Contents
Cover
About the Author
Illustrations
Dedication
Title Page
Introduction
1. War in Human History
Interlude: Limitations on Warmaking
2. Stone
Interlude: Fortification
3. Flesh
Interlude: Armies
4. Iron
Interlude: Logistics and Supply
5. Fire
Conclusion
Picture Section
References
Acknowledgments
Select Bibliography
Index
Copyright
In memory of Winter Bridgman
Lieutenant in the Régiment de Clare
killed at the battle of Lauffeld
July 2, 1747
Easter Island (Barnaby’s Picture Library)
Carl von Clausewitz (Hulton Deutsch)
Mameluke warrior (British Library)
Battle of the Pyramids (Robert Harding Picture Library)
Zulu warriors (Mansell Collection)
A Partisan’s Mother (Peter Newark’s Military Pictures)
Japanese swordsmen (Victoria & Albert Museum)
Mountain infantrymen in the Julian Alps (Robert Harding Picture Library)
Mar Panzer (E. T. Archive)
German ik IVnfantrymen, 1942 (E. T. Archive)
Future Yanomamö warrior (Sue Cunningham Photographic)
New Stone Age hunters (Mansell Collection)
Aztec warriors (British Museum)
Egyptian archers (Peter Clayton)
Sethos I (British Museum)
Palette of Narmer (Girauden)
Rameses II (British Museum)
Assyrian victors (C.M. Dixon)
Assyrian hunters (E. T. Archive)
Walls of Jericho (British School of Archaeology, Jerusalem)
Great Wall of China (G & A Loescher/Barnaby’s Picture Library)
Hadrian’s Wall (Barnaby’s Picture Library)
Porchester Castle (Aerofilms)
Krak des Chevaliers (Aerofilms)
Siege of Limerick (Mansell Collection)
Standard of Ur (British Museum)
Assyrian warriors (C.M. Dixon)
Assyrians in battle (C.M. Dixon)
Sarmatian warrior (Peter Newark’s Historical Pictures)
Battle of Issus (C.M. Dixon)
Iranian horsemen (Peter Newark’s Historical Pictures)
Coming of the stirrup (E.T. Archive)
Zouaves (Mansell Collection)
Janissaries (Sonia Halliday)
Swiss militia (Popperfoto)
John Hawkwood (Mansell Collection)
The Village Recruit (Mansell Collection)
Conscripts, 1939 (Hulton Deutsch)
Greek armour (C.M. Dixon)
Hoplite (Mansell Collection)
Hoplites in battle (Peter Newark’s Historical Pictures)
Roman warship (C.M. Dixon)
Centurion (E.T. Archive)
Barbarian tribesman (Robert Harding Picture Library)
Frankish horseman (Robert Harding Picture Library)
Crusaders (Peter Newark’s Historical Pictures)
Escalade used in a medieval siege (Hulton Deutsch)
Roman centurion (Mansell Collection)
Cannon manufacture (Peter Newark’s Historical Pictures)
Railroad construction (M.A.R.S.)
Krupp’s trial range (Mansell Collection)
Atlantic convoy (Peter Newark’s Historical Pictures)
Early cannon (E.T. Archive)
Gunpowder (E.T. Archive)
Knights of Malta (Robert Harding Picture Library)
The Great Harry (Mansell Collection)
Seventeenth-century Manual of Arms (Mansell Collection)
Siege cannon (M.A.R.S.)
Gunpowder mill (Mansell Collection)
Battle of Williamsburg (Peter Newark’s Historical Pictures)
British soldier at the Somme (E.T. Archive)
German Junkers dive-bombers (E.T. Archive)
B–17s (M.A.R.S.)
Atomic bomb test at Bikini atoll (Peter Newark’s Historical Pictures)
I was not fated to be a warrior. A childhood illness left me lame for life in 1948 and I have limped now for forty-five years. When, in 1952, I reported for my medical examination for compulsory military service, the doctor who examined legs – he was, inevitably, the last doctor to examine me that morning – shook his head, wrote something on my form and told me that I was free to go. Some weeks later an official letter arrived to inform me that I had been classified permanently unfit for duty in any of the armed forces.
Fate nevertheless cast my life among warriors. My father had been a soldier in the First World War. I grew up in the Second, in a part of England where the British and American armies gathering for the D-Day invasion of Europe were stationed. In some way I detected that my father’s service on the Western Front in 1917–18 had been the most important experience of his life. The spectacle of the preparation for invasion in 1943–4 marked me also. It aroused an interest in military affairs that took root, so that when I went up to Oxford in 1953 I chose military history as my special subject.
A special subject was a requirement for a degree, no more than that, so that my involvement in military history might have ended at graduation. The interest, however, had bitten deeper during my undergraduate years, because most of the friends I made at Oxford had, unlike me, done their military service. They made me conscious of having missed something. Most had been officers and many had served on campaign, for Britain in the early 1950s was disengaging from empire in a series of small colonial wars. Some of my friends had soldiered in the jungles of Malaya or the forests of Kenya. A few, who had served in regiments sent to Korea, had even fought in a real battle.
Sober professional lives awaited them and they sought academic success and the good opinion of tutors as a passport to the future. Yet it was clear to me that the two years they had spent in uniform had cast over them the spell of an entirely different world from that they were set on entering. The spell was in part one of experience – of strange places, of unfamiliar responsibility, of excitement and even of danger. It was also the spell of acquaintance with the professional officers who had commanded them. Our tutors were admired for their scholarship and eccentricities. My contemporaries continued to admire the officers they had known for other qualities altogether – their dash, élan, vitality and impatience with the everyday. Their names were often mentioned, their characters and mannerisms recalled, their exploits – above all their self-confident brushes with authority – recreated. Somehow I came to feel that I knew these light-hearted warriors and I certainly wanted to know people like them very badly, if only to flesh out my vision of the warrior’s world that, as I laboured over my military historical texts, was slowly taking shape in my mind.
When university life came to its end, and my friends departed to become lawyers, diplomats, civil servants or university tutors themselves, I found that the afterglow of their military years had cast its spell on me. I decided to become a military historian, a foolhardy decision since there were few academic posts in the subject. More quickly than I had any right to expect, however, such a post became vacant at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, Britain’s cadet college, and in 1960 I joined the staff. I was twenty-five, I knew nothing about the army, I had never heard a shot fired in anger, I had scarcely met a regular officer and the picture I had of soldiers and soldiering belonged entirely to my imagination.
The first term I spent at Sandhurst pitched me headlong into a world for which not even my imagination had prepared me. In 1960 the military staff of the Academy – I belonged to its academic side – was composed, at the senior level, exclusively of men who had fought in the Second World War. The junior officers were almost all veterans of Korea, Malaya, Kenya, Palestine, Cyprus or any one of another dozen colonial campaigns. Their uniforms were covered with medal ribbons, often of high awards for gallantry. My head of department, a retired officer, wore on mess evenings the Distinguished Service Order and the Military Cross with two bars and his distinctions were not exceptional. There were majors and colonels with medals for bravery won at Alamein, Cassino, Arnhem and Kohima. The history of the Second World War w4as written in these little strips of silk that they wore so lightly and its high moments were recorded with crosses and medals which the bearers scarcely seemed conscious of having been awarded.
It was not only the kaleidoscope of medals that entranced me. It was also the kaleidoscope of uniforms and all that they signified. Many of my university contemporaries had brought with them scraps of military glory – regimental blazers or British Warm overcoats. Those who had been cavalry officers continued to wear with evening dress the morocco-topped patent-leather boots, slotted at the heel for, that belonged to their Lancer or Hussar uniforms. That had alerted me to the paradox that uniform was not uniform, but that regiments dressed differently. How differently Sandhurst taught me on the first mess evening I spent there. There were Lancers and Hussars in blue and scarlet, but also Household Cavalrymen crushed by the weight of their gold lace, Riflemen in green so dark it was almost black, Gunners in tight trousers, Guardsmen in stiff shirts, Highlanders in six different patterns of tartan, Lowlanders in plaid trews and infantrymen of the county regiments with yellow, white, grey, purple or buff facings to their jackets.
I had thought the army was one army. After that evening I realised it was not. I still had to learn that the outward differences of dress spoke of inward differences of much greater importance. Regiments, I discovered, defined themselves above all by their individuality and it was their individuality which made them into the fighting organisations whose effectiveness in combat was proclaimed by the medals and crosses I saw all about me. My regimental friends – the ready friendship extended by warriors is one of their most endearing qualities – were brothers-in-arms; but they were brothers only up to a point. Regimental loyalty was the touchstone of their lives. A personal difference might be forgiven the next day. A slur on the regiment would never be forgotten, indeed would never be uttered, so deeply would such a thing touch the values of the tribe.
Tribalism – that was what I had encountered. The veterans I met at Sandhurst in the 1960s were by many external tests no different from professional men in other walks of life. They came from the same schools, sometimes the same universities, they were devoted to their families, they had the same hopes for their children as other men, they worried about money in the same way. Money, however, was not an ultimate or defining value, nor even was promotion within the military system. Officers, of course, hankered for advancement, but it was not the value by which they measured themselves. A general might be admired, or he might not. Admiration derived from something other than his badges of superior rank. It came from the reputation he held as a man among other men and that reputation had been built over many years under the eyes of his regimental tribe. That tribe was one not only of fellow officers but of sergeants and ordinary soldiers as well. ‘Not good with soldiers’ was an ultimate condemnation. An officer might be clever, competent, hard-working. If his fellow soldiers reserved doubt about him, none of those qualities countervailed. He was not one of the tribe.
The British army is tribal to an extreme degree; some of its regiments have histories which go back to the seventeenth century, when modern armies were only beginning to take shape from the feudal hosts of warriors whose forebears had entered western Europe during the invasions that overthrew the Roman empire. I have encountered the same warrior values of the tribe in many other armies, however, over the years since I first joined Sandhurst in my youth. I have sensed the tribal aura about French officers who fought the war in Algeria, leading Muslim soldiers whose traditions belong with those of the ghazi, Islam’s frontier marauders. I have sensed it, too, in the recollections of German officers, re-enlisted to build Germany’s post-war army, who had fought the Russians on the steppe and preserved a pride in the ordeal they had undergone that harked back to the wars of their medieval ancestors. I have sensed it strongly among Indian officers, above all in their quickness to insist that they are Rajputs or Dogras, descendants of the invaders who conquered India before its history had begun to be written. I have sensed it among American officers who served in Vietnam or the Lebanon or the Gulf, exponents of a code of courage and duty that belongs to the origins of their republic.
Soldiers are not as other men – that is the lesson that I have learned from a life cast among warriors. The lesson has taught me to view with extreme suspicion all theories and representations of war that equate it with any other activity in human affairs. War undoubtedly connects, as the theorists demonstrate, with economics and diplomacy and politics. Connection does not amount to identity or even to similarity. War is wholly unlike diplomacy or politics because it must be fought by men whose values and skills are not those of politicians or diplomats. They are those of a world apart, a very ancient world, which exists in parallel with the everyday world but does not belong to it. Both worlds change over time, and the warrior world adapts in step to the civilian. It follows it, however, at a distance. The distance can never be closed, for the culture of the warrior can never be that of civilisation itself. All civilisations owe their origins to the warrior; their cultures nurture the warriors who defend them, and the differences between them will make those of one very different in externals from those of another. It is, indeed, a theme of this book that in externals there are three distinct warrior traditions. Ultimately, however, there is only one warrior culture. Its evolution and transformation over time and place, from man’s beginnings to his arrival in the contemporary world, is the history of warfare.
‘WHAT IS WAR?’ was the question with which I began this book. Now that I have finished it, and if the reader has followed me to the end, I hope I have called into doubt the belief that there is a simple answer to that question or that war has any one nature. I hope, too, that I have cast doubt on the idea that man is doomed to make war or that the affairs of the world must ultimately be settled by violence. The written history of the world is largely a history of warfare, because the states within which we live came into existence largely through conquest, civil strife or struggles for independence. The great statesmen of written history, moreover, have generally been men of violence for, if not warriors themselves, though many were, they understood the use of violence and did not shrink to use it for their ends.
In this century the frequency and intensity of warmaking have also distorted the outlook of ordinary men and women. In western Europe, the United States, Russia and China, the demands of warfare have touched a majority of families over two, three or four generations. The call to arms has taken sons, husbands, fathers and brothers in their millions away to the battlefield and millions have not returned. War has scarred the gentler emotions of whole peoples and left them inured to the expectation that the lives of their children and grandchildren might go untouched by the ordeals they themselves have suffered. Yet, in their everyday lives, people know little of violence or even of cruelty or harsh feeling. It is the spirit of cooperativeness, not confrontation, that makes the world go round. Most people pass most of their days in a spirit of fellowship and seek by almost every means to avoid discord and to diffuse disagreement. Neighbourliness is thought the best of common virtues, and kindness the most welcome trait of character.
Neighbourliness flourishes, we must recognise, inside firm bounds of restraint. The civilised societies in which we best like to live are governed by law, which means that they are policed, and policing is a form of coercion. In our acceptance of policing we silently concede that man has a darker side to his nature which must be constrained by fear of superior force. Punishment is the sanction against those who will not be constrained and superior force is its instrument. Yet, despite a potentiality for violence, we also have an ability to limit its effects even when no superior force stands ready to spare us from the worst of which we are capable. It is for that reason that the phenomenon of ‘primitive’ war, with a study of which this book began, is so instructive. Because the wars of this century have taken such an extreme and ruthless form, it has become all too easy for modern man to slip into the supposition that the trend to extremity in warfare is an inevitable one. Modern war has given moderation or self-restraint a bad name; humanitarian intermissions or mediations are cynically seen as a means by which the intolerable is palliated or disguised. Yet warmaking man, as the ‘primitives’ show, does have a capacity to limit the nature and effects of his actions. Primitives have recourse to all sorts of devices which spare both themselves and their enemies from the worst of what might be inflicted. Exemption is one, the exemption of specified members of society – women, children, the unfit, the old – from combat and its consequences. Convention is another, particularly the conventions of choice of time, place and season of conflict, and of pretext for it. 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.
It is important, as has been said, not to idealise primitive warfare. It may take a very violent turn, in which exemptions, conventions and rituals are discarded and violence rises to a high level. It may, even when constraints are observed, have material effects undesired by those who suffer them. The most important is the progressive displacement of the weaker party from familiar territory to worse land. Such displacement may eventually damage or even destroy the culture which the cultural constraints on warmaking normally protect. Cultures are not infinitely self-sustaining. They have fragilities which are vulnerable to hostile influences, and among those influences warmaking is one of the more potent.
Culture is, nevertheless, a prime determinant of the nature of warfare, as the history of its development in Asia clearly demonstrates. Oriental warmaking, if we may so identify and denominate it as something different and apart from European warfare, is characterised by traits peculiar to itself. Foremost among these are evasion, delay and indirectness. Given the extraordinary dynamism and ruthlessness of the campaigns of Attila, Genghis and Tamerlane, such a characterisation may seem wholly inappropriate. Those excursions, however, must be seen in context. Over the 3000-year span in which the riding-horse was a principal instrument of warmaking, they appear as quite widely spaced interruptions rather than as a constant and regular feature in the military history of Eurasia. The threat posed by the horse warrior was, of course, a constant in those millennia; but it was normally containable, not least because of his preferred style of fighting. That was, indeed, one in which evasion, delay and indirectness were paramount. The horse warrior chose to fight at a distance, to use missiles rather than edged weapons, to withdraw when confronted with determination and to count upon wearing down an enemy to defeat rather than by overthrowing him in a single test of arms.
For that reason, mounted warmaking could usually be successfully checked by a defender who had recourse to fixed defences built at the perimeter of terrain where the horseman had his home. Off that terrain he found the management of his large horse herds difficult in any case; if free movement were further impeded by obstacles – the Great Wall of China, the Russian cherta – his ability to campaign might be altogether nullified. Nevertheless, some horse warriors did eventually succeed in penetrating the settled lands and establishing themselves as rulers in permanency. Notable among them were the Moghuls of India and the Ottoman Turks, together with the bodies of Mamelukes who, at various times, wielded power within the Arab lands. Yet, as we have seen, even these successful horse conquerors did not succeed in transforming the conquering impulse into a creative and constructive style of government. They remained wedded to the culture of the camp, the horse and the bow, living still as nomad chiefs even when luxuriously accommodated in the capitals of the empires they had overthrown. When eventually confronted by new powers which had adapted to real technological change in warfare, their cultural rigidity denied them the opportunity to respond effectively to the challenge and they were eventually extinguished.
Yet, paradoxically, there was a dimension to Oriental warmaking, which came only later to the West, that invested it with formidable but self-limiting purpose. That dimension was ideological and intellectual. Long before any Western society had arrived at a philosophy of war, the Chinese had devised one. The Confucian ideal of rationality, continuity and maintenance of institutions led them to seek means of subordinating the warrior impulse to the constraints of law and custom. The ideal could not be and was not always maintained. Internal disorder and irruptions from the steppe, the latter often the cause of the former, prevented that. Nevertheless, the most persistent feature of Chinese military life was moderation, designed to preserve cultural forms rather than serve imperatives of foreign conquest or internal revolution. Among the greatest of Chinese achievements was the sinicisation of successful steppe intruders and the subordination of their destructive traits to the civilisation’s central values.
Restraint in warmaking was also a feature of the other dominant civilisation of Asia, that of Islam. The perception is contrary. Islam is widely seen as a religion of conquest and one of its most widely known tenets is that of the obligation to wage holy war against the unbeliever. The history of Islamic conquest and the exact nature of the doctrine of holy warmaking are both misunderstood outside the Muslim community. The era of conquest was comparatively short-lived and came to an end not simply because Islam’s opponents learnt how to mobilise opposition to it but also because Islam itself became divided over the morality of warmaking. Riven by internal disputes which set Muslim against Muslim, in defiance of the doctrine that they should not fight each other, its supreme authority chose the solution of devolving the warmaking role on to a specialist and subordinate class of warriors recruited for the purpose, thus freeing the majority from military obligation and allowing the pious to emphasise in their personal lives the ‘greater’ rather than the ‘lesser’ aspect of the injunction to wage holy war, ‘the war against self’. As the specialists chosen by Islam to wage war in its name were chiefly recruited from steppe horsemen who refused to adapt their military culture to changed circumstances even when their monopoly of arms brought them to power, Islamic warmaking eventually became almost as circumscribed as within Chinese civilisation. Within the culture the effects were widely beneficial. Once that culture encountered the full force of another, which recognised none of the constraints the Oriental tradition had imposed upon itself, it succumbed to a ruthlessness it was not prepared or able to mobilise even in self-defence.
That culture was Western. It comprised three elements, one derived from within itself, one borrowed from Orientalism and a third brought to it by its own potentiality for adaptation and experiment. The three elements are respectively moral, intellectual and technological. The moral element is owed to the Greeks of the classical age. It was they who, in the fifth century BC, cut loose from the constraints of the primitive style, with its respect above all for ritual in war, and adopted the practice of the face-to-face battle to the death. This departure, confined initially to warfare among the Greeks themselves, was deeply shocking to those outside the Greek world who were first exposed to it. The story of Alexander the Great’s encounter with Persia, an empire whose style of warmaking contained elements both of primitive ritual and of the horse warrior’s evasiveness, is both real history, as narrated by Arrian, and a paradigm of cultural difference. The emperor Darius is a genuinely tragic figure, for the civilisation that he represented was quite unprepared to contend with enemies who could not be bought or talked off after they had won an advantage, who sought always to bring the issue to the test of battle and who fought in battle as if its immediate outcome took precedence over all other considerations, including that of personal survival. The death of Darius at the hands of his entourage, who hoped that by leaving his body to be found by Alexander they might save their own skins, perfectly epitomises the cultural clash between expediency and honour in these two different ethics of warmaking.
The ethic of the battle to the death on foot – we must say on foot for it is associated with infantry rather than cavalry fighting – then made its way from the Greek to the Roman world via the presence in southern Italy of Greek colonists. How it was transmitted, as it certainly must have been, to the Teutonic peoples with whom Rome fought its conclusive and eventually unsuccessful battles for survival has not been, and perhaps never will be reconstructed. The Teutonic invaders were, nevertheless, face-to-face warriors without doubt; but for that they would surely not have defeated Roman armies even of the debilitated state to which they descended in the last century of the western empire. A peculiar achievement of the Teutonic successor kingdoms was to assimilate the face-to-face style with combat on horseback, so that the Western knight, unlike the steppe nomad, pressed home his charge against the main body of the enemy, rather than skirmishing against it at a distance. Against the Arab and Mameluke opponents they eventually encountered in the Crusading campaigns for the Holy Land the face-to-face style often foundered; charging home could not be made to work against an enemy who saw no dishonour in avoiding contact. There was, nevertheless, a cultural exchange of great importance that resulted from the conflict of Muslim and Christian in the Middle East. The conflict resolved the inherent Christian dilemma over the morality of warmaking by transmitting to the West the ethic of holy war, which was thereafter to invest Western military culture with an ideological and intellectual dimension it had thitherto lacked.
The combination of the face-to-face style – in which the ethic of personal honour was embedded – with that ideological dimension then only awaited the addition of the technological element to produce the final Western manner of warmaking. By the eighteenth century, when the gunpowder revolution had been accepted and gunpowder weapons perfected, it had arrived. Why Western culture should have been open to the changes that technology offered, while Asian was not (and primitivism, of its nature, not at all), is a question that belongs elsewhere; we should, however, recognise that a major factor closing Asian culture to such adaptation was its adherence to a concept of military restraint that required its élites to persist in the use and monopoly of traditional weapons, however obsolete by comparison with those coming into fashion elsewhere, and that this persistence was a perfectly rational form of arms control. The Western world, by forsaking arms control, embarked on a different course, which resulted in the form of warfare that Clausewitz said was war itself: a continuation of politics, which he saw as intellectual and ideological, by means of combat, which he took to be face-to-face, with the instruments of the Western technological revolution, which he took for granted.
The Western way of warfare was to carry all before it in the years after Clausewitz died. During the nineteenth century all Asian peoples, with the exception of the Chinese, Japanese, Thais and the subjects of the Ottoman Turks, came under Western rule; the primitives of the Americas, Africa and the Pacific stood no chance at all. A few peoples of remote and inaccessible regions – Tibet, Nepal, Ethiopia – alone proved too difficult to bring under the sway of empire, though all experienced Western invasions. During the first half of the twentieth century even China succumbed, at the hands of the Westernised Japanese, while most of the Ottoman lands were overrun by Western armies also. Only the Turks of Turkey, that tough, intelligent and resourceful warrior race, who had taught their enemies so many harsh military lessons even through the unsatisfactory medium of the horse and the bow, remained unsubdued to emerge in mid-century as an independent nation.
The triumph of the Western way of warfare was, however, delusive. Directed against other military cultures it had proved irresistible. Turned in on itself it brought disaster and threatened catastrophe. The First World War, fought almost exclusively between European states, terminated European dominance of the world and, through the suffering it inflicted on the participant populations, corrupted what was best in their civilisation – its liberalism and hopefulness – and conferred on militarists and totalitarians the role of proclaiming the future. The future they wanted brought about the Second World War which completed the ruin initiated by the First. It also brought about the development of nuclear weapons, the logical culmination of the technological trend in the Western way of warfare, and the ultimate denial of the proposition that war was, or might be, a continuation of politics by other means.
Politics must continue; war cannot. That is not to say that the role of the warrior is over. The world community needs, more than it has ever done, skilful and disciplined warriors who are ready to put themselves at the service of its authority. Such warriors must properly be seen as the protectors of civilisation, not its enemies. The style in which they fight for civilisation – against ethnic bigots, regional warlords, ideological intransigents, common pillagers and organised international criminals – cannot derive from the Western model of warmaking alone. Future peacekeepers and peacemakers have much to learn from alternative military cultures, not only that of the Orient but of the primitive world also. There is a wisdom in the principles of intellectual restraint and even of symbolic ritual that needs to be rediscovered. There is an even greater wisdom in the denial that politics and war belong within the same continuum. Unless we insist on denying it, our future, like that of the last Easter Islanders, may belong to the men with bloodied hands.
1 Carl von Clausewitz, On War (tr. J.J. Graham), London, 1908, I, p. 23
2 Luke 7: 6–8, Authorised Version
3 Address to the Michigan Military Academy, 19 June 1879, in J. Wintle, The Dictionary of War Quotations, London, 1989, p. 91
4 R. Parkinson, Clausewitz, London, 1970, pp. 175–6
5 R. McNeal, Tsar and Cossack, Basingstoke, 1989, p. 5
6 A. Seaton, The Horsemen of the Steppes, London, 1985, p. 51
7 Parkinson, op. cit., p. 194
8 Seaton, op. cit., p. 121
9 Ibid., p. 154
10 Parkinson, op. cit., p. 169
11 G. Sansom, The Western World and Japan, London, 1950, pp. 265–6
12 W. St Clair, That Greece Might Still Be Free, London, 1972, pp. 114–15
13 Marshal de Saxe, Mes rêveries, Amsterdam, 1757, I, pp. 86–7
14 P. Contamine, War in the Middle Ages (tr. M. Jones), Oxford, 1984, p. 169
15 M. Howard, War in European History, Oxford, 1976, p. 15
16 L. Tolstoy, Anna Karenin, London, 1987, pp. 190–5
17 M. Howard, Clausewitz, Oxford, 1983, p. 35
18 P. Paret, Understanding War, Princeton, 1992, p. 104
19 P. Paret, Clausewitz and the State, Princeton, 1985, pp. 322–4
20 M. Howard, op. cit., p. 59
21 Carl von Clausewitz, On War (tr. M. Howard and P. Paret), Princeton, 1976, p. 18
22 Ibid., p. 593
23 M. Sahlins, Tribesmen, New Jersey, 1968, p. 64
24 S. Engleit, Islands at the Centre of the World, New York, 1990, p. 139
25 M. Wilson and L. Thompson (eds.), Oxford History of South Africa, Vol I, Oxford, 1969
26 K. Otterbein, ‘The Evolution of Zulu Warfare’, in B. Oget (ed.) War and Society in Africa, 1972
27 Wilson and Thompson, op. cit., pp. 338–9
28 G. Jefferson, The Destruction of the Zulu Kingdom, London, 1979, pp. 9–10, 12
29 E.J. Krige, The Social System of the Zulus, Pietermaritzburg, 1950, Chapter 3 passim
30 Wilson and Thompson, op. cit., p. 345
31 Ibid., p. 346
32 D. Ayalon, ‘Preliminary Remarks on the Mamluk Institutions in Islam’, in V. Parry and M. Yapp (eds.), War, Technology and Society in the Middle East, London, 1975, p. 44
33 Ayalon, ibid., pp. 44–7
34 D. Pipes, Slave Soldiers and Islam, New Haven, 1981, p. 19
35 P. Holt, A. Lambton and B. Lewis (eds.), The Cambridge History of Islam, Cambridge, 1970, Vol. IA, p. 214
36 H. Rabie, ‘The Training of the Mamluk Faris’, in Parry and Yapp, op. cit., pp. 153–63
37 D. Ayalon, Gunpowder and Firearms in the Mamluk Kingdom, London, 1956, p. 86
38 Ibid., pp. 94–5
39 Ibid., p. 70
40 A. Marsot, Egypt in the Reign of Muhammad Ali, Cambridge, 1982, pp. 60–72
41 N. Perrin, Giving Up the Gun, Boston, 1988, p. 19
42 R. Storry, A History of Modern Japan, London, 1960, pp. 53–4
43 J. Hale, Renaissance War Studies, London, 1988, pp. 397–8
44 Sansom, op. cit., p. 192
45 Storry, op. cit., p. 42
46 Perrin, op. cit., pp. 11–12
47 I. Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, New York, 1991, p. 51
48 Ibid., pp. 52–3
49 Clausewitz (tr. Graham), op. cit., p. 25
50 J. Shy ‘Jomini’, in P. Paret, Makers of Modern Strategy, Princeton, 1986, p. 181
51 A. Kenny, The Logic of Deterrence, London, 1985, p. 15
52 J. Spence, The Search for Modern China, London, 1990, p. 395
53 Ibid., p. 371
54 B. Jelavich, History of the Balkans (Twentieth Century), Cambridge, 1983, p. 270
55 F. Deakin, The Embattled Mountain, London, 1971, p. 55
56 N. Beloff, Tito’s Flawed Legacy, London, 1985, p. 75
57 K. McCormick and H. Perry, Images of War, London, 1991, pp. 145, 326, 334
58 Deakin, op. cit., p. 72
59 M. Djilas, Wartime, New York, 1977, p. 283
60 Spence, op. cit., p. 405
61 A. Home, A Savage War of Peace, London, 1977, pp. 64, 537–8
62 R. Weigley, The Age of Battles, Bloomington, 1991, p. 543
63 J. Mueller, ‘Changing Attitudes to War. The Impact of the First World War’, British Journal of Political Science, 21, pp. 25–6, 27
1 Mariner’s Mirror, Vol. 77, no. 3, p. 217
2 A. Ferrill, The Origins of War, London, 1985, pp. 86–7
3 See J. Guilmartin, Gunpowder and Galleys, Cambridge, 1974, especially Chapter 1, for argument that the galley’s usefulness was not immediately extinguished by the appearance of cannon
4 J. Keegan, The Price of Admiralty, London, 1988, p. 137
5 O. Fames, War in the Arctic, London, 1991, pp. 39 ff.
6 See ‘Adrianople’ in index of R. and T. Dupuy, The Encyclopedia of Military History, London, 1986
7 J-P. Pallud, Blitzkrieg in the West, London, 1991, p. 347
8 J. Keegan, The Second World War, London, 1989, p. 462
9 Punch, 1853, quoted in T. Royle, A Dictionary of Military Quotations, London, 1990, p. 123
10 The Times Atlas (Comprehensive Edition), London, 1977, plate 5
11 I. Berlin, Karl Marx, Oxford, 1978, p. 179
12 A. Van der Heyden and H. Scullard, The Atlas of the Classical World, London, 1959, p. 127, and C. Duffy, Siege Warfare, London, 1979, pp. 204–7, 232–7
13 N. Nicolson, Alex, London, 1973, p. 10
14 See A. Fraser, Boadicea’s Chariot, London, 1988
1 J. Groebel and R. Hinde (eds.), Aggression and War, Cambridge, 1989, pp. xiii–xvi
2 A. J. Herbert, ‘The Physiology of Aggression’, in ibid., p.67
3 Ibid., pp. 68–9
4 R. Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, Oxford, 1989
5 A. Manning, in Groebel and Hinde, op. cit., pp. 52–5
6 Groebel and Hinde, op. cit., p. 5
7 A. Manning, in Groebel and Hinde, op. cit., p. 51
8 R. Clark, Freud, London, 1980, p. 486 ff.
9 K. Lorenz, On Aggression, London, 1966
10 R. Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative, London, 1967
11 L. Tiger, Men in Groups, London, 1969
12 M. Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory, London, 1968, pp. 17–18
13 D. Freeman, Margaret Mead and Samoa, Cambridge, Mass., 1983, pp. 13–17
14 Ibid., Chapter 3
15 Harris, op. cit., p. 406
16 A. Kuper, Anthropologists and Anthropology, London, 1973, p. 18
17 Ibid., pp. 207–11
18 A. Mockler, Haile Selassie’s War, Oxford, 1984, p. 219
19 A. Stahlberg, Bounden Duty, London, 1990, p. 72
20 H. Turney-High, Primitive War: Its Practice and Concepts (2nd edition), Columbia, SC, 1971, p. 5
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid., p. 55
23 Ibid., p. 142
24 Ibid., p. 14
25 Ibid., p. 253
26 Ibid., p. v
27 R. Ferguson (ed.), Warfare, Culture and Environment, Orlando, 1984, p. 8
28 M. Mead, ‘Warfare is Only an Invention’, in L. Bramson and G. Goethals, War: Studies from Psychology, Sociology, Anthropology, New York, 1964, pp. 269–74
29 R. Duson-Hudson, in Human Intra-specific Conflict: An Evolutionary Perspective, Guggenheim Institute, New York, 1986
30 Ferguson, op. cit., pp. 6, 26
31 M. Fried, M. Harris and R. Murphy (eds.), War: The Anthropology of Armed Conflict and Aggression, New York, 1967, p. 132
32 Ibid., p. 133
33 Ibid., p. 128
34 US News and World Report, 11 April 1988, p. 59
35 W. Divale, War in Primitive Society, Santa Barbara, 1973, p. xxi
36 A. Vayda, War in Ecological Perspective, New York, 1976, pp. 9–42
37 Ibid., pp. 15–16
38 Ibid., pp. 16–17
39 J. Haas (ed.), The Anthropology of War, Cambridge, 1990, p. 172
40 P. Blau and W. Scott, Formal and Informal Organisations, San Francisco, 1962, pp. 30–2
41 M. Fried, Transactions of New York Academy of Sciences, Series 2, 28, 1966, pp. 529–45
42 J. Middleton and D. Tait, Tribes Without Rulers, London, 1958, pp. 1–31
43 R. Cohen, ‘Warfare and State Formation’, in Ferguson, op. cit., pp. 333–4
44 P. Kirch, The Evolution of the Polynesian Chiefdoms, Cambridge, 1984, pp. 147–8
45 Ibid., p. 81
46 Ibid., pp. 166–7
47 Vayda, op. cit., p. 115
48 Kirch, op. cit., pp. 209–11
49 Vayda, op. cit., p. 80
50 Turney-High, op. cit., p. 193: ‘The Caytes of the Brazilian coast ate every wrecked vessel’s crew. At one meal they ate the first Bishop of Bahia, two Canons, the Procurator of the Royal Portuguese Treasury, two pregnant women and several children.’
51 Ibid., pp. 189–90
52 I. Clendinnen, Aztecs, Cambridge, 1991, pp. 87–8
53 R. Hassing, ‘Aztec and Spanish Conquest in Mesoamerica’, in B. Ferguson and N. Whitehead, War in the Tribal Zone, Santa Fe, 1991, p. 85
54 Ibid., p. 86
55 Clendinnen, op. cit., p. 78
56 Ibid., p. 81
57 Ibid., p. 116
58 Ibid., p. 93
59 Ibid., pp. 94–5
60 Ibid., pp. 95–6
61 Ibid., pp. 25–7
62 I. Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests, Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1515–70, Cambridge, 1987, pp. 144, 148–9
63 J. Roberts, The Pelican History of the World, London, 1987, p. 21
64 Ibid., p. 31
65 H. Breuil and R. Lautier, The Men of the Old Stone Age, London, 1965, p. 71
66 Ibid., p. 69
67 Ibid., p. 20
68 Ibid., p. 69
69 A. Ferrill, op. cit., p. 18
70 W. Reid, Arms Through the Ages, New York, 1976, pp. 9–11
71 Breuil and Lautier, op. cit., p. 72
72 C. Robarchak, in Papers Presented to the Guggenheim Foundation Conference on the Anthropology of War, Santa Fe, 1986; also Robarchak, in Haas, op. cit., pp. 56–76
73 H. Obermaier, La vida de nuestros antepasados cuaternanos en Europa, Madrid, 1926
74 F. Wendorf, in F. Wendorf (ed.), The Prehistory of Nubia, II Dallas, 1968, p. 959
75 Ferrill, op. cit., p. 22
76 M. Hoffman, Egypt Before the Pharaohs, London, 1988, pp. 87–9
77 Roberts, op. cit., p. 51
78 J. Mellaert, ‘Early Urban Communities in the Near East, 9000–3400 BC’, in P. Moorey (ed.), The Origins of Civilisation, Oxford, 1979, pp. 22–5
79 H. de la Croix, Military Considerations in City Planning, New York, 1972, p. 14
80 Y. Yadin, The Art of Warfare in Biblical Lands, London, 1963, p. 34
81 Mellaert, op. cit., p. 22
82 B. Kemp, Ancient Egypt. Anatomy of a Civilisation, London, 1983, p. 269
83 S. Piggott, ‘Early Towns in Europe’, in Moorey, op. cit., pp. 3, 44
84 H. Thomas, An Unfinished History of the World, London, pp. 19, 21
85 J. Bottero et al. (eds.), The Near East: The Early Civilisations, London, 1967, p. 44
86 Ibid., p. 6
87 Roberts, op. cit., p. 131
88 Hoffman, op. cit., pp. 331–2
89 Kemp, op. cit., pp. 169–72
90 Ibid., pp. 223–30
91 Ibid., p. 227
92 Yadin, op. cit., pp. 192–3
93 Kemp, op. cit., pp. 43, 225
94 Hoffman, op. cit., p. 116
95 W. Hayes, ‘Egypt from the Death of Ammanemes II to Seqenenre II’, in Cambridge Ancient History (3rd edition), Vol. II, Part 1, p. 73
96 Kemp, op. cit., p. 229
97 The first of the intermediate periods (2160–1991 BC) between the Old and Middle Kingdoms is held to have been an era of warmaking between local strongmen: a text of the period (quoted Bottero, op. cit., p. 337) reads, however, as follows: ‘I armed my bands of recruits and went into combat . . . There was no one else with me but my own troops, while [the mercenaries from Nubia and elsewhere] were united against me. I returned in triumph, my whole city with me, with no losses’; scarcely evidence that Egyptian domestic warfare was hard-fought.
98 Bottero, op. cit., pp. 70–1
99 W. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power, Oxford, 1983, p. 5
100 J. Laessoe, People of Ancient Assyria, London, 1963, p. 16
101 Yadin, op. cit., p. 130
102 G. Roux, Ancient Iraq, New York, 1986, p. 129
103 P.J. Forbes, Metallurgy in Antiquity, Leiden, 1950, p. 321
104 Ibid., p. 255 and fig. 49
105 W. McNeill, A World History, New York, 1961, p. 34
106 R. Gabriel and K. Metz, From Sumer to Rome, New York, 1991, p. 9
1 D. Petite, Le balcon de la Côte d’azure, Marignan, 1983, passim
2 A. Fox, Prehistoric Maori Fortifications, Auckland, 1974, pp. 28–9
3 F. Winter, Greek Fortifications, Toronto, 1971
4 N. Pounds, The Mediaeval Castle in England and Wales, Cambridge, 1990, p. 69
5 S. Johnson, Roman Fortifications on the Saxon Shore, London, 1977, p. 5
6 Kemp, op. cit., pp. 174–6
7 S. Piggott, ‘Early Towns in Europe’, in Moorey, op. cit., pp. 48–9
8 A. Hogg, Hill Forts of Britain, London, 1975, p. 17
9 Piggott, op. cit., p. 50
10 W. Watson, in Moorey, op. cit., p. 55
11 S. Johnson, Late Roman Fortifications, London, 1983, p. 20
12 E. Luttwak, The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire, Baltimore, 1976, pp. 96, 102–4
13 B. Isaac, The Limits of Empire, Oxford, 1990; A. Home, A Savage War of Peace, London, 1987, pp. 263–7
14 Q. Hughes, Military Architecture, London, 1974, pp. 187–90
15 C. Duffy, Siege Warfare, London, 1979, pp. 204–7
16 J. Fryer, The Great Wall of China, London, 1975, p. 104; A. Waldron, The Great Wall of China, Cambridge, 1992, pp. 5–6
17 O. Lattimore, ‘Origins of the Great Wall’, in Studies in Frontier History, London, 1962, pp. 97–118
18 J. Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, I, Cambridge, 1954, p. 144
19 S. Johnson, Late Roman Fortifications, Maps 25, 44, 46
20 P. Contamine, War in the Middle Ages, Oxford, 1984, p. 108
21 Ibid., p. 46
22 Pounds, op. cit., p. 19
23 Winter, op. cit., pp. 218–19
24 Yadin, op. cit., pp. 158–9, 393, 409
25 S. Runciman, A History of the Crusades, I, Cambridge, 1951, pp. 231–4
26 Pounds, op. cit., p. 115
27 Ibid., p. 213
1 A. Azzarolli, An Early History of Horsemanship, London, 1985, pp. 5–6
2 S. Piggott, The Earliest Wheeled Transport, London, 1983, p. 87
3 Ibid., p. 39
4 Azzarolli, op. cit., p. 9
5 R. Sallares, The Ecology of the Ancient Greek World, London, 1991, pp. 396–7
6 Piggott, op. cit., pp. 64–84
7 W. McNeill, The Rise of the West, Chicago, 1963, p. 103
8 A. Friendly, The Dreadful Day, London, 1981, p. 27
9 Yadin, op. cit., pp. 150, 187
10 J. Guilmartin, op. cit., p. 152; P. Klopsteg, Turkish Archery and the Composite Bow, Evanstown, 1947
11 Yadin, op. cit., p. 455
12 Y. Garlan, War in the Ancient World, London, 1975, p. 90
13 O. Lattimore, op. cit., pp. 41–4
14 Piggott, op. cit., pp. 103–4
15 H. Creel, The Origins of Statecraft in China, Chicago, 1970, pp. 285–6
16 Guilmartin, op. cit., p. 157
17 Lattimore, op. cit., p. 53
18 Cambridge Ancient History, Vol. II, Part 1, Cambridge, 1973, pp. 375–6
19 Laessoe, op. cit., pp. 87, 91
20 Cambridge Ancient History, Vol. II, Part 1, pp. 54–64
21 J. Gernet, A History of Chinese Civilisation, Cambridge, 1982, pp. 40–5
22 H. Saggs, The Might That Was Assyria, London, 1984, p. 197
23 Ibid., pp. 199, 255
24 Ibid., p. 100
25 Ibid., p. 101
26 Ibid., p. 258
27 Creel, op. cit., pp. 258, 265
28 Ibid., p. 259
29 Ibid., pp. 266, 264
30 Robert Thurton, ‘The Prince Consort in Armour’, in M. Girouard, The Return of Camelot, New Haven, 1981; Hubert Lanzinger, ‘Hitler in Armour’, in P. Adam, The Arts of the Third Reich, London, 1992
31 Yadin, op. cit., pp. 100–3; Cambridge Ancient History, Vol. II, Part 1, pp. 444–51
32 Yadin, op. cit., pp. 103–14
33 Ibid., pp. 218–21
34 McNeill, The Rise of the West, p. 15
35 Saggs, op. cit., p. 169
36 J. Saunders, The History of the Mongol Conquests, London, 1991, pp. 9–10
37 Ibid., p. 14; Gernet, op. cit., pp. 4–5
38 W. McNeill, The Human Condition, Princeton, 1980, p. 47
39 D. Maenchen-Helfen, The World of the Huns, Berkeley, 1973, p. 187
40 Ibid., p. 267
41 Ibid., p. 184
42 Ibid., p. 180
43 J. Jakobsen and R. Adams, ‘Salt and Silt in Ancient Mesopotamian Agriculture’, Science, CXXVIII, 1958, p. 257
44 L. Kwantem, Imperial Nomads: A History of Central Asia, 500–1500, Leicester, 1979, p. 12
45 A. Jones, The Later Roman Empire, 284–602, Oxford, 1962, p. 157
46 J. Bury, A History of the Later Roman Empire, 1927, I, p. 300, n. 3
47 R. Lindner, ‘Nomadism, Horses and Huns’, Past and Present, 92 (1981), pp. 1–19
48 J. Lucas, Fighting Troops of the Austro-Hungarian Army, New York, 1987, p. 149
49 Marquess of Anglesey, A History of British Cavalry, IV, London, 1986, p. 297
50 Maenchen-Helfen, op. cit., pp. 152–3
51 P. Ratchnevsky, Genghis Khan, Oxford, 1991, p. 155
52 Kwantem, op. cit., p. 21; the Ephthalites appear to have spoken Tocharian, an extinct Indo-European language
53 Saunders, op. cit., p. 27
54 Ibid.
55 J. Keegan, The Mask of Command, London, 1988, p. 18
56 Ferrill, op. cit., p. 70
57 A. Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples, London, 1991, p. 19
58 Koran 9: 125
59 P.M. Holt and others, Cambridge History of Islam, Vol. IA, Cambridge, 1977, pp. 87–92
60 Cambridge History of Islam, op. cit., p. 42
61 Sallares, op. cit., p. 27
62 D. Hill, ‘The Role of the Camel and the Horse in the Early Arab Conquests’, in Parry and Yapp, op. cit., p. 36
63 Ibid., pp. 57–8
64 Cambridge History of Islam, op. cit., p. 60
65 Ibid.
66 Pipes, op. cit., pp. 109–13
67 Ibid., p. 148
68 Saunders, op. cit., p. 37
69 Kwantem, op. cit., p. 61
70 Cambridge History of Islam, op. cit., p. 150
71 Ratchnevsky, op. cit., p. 109
72 Kwantem, op. cit., pp. 12–13
73 Chen Ya-tien, Chinese Military Theory, Stevenage, 1992, pp. 21–30
74 Gernet, op. cit., p. 309
75 Ibid., p. 310
76 Ratchnevsky, op. cit., pp. 194–5
77