the Soviets fighting the mujahideen and Americans the Taliban in modern Afghanistan, insurgent tactics reject a definition of the heroic; based that is, on open and transparent confrontation.
When did we start killing each other in combat? Some scholars date the earliest warfare to 2 million years ago.
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Homo habilis
lived 2.3–1.4 million years ago, while we, the relative newcomer
Homo sapiens
, did not make an appearance until about 250,000 years ago. It was among the fraternal interest groups of our hominid hunter ancestors some 400,000 years ago that the territorial instinct turned lethal.
8
They killed one another not only to protect what they already had but also to extend their spheres of influence in order to maximize their chances of surviving and thriving.
9
The self-interest of the band was, and remains, the great motivator of warfare. We may have dressed that self-interest in a flashy rhetorical uniform, and the bands may now be nation-states, but it is nevertheless still connected to our most basic and ancient instincts. We cannot quite rid ourselves of the ripe stink of the pelt.
