The Last Full Measure (4 page)

It is hard to deny that in many cultures throughout history, including our own, killing in combat may be seen as, if not precisely a joyful act, then one that comes close, and is celebrated. But in many primitive cultures the warrior who had just slain a foe was considered by his noncombatant kin to be stained. A crime of a sort (though considered necessary) had been committed, and an expiation was necessary. In some cultures the warrior was forced into isolation for a period, or made to eat only certain foods, or abstain from sex: “Because he was a spiritual danger to himself and anyone he touched, a Huli killer of New Guinea could not use his shooting hand for several days; had to stay awake the first night after the killing, chanting spells; drink “bespelled” water; and exchange his bow for another. South American Carib warriors had to cover their heads for a month after dispatching an enemy. An African Meru warrior, after killing, had to pay a curse remover … returning raiders had to cleanse themselves by drinking water and vomiting.”
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Samurai warriors, although dedicated collectors of their slain enemies’ heads, were considered defiled if, by chance, they directly touched the head or any part of the corpse. In ancient Japan there were elaborate ceremonies of purification following battle, and a horror of the pollution associated with decay and death.
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And in an echo of these ancient rites modern warriors also often need to be “cleansed” through the ministration of a range of care facilities.

OF THE VISUAL
depictions of prehistoric and ancient war only fragments remain, but they are fragments of extraordinary beauty.
The whole schema has long gone, and we are left to decipher as best we can the enigmatic shards. The Stele of the Vultures (so called because the ruler is seen allowing vultures to devour the enemy dead, a kind of shameful “double death”) dates to about 2500 BCE (about thirteen hundred years before the Trojan War). Apart from prehistoric cave paintings delineating intertribal violence, it is the earliest depiction of organized warfare. The stele is a Bronze Age limestone slab that celebrates, in bas-relief images, the victory of Eannatum, ruler of Lagash in Sumeria, over the bordering kingdom of Umma, although victor and vanquished alike are now all fallen into some Ozymandian obscurity. A column of infantry (looking remarkably like a Greek phalanx about twelve hundred years before it appeared in Greece) walks, implacably, over the bodies of its fallen enemy (elsewhere the enemy dead—naked but unmutilated—lie in heaps). The victorious infantrymen’s eyes are resolutely fixed forward; every detail is immaculately ordered. They are in a column six files deep, with a nine-man frontage. They are spearmen, and the spears are long and need to be held in both hands; the spear tips extend well beyond the front rank. The warriors are protected to some extent by shields, which, because they cannot be supported by an arm, must have been suspended from a shoulder strap. The commander (perhaps the king) leads them from his chariot. It is an image of organization, of order and fixed intent. It conforms to a seductive notion of warfare: that it is planned and efficiently executed. There are those who have been empowered to give orders, and there are those who obediently execute them. But it is also unsettling, as though we are reviewing SS troops circa 2500 BCE.

Much as the ruling junta might have wished the war to be tightly controlled, the truth is that Bronze Age battle was in all probability an extension of the tactical messiness of earlier warfare. There was a good deal of long-range missile fire, a fair amount of ritualized “posturing,” and some dueling between champions or
principals (who may or may not have been kings or their equivalents). It has been claimed that the tight formation depicted on the stele reflects a willingness of the troops to “confront adversaries at close quarters and face danger in a cooperative fashion. This is a commitment virtually impossible to draw from any but highly motivated troops, those who view themselves as having a true stake in not just the fighting, but changing the course of their politics.”
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But there seems little reason to imagine that the levies who served a Bronze Age autocrat would have fought in the hope of influencing their fate through political change. Nor is it exclusively true that only those with a stake in the political outcome of battle fight with self-sacrificing resolve. Throughout history there have been dedicated groups of mercenary professionals who have great pride in their skills, a fierce commitment to their fellow mercenaries, and a willingness to fight to the death, irrespective of the political cause.

EVER SINCE THE
introduction of relatively long-range missile weaponry, the tactical shape of battle has conformed to a fairly predictable pattern. First comes the “softening-up” barrage. It was arrows in the Bronze Age; high-explosive shells, delivered either by artillery or by aircraft, in ours. Following that there has to be a closure, a physical confrontation that claims territory. In the Bronze Age it would have been a combination of chariot-borne warriors and infantry; in ours it is soldiery borne in a variety of armored vehicles, delivered by aircraft (and parachute), or, occasionally, by helicopter.

The earliest chariots may have been used by Sumerians from Uruk in Mesopotamia around 3500–3000 BCE. They were, in their earliest incarnation, lumbering, solid-wheeled battle wagons, drawn by onagers, draft animals somewhere between horses
and asses, and intended more as transport than shock weapon. Their primary function was to deliver into the heart of combat the highborn warrior-duelist who, protected from arrows and slingshots by an accompanying shield bearer, sought out his enemy peer. It was extremely important that there was an appropriate social match: a characteristic found not only in ancient warfare but vestigially into the modern era, where an officer would surrender only to a fellow officer.

Another role of the early chariot was to carry archers and spear throwers closer to the enemy, where they could loose off some shots and then make their retreat (a tactic that was resurrected with the mounted gunmen of the seventeenth century who performed an intricate maneuver known as the
caracole
, in which pistoleers would ride up to the enemy and fire, then turn back to make way for the next wave). Lighter chariots were developed around 1700 BCE, perhaps in China, and these faster versions not only became a characteristic of Chinese combat but also spread down through Anatolia, Crete, and mainland Greece (they were an important element in Homeric battle) to Mesopotamia and New Kingdom Egypt. The action was swift—a mêlée in which chariot might square off against chariot but also be unlucky enough to find itself the target of several enemy chariots. It was combat not unlike the swirling confusion of aerial dogfighting. If a chariot capsized, the occupants might be rescued if friendly troops were close enough; if not, they would be quickly overwhelmed and dispatched. In
The Iliad
, chariot-borne warriors usually dismount to fight as infantry, “using their chariots for transport to and from the field, as taxis and as ambulances.”
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Chariot warfare was a rough and problematic business: The passenger, whether archer or spearman, was banged and rocked about as the unsprung vehicle lurched, raced, and swung along. In consequence, the killing they meted out must have been somewhat random.

Horses are brilliant on the approach and in pursuit of a fleeing
enemy (and decidedly useful in retreat, as Richard III discovered to his profound regret) and may on occasion be persuaded to crash through a line of infantry, but they can also be easily spooked by any kind of resolute defense, particularly if it involves something sharp, like spearpoints or bayonets, or by having arrows fired into them. Understandably, no matter how well trained, they fear greatly for their safety and will remove themselves with alarming alacrity, despite the wishes of the mounted warrior or charioteer. This may account for the success of the horse archers of the Asiatic steppes, who used their mounts not as shock weapons but as swift archery platforms. Their skills at firing while guiding the horse only with their knees were astonishing. They could deliver a prodigious rate of accurate fire and had the ability to contort themselves in such a way as to deliver fire behind themselves (the legendary “Parthian shot”) while riding forward at full tilt, which made them almost as dangerous in retreat as attack. This style of warfare had a profound effect on much of the area that formed a great crescent of the Russian steppes, Mongolia, through what is now Iraq and Iran, and including the eastern Mediterranean (and was echoed in the cavalry combat style of the North American Plains Indians).

A horse-based style of war-making presented an enormous tactical challenge to the infantry-based military model that characterized settled, agricultural societies in the ancient world. Cavalry archery would stamp itself on the military ethos of the lands bordering the eastern Mediterranean (particularly Persia and, later, the Ottoman Empire) in a way that was not seen in Greece or western Europe, where traditional cavalry tended to be more like mounted infantry, armed with lance, sword, ax, or mace, rather than the bow.

Nevertheless, it is something of a mystery why horses, domesticated in Central Asia by about 5000 BCE, were not pressed into service as cavalry mounts until about 1000 BCE.
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And, although
chariot warfare was a characteristic of Homeric warfare, cavalry as a separate arm was absent, as it was in the hoplite warfare of the Hellenic city-states. The Greek phalanx placed so much emphasis on the virtue of face-to-face combat, for all ranks irrespective of social status, that fighting on horseback was considered, if not cowardly, then not quite appropriate.
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The Athenian aristocrats Cimon, Alcibiades, and Pericles fought in the phalanx, as did Spartan kings.
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Horses are expensive to maintain and, in a society that saw frugality as the handmaiden of democracy, may have been viewed as a symbol of aristocratic indulgence by the burghers of Hellenic Greece. This connection with feudal aristocracy and the horse would be central to western European history, and it is notable that the cavalry that eventually emerged from Greece came from Macedonia and Thessaly (“the truculent baronage of Thessaly,” as one historian refers to them),
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which were not only feudal-type autocracies but, due to their geography, probably much more influenced by the horse cultures of the Asiatic steppes.

What is taking shape, however, during the first millennium BCE is a split in the tactical attitude of two worlds, echoes heard still in modern warfare. One world, its epicenter Greece, attached itself to a battle ethic that was tactically centralized, focused, highly corporate, coherent, disciplined, and, above all, rational. The hoplite order is compact; it drives on with fixed and unwavering intent. It is bureaucratic, even machinelike. These characteristics became the imprimatur of warfare in western Europe and, later, Europeanized North America. The battle ethic of its enemies, however, represented an entirely different tradition based on mobility, on loose and overflowing formations rather than tight critical mass. Asiatic in essence, it is opportunistic and keen to exploit the odds of least risk and highest return. Greek-type warfare, however, seeks to
change
the odds, even at some risk. In one world the clever marauder and ambusher is a
model of effectiveness; in the other world those tactics are considered despicable—and only direct confrontation is ultimately effective and has moral virtue. It is heroic.

Some military historians, such as J. F. C. Fuller, have claimed that the Western tradition illustrates a racial superiority (Fuller was a member of the British Fascist Party): “When we look back upon Western warfare as it was before the introduction of firearms, of the differences we see, the one which most boldly stands out is the precedence of valor over cunning. It is out of valor that European history rises: the spear and the sword, and not, as in Asia, the bow and arrow, are its symbols. The bravest and not the most crafty are the leaders of men, and it is their example rather than their skill which dominates the battle.”
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It is easy to mock Fuller’s vision of Teutonic warriors as brave as lions but as thick as planks, versus those skulking but “damned clever” Orientals.