The 33 Strategies of War (40 page)

Fire will sometimes cause a swarm of locusts To rise in the air and fly to a river. The fire Keeps coming, burning them instantly,

And the insects shrink down into the water.

Just so Achilles. And Xanthus' noisy channel Was clogged with chariots, horses, and men. Achilles wasted no time. Leaving his spear Propped against a tamarisk And holding only his sword, he leapt from the bank Like a spirit from hell bent on slaughter. He struck over and over, in a widening spiral.

2.
In 1932, Paramount Pictures, following a craze for gangster films, began production on
Night After Night
. The film was to star George Raft, who had recently made a name for himself in
Scarface
. Raft was cast to type as a typical gangster. But
Night After Night
, in a twist, was to have a comic edge to it. The producer, William Le Baron, was afraid that there was no one in the cast who had a light enough touch to pull this off. Raft, hearing of his concern, suggested he hire Mae West.

West was a celebrity in vaudeville and on Broadway, starring in plays she had written. She had made her reputation as a saucy, aggressive blonde with a devastating wit. Hollywood producers had thought of her before, but she was too bawdy for film. And by 1932 she was thirty-nine years old, on the plump side, and considered too old to be making a film debut. Nevertheless, Le Baron was willing to take a risk to liven up the picture. She would create a splash, provide an angle for promotion, then be sent back to Broadway, where she belonged. Paramount offered her a two-month contract at five thousand dollars a week, a generous deal for the times. West happily accepted.

At first West was a little difficult. She had been told to lose some weight, but she hated dieting and quickly gave up. Instead she had her hair dyed a rather indecent platinum blond. She hated the script--the dialog was flat and her character unimportant. The part needed to be rewritten, and West offered her services as a writer. Hollywood people were used to dealing with difficult actresses and had a panoply of tactics for taming them, particularly those who wanted their parts rewritten. What was unusual was an actress who offered to rewrite her own lines. Baffled by the request, even from someone who had written for Broadway, the studio executives came back with a firm refusal. Giving her that privilege would set a terrible precedent. West countered by refusing to continue with the film until they let her rewrite the dialog.

Paramount boss Adolph Zukor had seen West's screen test and liked her look and manner. The picture needed her. Zukor had a studio executive take her out to dinner on her birthday to try to cajole her; the goal was to calm her down enough so that they could begin shooting. Once cameras were rolling, he thought, they would find a way to get West to behave. But that night at dinner, West pulled out a check from her handbag and handed it to the executive. It was for twenty thousand dollars, the amount she had earned to that point. She was giving the money back to the studio and, thanking Paramount for the opportunity, told the executive she was leaving for New York the next morning.

Zukor, immediately apprised of this news, was caught completely off balance. West seemed willing to lose substantial money, risk a lawsuit for breach of contract, and guarantee that she would never work in Hollywood again. Zukor took another look at the script--perhaps she was right and the dialog was lousy. She would rather give up money and a career than be in an inferior picture! He decided to offer her a compromise: she could write her own dialog, and they would shoot two versions of the movie, one hers, one the studio's. That would cost a little more, but they would get West on film. If her version was better, which Zukor thought unlikely, that would only improve the picture; if not, they would go with the original version. Paramount couldn't lose.

West accepted the compromise and shooting began. One person, however, was not amused: the director, Archie L. Mayo, a man with an extensive resume. Not only had West changed the script to suit her wise-cracking style, she insisted on altering the blocking and camera setups to make the most of her lines. They fought and fought, until one day West refused to go on. She had demanded a shot of her disappearing up some stairs after delivering one of her patented wisecracks. This would give the audience time to laugh. Mayo thought it unnecessary and refused to shoot it. West walked off the set, and production came to a halt. Studio executives agreed that West's lines had lightened up the picture; let her have her way with the direction and shoot the shot, they told Mayo. They would edit it out later.

Production resumed. The other actress in her scenes, Alison Skipworth, had the distinct impression that West was determining the pace of the lines, getting the camera to focus on her, stealing the scene. Protesting that West was taking over the direction of the movie, Skipworth, too, was told not to worry--it would all be fixed in the editing.

When it came time to cut the film, however, West had so altered the mood and pace of her scenes that no editing could bring them back to the original; more important, her sense of timing and direction were solid. She had indeed improved the entire picture.

The film debuted in October 1932. The reviews were mixed, but almost all agreed that a new star was born. West's aggressive sexual style and wit fascinated the men in the audience. Though she appeared in just a few scenes, she was the only part of the film anyone seemed to remember. Lines she had written--"I'm a girl who lost her reputation and never missed it"--were quoted endlessly. As Raft later admitted, "Mae West stole everything but the cameras."

Audiences were soon clamoring for more Mae West--and Paramount, in financial trouble at the time, could not ignore them. At the age of forty, as plump as ever, West was signed to a long-term contract at the highest salary of any star in the studio. For her next film,
Diamond Lil
, she would have complete creative control. No other actress--or actor, for that matter--had ever pulled off such a coup and in so short a time.

Hideous groans rose from the wounded, And the river water turned crimson with blood.

Fish fleeing a dolphin's huge maw Hide by the hundreds in the harbor's crannies, But the dolphin devours whatever it catches.

Likewise the Trojans beneath the riverbanks.

T
HE
I
LIAD
, H
OMER, CIRCA
N
INTH CENTURY B.C.

Interpretation

When Mae West set foot in Hollywood, everything was stacked against her. She was old and passe. The director and an army of studio executives had just one goal: to use her in a scene or two to animate a dull picture, then ship her back to New York. She had no real power, and if she had chosen to fight on their battlefield--one in which actresses were a dime a dozen and exploited to the fullest--she would have gotten nowhere. West's genius, her form of warfare, was slowly but surely to shift the battlefield to terrain of her choice.

She began her war by playing the part of the blond bombshell, charming and seducing the Paramount men. Her screen test hooked them--she was difficult, but what actress wasn't? Next she asked to rewrite her lines and, receiving the expected refusal, ratcheted up the stakes by not budging. Returning the money she had been paid was her campaign's key moment: it subtly shifted the focus from a battle with an actress to the script itself. By showing herself ready to give up so much, she made Zukor begin to wonder more about the dialog than about her. After his compromise, West made her next maneuver, fighting over the blocking, the camera angles, the pacing of the shots. Her writing had become an accepted part of the scenery; the battle now was over her directing. Another compromise, which translated into another victory. Instead of fighting the studio executives on their terms, West had subtly shifted the battle to a field unfamiliar to them--fighting with an actress over the writing and directing of a film. On such terrain, against a smart and seductive woman, the army of Paramount men was lost and helpless.

Your enemies will naturally choose to fight on terrain that is to their liking, that allows them to use their power to best advantage. Cede them such power and you end up fighting on their terms. Your goal is to subtly shift the conflict to terrain of your choice. You accept the battle but alter its nature. If it is about money, shift it to something moral. If your opponents want to fight over a particular issue, reframe the battle to encompass something larger and more difficult for them to handle. If they like a slow pace, find a way to quicken it. You are not allowing your enemies to get comfortable or fight in their usual way. And an enemy who is lured onto unfamiliar terrain is one who has lost control of the dynamic. Once such control slips from his hands, he will compromise, retreat, make mistakes, and effect his own destruction.

3.
By early 1864 the American Civil War had settled into a stalemate. Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia had managed to keep the Union forces away from Richmond, capital of the Confederacy. To the west the Confederates had established an impregnable defensive position at the town of Dalton, Georgia, blocking any Union advance on Atlanta, the key industrial city of the South. President Abraham Lincoln, facing reelection that year and gravely worried about his chances if the stalemate continued, decided to name Ulysses S. Grant overall commander of the Union forces. Here was a man who would go on the offensive.

Let us admit that boldness in war even has its own prerogatives. It must be granted a certain power over and above successful calculations involving space, time, and magnitude of forces, for wherever it is superior, it will take advantage of its opponent's weakness. In other words, it is a genuinely creative force. This fact is not difficult to prove even scientifically. Whenever boldness encounters timidity, it is likely to be the winner, because timidity in itself implies a loss of equilibrium. Boldness will be at a disadvantage only in an encounter with deliberate caution, which may be considered bold in its own right, and is certainly just as powerful and effective; but such cases are rare. Timidity is the root of prudence in the majority of men.... The higher up the chain of command, the greater is the need for boldness to be supported by a reflective mind, so that boldness does not degenerate into purposeless bursts of blind passion.

O
N
W
AR
, C
ARL VON
C
LAUSEWITZ
, 1780-1831

Grant's first move was to appoint his chief lieutenant, General William Tecumseh Sherman, to command the Union forces in Georgia. When Sherman arrived on the scene, he realized that any attempt to take Dalton was doomed from the start. The Confederate commander, General John Johnston, was a master at defensive warfare. With mountains to his rear and a solid position to his front, Johnston could simply stay put. A siege would take too long, and a frontal attack would be too costly. The situation seemed hopeless.

Sherman decided, then, that if he could not seize Dalton, he would take hold of Johnston's mind, striking fear in a man notorious for being conservative and cautious. In May 1864, Sherman sent three-fourths of his army into a direct attack on Dalton. With Johnston's attention held by this attack, Sherman then sneaked the Army of the Tennessee around the mountains to the town of Resaca, fifteen miles to the south of Dalton, blocking Johnston's only real route of retreat and only supply line. Terrified to find himself suddenly surrounded, Johnston had no choice but to give up his position at Dalton. He would not, however, play into Sherman's hands: he simply retreated to another defensive position that gave him maximum security, again inviting Sherman to attack him straight on. This quickly turned into a dance: Sherman would feint going one way, then would somehow divert a part of his army to the south of Johnston, who kept backing up...all the way to Atlanta.

The Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, disgusted by Johnston's refusal to fight, replaced him with General John Hood. Sherman knew that Hood was an aggressive commander, often even reckless. He also knew that neither the time nor the men were available to lay siege to Atlanta--Lincoln needed a quick victory. His solution was to send detachments to threaten Atlanta's defenses, but he made these forces temptingly small and weak. Hood could not resist the temptation to leave his stronghold in the city and move to the attack, only to find himself rushing into an ambush. This happened several times, and with each defeat, Hood's army became smaller and the morale of his men quickly deteriorated.

Now, with Hood's army tired and expecting disaster, Sherman played yet another trick. At the end of August, he marched his army southeast, past Atlanta, abandoning his supply lines. To Hood this could only mean that Sherman had given up the fight for Atlanta. Wild celebration broke out throughout the city. But Sherman had cunningly timed this march to coincide with the ripening of the corn, and with his men well fed and Hood unsuspecting, he cut off the final railway line still open to Atlanta and wheeled back to attack the unguarded city. Hood was forced to abandon Atlanta. This was the great victory that would ensure Lincoln's reelection.

Next came Sherman's strangest maneuver of all. He divided his army into four columns and, completely cutting himself loose from his supply lines, began a march east from Atlanta to Savannah and the sea. His men lived off the land, destroying everything in their path. Unencumbered by supply wagons, they moved with incredible speed. The four parallel columns were far enough apart that the southern forces could not tell where they were headed. The southern column seemed headed for Macon, the northern for Augusta. Confederate forces scrambled to cover both places, leaving the center open--which was exactly where Sherman planned to advance. Keeping the South on what he called "the horns of a dilemma," off balance and mystified as to his intentions, Sherman marched all the way to Savannah with hardly a battle.