THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES (2 page)

But circling the other city camped a divided army
gleaming in battle-gear, and two plans split their ranks:
to plunder the city or share the riches with its people,
hoards the handsome citadel stored within its depths.
But the people were not surrendering, not at all.
They armed for a raid, hoping to break the siege—
loving wives and innocent children standing guard
on the ramparts, flanked by elders bent with age
as men marched out to war. Ares and Pallas led them,
both burnished gold, gold the attire they donned, and great,
magnificent in their armor—gods for all the world,
looming up in their brilliance, towering over troops.
And once they reached the perfect spot for attack,
a watering place where all the herds collected,
there they crouched, wrapped in glowing bronze.
Detached from the ranks, two scouts took up their posts,
the eyes of the army waiting to spot a convoy,
the enemy's flocks and crook-horned cattle coming…
Come they did, quickly, two shepherds behind them,
playing their hearts out on their pipes—treachery
never crossed their minds. But the soldiers saw them,
rushed them, cut off at a stroke the herds of oxen
and sleek sheep-flocks glistening silver-gray
and killed the herdsmen too. Now the besiegers,
soon as they heard the uproar burst from the cattle
as they debated, huddled in council, mounted at once
behind their racing teams, rode hard to the rescue,
arrived at once, and lining up for assault
both armies battled it out along the river banks—
they raked each other with hurtling bronze-tipped spears:

And Strife and Havoc plunged in the fight, and violent Death—
now seizing a man alive with fresh wounds, now one unhurt,
now hauling a dead man through the slaughter by the heels,
the cloak on her back stained red with human blood.
So they clashed and fought like living, breathing men
grappling each other's corpses, dragging off the dead.

And he forged a fallow field, broad rich plowland
tilled for the third time, and across it crews of plowmen
wheeled their teams, driving them up and back and soon
as they'd reach the end-strip, moving into the turn,
a man would run up quickly
and hand them a cup of honeyed, mellow wine
as the crews would turn back down along the furrows,
pressing again to reach the end of the deep fallow field
and the earth churned black behind them, like earth churning,
solid gold as it was—that was the wonder of Hephaestus' work.

And he forged a king's estate where harvesters labored,
reaping the ripe grain, swinging their whetted scythes.
Some stalks fell in line with the reapers, row on row,
and others the sheaf-binders girded round with ropes,
three binders standing over the sheaves, behind them
boys gathering up the cut swaths, filling their arms,
supplying grain to the binders, endless bundles.
And there in the midst the king,
scepter in hand at the head of the reaping-rows,
stood tall in silence, rejoicing in his heart.
And off to the side, beneath a spreading oak,
the heralds were setting out the harvest feast,
they were dressing a great ox they had slaughtered,
while attendant women poured out barley, generous,
glistening handfuls strewn for the reapers' midday meal.

And he forged a thriving vineyard loaded with clusters,
bunches of lustrous grapes in gold, ripening deep purple
and climbing vines shot up on silver-vine poles.
And round it he cut a ditch in dark blue enamel
and round the ditch he staked a fence in tin.
And one lone footpath led toward the vineyard
and down it the pickers ran
whenever they went to strip the grapes at vintage—
girls and boys, their hearts leaping in innocence,
bearing away the sweet ripe fruit in wicker baskets.
And there among them a young boy plucked his lyre,
so clear it could break the heart with longing,
and what he sang was a dirge for the dying year,
lovely… his fine voice rising and falling low
as the rest followed, all together, frisking, singing,
shouting, their dancing footsteps beating out the time.

And he forged on the shield a herd of longhorn cattle,
working the bulls in beaten gold and tin, lowing loud
and rumbling out of the farmyard dung to pasture
along a rippling stream, along the swaying reeds.
And the golden drovers kept the herd in line,
Four in all with nine dos at their heels
their paws flickering quickly—a savage roar!—
a crashing attack—and a pair of ramping lions
had seized a bull from the cattle's front ranks—
he bellowed out as they dragged him off in agony.
Packs of dogs and the young herdsmen rushed to help
but the lions ripping open the hide of the huge bull
were gulping down the guts and the black pooling blood
while the herdsmen yelled the fast pack on—no use.
The hounds shrank from sinking teeth in the lions,
they balked, hunching close, barking, cringing away.

And the famous crippled Smith forged a meadow
deep in a shaded glen for shimmering flocks to graze,
with shepherds' steadings, well-roofed huts and sheepfolds.

And the crippled Smith brought all his art to bear
on a dancing circle, broad as the circle Daedalus
once laid out on Cnossos' spacious fields
for Ariadne the girl with lustrous hair.
Here young boys and girls, beauties courted
with costly gifts of oxen, danced and danced,
linking their arms, gripping each other's wrists.
And the girls wore robes of linen light and flowing,
the boys wore finespun tunics rubbed with a gloss of oil,
the girls were crowned with a bloom of fresh garlands,
the boys swung golden daggers hung on silver belts.
And now they would run in rings on their skilled feet,
nimbly, quick as a crouching potter spins his wheel,
palming it smoothly, giving it practice twirls
to see it run, and now they would run in rows,
in rows crisscrossing rows—rapturous dancing.
A breathless crowd stood round them struck with joy
and through them a pair of tumblers dashed and sprang,
whirling in leaping handsprings, leading out the dance.

And he forged the Ocean River's mighty power girdling
round the outmost rim of the welded indestructible shield.
And once the god had made that great and massive shield
he made Achilles a breastplate brighter than gleaming fire,
he made him a sturdy helmet to fit the fighter's temples,
beautiful, burnished work, and raised its golden crest
and made him greaves of flexing, pliant tin.

Now,
when the famous crippled Smith had finished off
that grand array of armor, lifting it in his arms
he laid it all at the feet of Achilles' mother Thetis—
and down she flashed like a hawk from snowy Mount Olympus
bearing the brilliant gear, the god of fire's gift.

—Homer

(translated by Robert Fagles)

This is a remarkable and perhaps a unique book. There have been many studies of the development of warfare, even more of the history of international relations, while those on international and constitutional law are literally innumerable. But I know of none that has dealt with all three of these together, analyzed their interaction throughout European history, and used that analysis to describe the world in which we live and the manner in which it is likely to develop. Indeed, few people can match Philip Bobbitt's qualifications to write it: doctorates in both law and strategic studies, a respected record of publications in both, long experience in government, and all informed by a deep understanding of history such as most professional historians would envy.

Even as recently as a decade ago Bobbitt's approach, and yet more, his conclusions, would have seemed profoundly shocking to international lawyers and specialists in international relations alike. The conventional wisdom of the Western world, derived from Kant through Jeremy Bentham, proclaimed by Woodrow Wilson in 1918 and implemented by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945, was that war was a condition of international disorder that should and would be remedied by the development of international law and enforced by appropriate courts on the model of those prevalent in Western democracies. On that basis had been created the whole apparatus of the United Nations and World Courts on which we allegedly depend today for the maintenance of international order and which quite manifestly fails to provide it. Bobbitt goes back to an older and bleaker tradition: that associated with the name of Niccolò Macchi-avelli, who wrote in a time in many respects very comparable to our own. Then as now the accepted paradigm of legitimate order, in his day the hierarchy of feudalism, was breaking down. A new template of legitimacy was needed, and could be provided only by a new institution, the State, termed by Thomas Hobbes “That Mortal God—our peace and defence.” The State promised peace and defense to its members in return for their allegiance, their money, and, if need be, their lives. But the State could emerge and sustain itself only through success in war, and success depended on mastering the appropriate techniques—the weapons systems, the motivations, and the financial underpinning. Success in war legitimized the State, and the structures developed by the successful states—not simply the armed forces themselves but the financial arrangements required to pay for them and the constitutional relationship between rulers and ruled that made those arrangements possible—became the new paradigm for political authority and obedience throughout the European continent.

“International relations” thus became the relationship between sovereign States. But whence did those States derive their legitimacy? By the nineteenth century two very different schools of thought had developed. In Western Europe and the United States, after the English, American, and French Revolutions, it was assumed that the legitimacy of the State arose from popular consent enshrined in written or unwritten constitutions. Since these constitutions guaranteed domestic justice and order, it was further assumed that a similar mechanism would produce justice and order between states themselves. States that disturbed international order were behaving as “illegally” as were rebels against domestic order, and war against them was as legitimate as forcible proceedings against domestic rebellion. But in nineteenth century Germany a very different analysis had been developed by Hegel and his disciples. The State, they pointed out, was created not by law but by war. Since the State was not only the highest but the sole creator of legitimacy, self-preservation was the State's first duty and the primary concern of its citizens' allegiance. As the State had come into existence through war (a thesis self-evident in the case of Prussia, but no less applicable to the Untied States) so it could only survive and express itself through war. This philosophy was to shape German policy in the first half of the twentieth century. If Germany had won the two World Wars, the subsequent settlement would have borne the stamp of Hegel rather than that of Jeremy Bentham.

This is Bobbitt's starting point: “Law and strategy” he writes, “are mutually affecting.” There is a constant interaction between the two. Legitimacy itself “is a constitutional idea that is sensitive to strategic events”—not least to a “strategic event” so cataclysmic as losing a war. Nevertheless, although wars may create and mold states, it is the State that creates legitimacy both domestic and external, and it is legitimacy that maintains “peace.” If states can no longer maintain their legitimacy, or if their capacity to do so is called into question, then there will be another war, the out-come of which will create a new legitimacy. To ignore the legal aspect of international order is a recipe for the total and permanent war preached by Ludendorff and, more effectively, his younger colleague Adolf Hitler. To ignore the strategic aspect, as did Woodrow Wilson and his disciples, is at best to forfeit the capacity to create an international order reflecting one's own value system; at worst, to see it destroyed altogether.

In the first part of this book Bobbitt shows how the very nature of the State has been determined by the changing demands of war, and how it developed through a series of what he terms “Epochal Wars.” In early modern Europe, princes had to create state mechanisms—administrative bureaucracies, legal systems, fiscal apparatus—to extract enough taxes from their subjects to enable them to conduct wars that were made increasingly expensive by the need to pay full-time mercenary forces, to build fortifications, and to buy guns. At the same time they created a common structure for reciprocal acceptance and mutual recognition, a “Society of States” that was eventually established by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, to be updated at Utrecht in 1713 and again at Vienna a hundred years later. The legitimacy of this structure—states defined by territorial boundaries ruled by dynastic rulers “absolute” in their jurisdiction—was challenged at the end of the eighteenth century by the concept of the “nation,” one that not only created a new criterion of legitimacy but could alone provide the numbers and motivation of a new age of mass warfare. But if these newly enlisted masses were to be motivated and militarily effective the State had to provide not only defense but welfare and education, and if they did not the “audit of war” would find them out. That was what happened in the First World War, which destroyed the dynastic regimes that proved unable to mobilize and motivate their peoples. But no peace was then possible until an alternative criterion of legitimacy emerged that could win universal acceptance. A three-cornered struggle had to take place between the liberal democracy of the West, the bellicose tribalism of Nazi Germany, and the authoritarian socialism of the Soviet Union. So for Bobbitt the Long War that opened in 1914 ended only with the Soviet collapse in 1990 and the apparent triumph of Western concepts of “legitimacy.”