And now, some perspective:War is not the continuation of policy by other means. The world would be a simpler place to understand if this dictim of Clausewitz's were true. Clausewit, a Prussian veteran of the Napoleanic wars who used his years of retirement to compose what what was destined to be the most famous book on war - called On War - ever written, actually wrote that war is the continuation 'of political discourse' (des politschen Verkehrs) 'with the intermixing of other meanings' (mit Einmischung anderer Mittel). The original German expresses a more subtle and complex idea than the English words in which it is so frequently quoted. In either form, however, Clausewitz's thought is incomplete. It implies the existance of states, of state interests and of rational calculation about how they may be achieved. Yet war antedates the state, diplomacy and strategy by many millenia. Warfare is almost as old as man himself, and reaches into the most secret places of the human heart, places where self dissolves rational purpose, where pride reigns, where emotion is paramount, where instinct is king. 'Man is a political animal' said Aristotle. Clausewitz, a child of Aristotle, went no farther than to say that a political animal is a warmaking animal. Neither dared confront the thought that man is a thinking animal in whom the intellect directs the urge to hunt and the ability to kill.
This is not an idea any easier for modern man to confront than it was for a Prussian officer, born the grandson of a clergyman and raised in the spirit of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. For all the effect that Freud, Jung and Adler have had on our control, our moral values remain those of the great monotheistic religions, which condemn the killing of fellow souls in all but the most constrained circumstances. Anthropology tells us and archaeology tells us that our uncivilized ancestors could be red in tooth and claw; psychoanalysis tells us that the savage in all of us lurks not far below the skin. We prefer, none the less, to recognise human nature as we find it displayed in the everyday - imperfect, no doubt, but certainly cooperative and frequently benevolent. Culture to us seems the great determinent of how human beings conduct themselves; in the relentless academic debate between 'nature anbd nurture', it is the 'nurture' school which commands greater support from the bystanders. We accept our undoubted potentiality for violence but to believe nevertheless that its expression is a cultural aberration. History lessons remind us that the states in which we live, their institutions, even their laws, have come to us through conflict, often of the most bloodthirsty sort. Our daily diet of news brings us reports of the shedding of blood, often in regions quite close to our homelands, in circumstances that deny our conception of cultural normality altogether. We succeed, al the same, in consigning the lessons both of history and of reportage to a special and seperate catagory of 'otherness' which invalidates our expectations of how our own world will be tomorrow and the day after not at all. Our institutions and our laws, we tell ourselves, have set the human potentiality for violence about with such restraints that violence in everyday life will be punished as criminal by our laws, while its use by our institutions of state will take the particular form of 'civlised warfare'.
The bounds of civilised warefare are defined by two antitheitical human types, the pacifist and the 'lawful bearer of arms'. The lawful bearer of arms has always been respected, if only because he has the means to make himself so; the pacifist has come to be valued in the two thousand years of the Christian era. Their mutuality is caught in the dialogue between the founder of Christianity and the professional Roman soldier who has asked for his healing word to cure a servant. 'I also am a man set under authority', the centurion explained. Christ exclaimed at the centurion's belief in the power of virtue, which the soldier saw as the complement to the force of law which he personified. May we guess that Christ was conceding the moral position of the lawful bearer of arms, who much surrender his life at the demand of authority, and therefore bears comparsion with the pacifist who will surrender his life rather than violate the authority of his own creed. It is a complicated thought, but not one which Western culture finds difficult to accomodate. Within it the professional soldier and the commited pacifist find room to co-exist - sometimes cheek-by-jowl: in 3 Commando, one of Britain's toughest Second World War units, the stretcher-bearers were all pacifists but were held by the commanding officer in the highest regard for their bravery and readiness for self-sacrifice. Western culture would, indeed, not be what it is unless it could respect both the lawful bearer of arms and the person who holds the bearing of such intrinsically unlawfull. Our culture looks for compromises and the compromise at which it has arrived over the issue of public violence is to deprecate its manifestation but to legimise its use. Pacifism has been elevated as an ideal; the lawful bearing of arms - under a strict code of military justice and within a corpus of humanitarian law - has been accepted as a practical necessity.
"War as the continuation of policy' was the form Clausewitz chose to express the compromise for which the states he knew had settled. It accorded respect to their prevailing ethics - of absolute sovereignty, ordered diplomacy and legally binding treaties - for the overriding principle of state interest. If it did not admit the ideal of pacifism, which the Prussian philosopher Kant was only just translating from the religious to the political sphere, it certainly distinguished sharply between the lawful bearer of arms and the rebel, the freebooter and the brigand. It presupposed a high level of military discipline and an awesome degree of obedience by subordinates to their lawful superiors. It expected that war would take certain narrowly defined forms - siege, pitched battle, skirmish, raid, reconnaisance, patrol, and outpost duties - each of which had its own recognized conventions. It assumed that wars had a beginning and an end. What it made no allowance for at all was pre-state peoples, in which there was no distinction between lawful and unlawful bearers of arms, since all males were warriors; a form of warfare which had prevailed during long periods of human history and which, at the margins, still encroached on the life of civilised states and was, instead, turne dto their use through the common practice of recruiting its practitioners as 'irregular' light cavalry and infrantrymen. From the unlawful and uncivilised means by which these irregular warriors rewarded themselves on campaign and from their barbaric methods of fighting, the officers of the civilised states averted their gaze; yet without the services they offered, the over-drilled armies in which Clausewitz and his kin had been raised would scarcely have been able to keep the field. All regular armies, even the armies of the French Revolution, recruited irregulars to patrol, reconnoitre and skirmish for them; during the eighteenth century the expansion of such forces - Cossacks, 'hunters', Highlanders, 'borderes', Hussars - had been one of the most notable contemporary military developments. Over their habits of loot, pillage, rape, murder, kidnap, extortion and systematic vandalism their civilised employers chose to draw a veil. That it was an older and more widespread form of warfare than that which they themselves practised they prefered not to admit; 'war is the continuation of policy, once Clausewitz had formulated the thought, proved to offer the thinking officer a convienient philosophical bolt-hole from contemplation of the older, darker and fundamental aspects of his profession.
Yet Clausewitz himself saw with half an eye that war was not altogether what he claimed it to be. 'If the wars of civlised peoples are less cruel and destructive than those of savages', he conditionally began one of his most famous passages. It was a thought he did not pursue because, with all the considerable philosophical force at his disposal, he was struggling to achieve a universal theory of what war ought to be, rather than what is actually was and had been. To a very great degree he succeeded. In the practice of warmaking it is to the principles of Clausewitz that the statesman and the supreme commander still turn; in the truthful deception of war, however, the eye-witness and the historian of war must flee from Clausewitz's methods, despite the fact that Clausewitz himself was both an eye-witness and a historian of war, who must have seen and could have written of a great deal that found no place in his theories. 'Without a theory the facts are silent', the economist F.A. Hayek has written. That may be true of the cold facts of economics, but the facts of war are not cold. They burn with the heat of the fires of hell. In old age General William Tecumseh Sherman, who had burned Atlanta and put a great swathe of the American South to the torch, bitterly delivered himself of exactly that thought, in words that have become almost as famous as those of Clausewitz: 'I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine . . . War is hell.'
. . . On War had proven a book of long-delated effect. Not until forty years after is publication in 1832-5 did it become widely known, and then in a roundabout way. Helmuth von Moltke, chief of the Prussian general staff, had apparently magical gifts of generalship which had toppled the power of the Austrian and then then the French empires in campaigns of a few weeks in 1871. The world wanted to know his secret, of course, and when Moltke revealed that, beside the Bible and Homer, the book that had most influenced him was On War, Clausewitz's posthumous fame was assured. That Moltke had been a student at Prussia's war college when Clausewitz was its director was overlooked and in any case irrelevent; the world seized on the book itself, read it, translated it, often misunderstood it, but thereafter believed that it contained the essence of successful warmaking.
On War's onward march derived much of its force from its apparent validation by much that had happened in warfare since its composition. The most important of these developments was the spread of that regimentalism in which Clausewitz had been raised. 'The business of war', he laid down, in one of those characteristic modifications of his central idea of war as a political act, 'will always be individual and distinct. Consequently, for as long as they practise this activity, soldiers will think of themselves as members of a kind of guild, in whose regulations, laws and customs the spirit of war is gfiven pride of place.' That 'kind of guild' was, of course, the regiment, whose spirit and values he then proceeded to catagorize:
An army that maintains its cohesian under the most murderous fire; that cannon be shaken by imaginary fears and resists well-found ones with all its might; that, proud of its victories, will not lose the strength to obey order and its respect and trust for its officers even in defeat; whose physical power, like the muscles of an athlete, has been steeled by training in privation and effort . . . that is mindful of all these duties and qualities by virtue of the single powerful idea of the honour of its arms - such an army is imbued with the true military spirit.
For 'army' read 'regiments', its constituent parts. Prussia in the nineteenth century was positively swamped by regiments; in 1831 there had been only forty of them, but by 1871 there were more than a hundred, not counting rifle batallions or cavarly. Every fit Prussian was a member of a regiment, or had been in his hot youth, and all understood the 'single powerful idea of the honour of its arms'.
That 'single powerful idea' brought Prussian arms victory in wars against Austria and Frnace, and immedietly sent officers in other nations scurrying to raise regiments on the Prussian model, recruited from the best of a nation's young men and supported by droves of older reservists who looked back on their conscript days as the rite de passage which ushered them from boyhood to manhood. This rite de passage became an important cultural form in European males and, through its universality, its ready acceptance by electorates as a social norm and its inescable militarisation of society, a further validation of Clausewitz's dictum that war was a continuation of political activity. If peoples voted for conscription or acquiesced in conscription laws, how could it be denied that war and politics indeed belonged together on the same continuum?
And yet, the God of War is not mocked. When in 1914 the conscript regiments of Europe marched off to war, dragging their tails of reservists behind them, the war that embroiled them was worse by far than anything for which the citizens had bargained. In the First World War 'real war' and 'true war' rapidly became indistinguishable; the moderating nomena, had declared always operated to bring a war's potential nature and actual purpose into adjustment dwindled into invisibility; Germans, French, British and Russians found themselves apparently fighting war for war's sake. The war's political objectives - difficult enough to define in the first place - were forgotten, political restraints were overwhelmed, politics even in the liberal democracies was rapidly reduced to a mere justification of bigger battles, longer casualty lists, costlier budgets, overflowing human misery.
Politics played no part in the conduct of the First World War worth mentioning. The First World War was, on the contrary, an extraordinary, a monstrous cultural aberration, the outcome of an unwitting decision by Europeans in the century of Clausewitz - which began with his return from Russia in 1813 and ended in 1913, the last year of the long European peace - to turn Europe into a warrior society. Clausewitz was not the architect of that cultural decisision, any more than Marx was the architect of the revolutionary impulses which perverted liberalism during the same period, but each bears weighty responsibility. Their great books, purporting to be works of science, were in fact heady works of ideaology, laying down a vision of the world not as it actually was but as it might be.
The purpose of war, Clausewitz said, was to serve a political end; the nature of war, he succeeded in arguing, was to serve only itself. By conclusion, his logic therefore ran, those who make war an end in itself are likely to be more successful than those who seek to moderate its character for political purposes. The peace of the most peaceful century in European history was helf ransome to this subversive idea, which bubbled and seethed like the flux of an active volcano beneath the surface of progress and prosperity. The wealth generated by the century paid, on a scale never before witnessed, for the works of real peace - schools, universities, hospitals, roads, bridges, new cities, new workplaces, the infrastructure of a vast and benevolent continental economy. It also generated, through taxes, improved public health, higher birth rates, and a new and ingenious military technology, the wherewithal to fight true war, through the creation of the strongest warrior society the world has ever known. When in 1818 Clausewitz began the manuscript of On War, Europe was a continent disarmed. The Grand Army of Napoleon had melted away after his exile to St Helena, and those of his enemies had dwindled proportionately. Large-scale conscription had effectively been abolished everywhere, the arms industry had collapsed, generals were pensioners, veterans begged in the streets. Ninety-six years later, on the eve of the First World War, almost every fit European male of military age had a soldier's identity card among his personal papers, telling him where to report for duty in the event of general mobilisation. The regimental depots bulged with spare weapons and uniforms to kit the reservists out, even the horses in the farmers' fields were docketed for requistion should war come.
At the beginning of July 1914 there were some four million Europeans actually in uniform; at the end of August there were twenty million, and many tens of thousands had already been killed. The submerged warrior society had sprung armed through the surface of the peaceful landscape and the warrior s were to wage war until, four years later, they could wage it no more. And although this catastrophic outcome must not be laid at the door of Clausewitz's study,we are nevertheless right to see Clauswitz as the ideological father of the First World War, just as we are right to perceive Marx as the idelogical father of the Russian Revolution. The ideology of 'true war was the ideology of the First World War's armies, and the appalling fate that those armies brought upon themselves by their dedication to it may be Clausewitz's enduring legacy.
. . . 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 inaccessable 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 Westernized 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 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, elusive. Directed against other military cultures it had proved irresistable. Turned in on itself it brought disaster and threatened catastrophe. The First World War, fought almost exclusively between European states, terminated European dominace of the world and, through the suffering ithad 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, and the ultimate denial of the proposition that war was, or might be, a continuation of politics by other means.
Politics must continue; war cannon. This is not to say that the role of the warrior is over. The world community needs, more than it has ever done, skilled 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 civlisation, not its enemies. The style in which they fight for civlisation - 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 tolearn 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 in 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.
These are excerpts from John Keegan's A History of Warfare, published in 1993. The book has three purposes: to serve as a guide of military history over the last five thousand years, to analyze the "root causes" of what causes men to fight, going back to studies of psychology and anthropology, and to refute Clausewitz's dictum that "War is the continuation of policy by other means", which is, of course, what most of the above was devoted to. The author is reasonably successful on the first and second points - it is the third that, inevitably, causes debate. I have included as much as I feel is relevent on that point above; however, since it spans the entire book, such excerpts can be just that, excerpts, and not totally representative of Keegan's point, which I will attempt to flesh out.
Keegan's argument that Clausewitz is incorrect stems from the allegation that Clausewitz, who was of course a Prussian military officer, was too tightly bound in his regimental, militaristic 19th-century culture to look beyond it and to see other examples which contradicted his beliefs. Keegan serves as examples the Easter Islanders, a primitive people without any state to speak of which tore itself to bits in a bloody dispute over leadership. War, he said, is practiced to serve culture, yet the Easter Islanders destroyed their own culture in war. He also cites the Mamluks, the slaves of Muslims who did their fighting to avoid violating the creed that Muslims should avoid fighting other Muslims, and the Japanese, one of the most famous warrior societies, as examples where culture perpetuates war as an end to itself. Clauswitz, he says, through his work, created a European warrior society that perpetuated itself, and when finally forced to fight in all-out bloody war, tore itself apart senseless.
Admitedly the book is somewhat vague and digresses a good deal; this is due to its schitzophrenic origins. The point, apparently, is that total war has grown too destructive a force, at least when both sides possess the same weapons and means to destroy each other, and that it must be abolished between nation-states, or at least severly curtailed, to avoid the destruction of both cultures. This is a view, I believe, which is quite common today, and which is worth another debate on, if for no other reason than I wanted people to discuss this book <G>
