A History of Warfare by John Keegan
London: Pimlico, 1994 (first published 1993) ISBN: 0712698507
It took me a while to warm to this book. The opening section, which contains psychological insights into human character, and discussions of primitive peoples, was not what I was expecting. As I read further, it became clear what Keegan was trying to say, and his conclusion ties up his thesis very nicely, whether you agree with it or not (in fact you could probably just read the conclusion and not bother with the rest of the book if all you want is Keegan's view on the history of warfare).
Written in the 1990s, history has overtaken some of his final conclusions, but here is what the book contends, in a nutshell. In primitive societies, warfare in the sense we know it doesn't exist. Conflicts involved a ritualised exchange of violence, where death was in fact rare (vide traditional fighting in Papua New Guinea as a recent example, or descriptions of Australian Aboriginal fighting). The fight was more about serving "honour" rather than killing or taking land. Sometimes disagreements were resolved by "champions" from each side fighting in lieu of a general melee. Keegan points out that sometimes killing and taking land did happen, but that was the exception rather than the rule.
At some stage in Mesopotamia, things got more organised. The more settled societies could organise, for small periods of time, groups of warriors, who now had reason, in an agricultural world, to protect their own lands, and perhaps take the land of others. The development of the horse into a weapon of war is hard to track, but it's impact was decisive. Development of the chariot revolutionized how battles were fought, and led to the rise of the Hittites. However it was some time yet before horses could be ridden and men fight from horseback.
Most warfare at this time did not involve close combat. Keegan explains that most battles were fought at as great a distance as possible, and retreat was not seen as dishonourable if one's foe had greater strength. The culture that changed this outlook was the Ancient Greeks. It was they, with their closely-packed phalanxes, that brought the horror of mass hand-to-hand fighting into war. It was this revolutionary change that led to their success on the battlefield. It is at this stage of the history of warfare that Keegan explains we see two differing ways of making war. Those from the Middle East, the Steppe lands and China, stuck to the idea of a hit-and-run type of warfare, attacking and retreating as necessary. This style of warfare was greatly aided by the development of the horse, saddle, and stirrup to enable a man to fire his newly developed composite bow while riding.
When the Romans took over hegemonic status in Europe from the other powers such as Greece and Carthage, they did so using Greek methods of warfare. Their centralized control, and logistical ability to keep great armies in the field, led them to quickly overrun not only the other powers, but move into areas such as Gaul where older tribal ways of warfare still prevailed. Those areas were quickly crushed - Keegan points out that the boundaries of the Roman Empire at its peak delineated in a general way the boundary between agricultural and pastoral land.
And it is those boundaries, delineated by geographic and climatic factors, Keegan sees as the most important factor in warfare almost until the arrival of gunpowder and the nation-state. The ways of war that suited each landscape could not be readily translated to the other. The horse lords of the Steppe could overrun settled areas for a time (Huns, Goths etc.), but the structure of their armies did not suit long-form siege warfare, and more importantly the settled areas of Europe could not support the huge numbers of horses that were required by such armies for long. Keegan suggests that it is for those reasons that the invasions from the Steppe lands always petered out - the invaders could not our would not change their way of life to enable them to control the settled lands.
The opposite side of the same coin meant that generally speaking the organised phalanx-style armies of the settled areas were mostly ineffective against mobile warriors that would not stand and fight, and such armies couldn't penetrate far into the pastoral lands owing to logistics not being resilient enough to keep up supply.
Once the Roman Empire collapsed, and along with it revenue to the centre from taxation, and supplies from the centre out to the armies and garrisons, a new way for leaders to gather fighters needed to be developed. That new way developed into the Feudal system. A leader gave land, with the expectation that those he gave it to would come to his support in a time of crisis with an agreed number of troops. Despite the internal problems with such a system, it prevailed in Europe for hundreds of years, and led to the development of the knightly class.
Keegan is a bit iconoclastic about the value of knights on horseback, and suggests that their effectiveness was much less than legend would have us believe: he notes that if one reads the accounts of Crecy, Poitiers and Agincourt, the knights mostly fought dismounted. Infantry soon came up with tactics to counter horsemen, using lances or longbows and then crossbows to keep them at a distance.
The codes of chivalry, and their equivalents in the East, were developed partly to separate the warrior class from the rest of society, and to impose (harking back to primitive times), some sort of accepted ritual to combat. The ascent of gunpowder changed that, and a lot else besides. Firstly gunpowder put paid to city walls and castles, and led to a whole new theory of fortification. Secondly, it destroyed the notion of a warrior class - gunpowder put lethal force into the hands of people who didn't need a lifetime of training to be effective.
Gunpowder led to a change in naval warfare as well. Galleys, which had been the prime warfighting vessel up until the advent of gunpowder, were ships that needed to keep close to shore - with their many oarsmen, they couldn't keep at sea for long time periods. In fact most naval warfare up until the gunpowder age was conducted in conjunction with land campaigns. Guns required bigger ships - sail took over, and without oarsmen, ships could be built that could range over oceans and stay for years away from port. It was this revolution that enabled Europe to dominate the world.
They could do this because the reaction to gunpowder in the East was to reinforce the specialty warrior class, and to reject the new technology. That's fine if you are only fighting other people who share the same ethos: something that illustrates this clash vividly (although apocryphal) is the doomed charge of the Polish Lancers against German tanks in 1939.
If the invention of gunpowder enabled deadly force to be placed into the hands of almost every man with a limited amount of training, it was the creation of the nation state, the development of nationalism and the industrialisation of industry and society that meant that mass armies could fight a mechanised war. The notion of a superior warrior class being able to take the battlefield owing to their prowess was shown in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to be an obsolete idea - it was the ability to put large numbers of men in the field, and critically, to overpower the enemy with material and the logistics to get it to the point of need in quantity, that became key to victory.
With the atomic bomb, Keegan (writing in the early 90s), suggested that we were on the verge of seeing the end of war. Sadly this has not turned out to be the case.
Once Keegan got himself underway in this book, there is much to study and absorb. Worth reading.
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