Taking advantage of the nature of this symposium, I have adopted a
more casual approach and prose than the more formal book review.

        Let’s get a couple issues out of the way quickly.  First, I come to
praise John Lynn’s _Battle_, not to bury it.  In the nature of things much of
the rest of my comments will sound critical (that is after all what we do!),
but fundamentally I am deeply appreciative of this work.  It is insightful,
wide-ranging, compelling, and it pushes the debate in the right direction.
Among other things, I suspect that it is the seed of many a dissertation to
come.   A number of my comments are in fact “additive” or even suggested by
Lynn’s analysis; they are not (necessarily) intended to point up
shortcomings.  Second, anticipating the possible criticism of others, let me
suggest that one of the reasons I enjoy military history as a profession is
its generally welcoming attitude to this kind of synthetic work.  _Battle_ is
not a monograph.  It leans heavily on the work of others, but brings them
together in new and interesting ways.  Such synthesis has tremendous value.
The point of doing detailed studies is to help reshape broader
generalizations and interpretations, and _Battle_ puts those detailed works
to excellent use.

        Lynn confronts two historiographical pendulums that he feels need
pushing back.  The first is the older, even long dominant, emphasis on the
determinative role of technology in military history, especially in the story
of western dominance.  The best technology wins out, and the nature of the
technology shapes the battlefield.  There have always been subtleties to this
line of argument, but Lynn strongly feels that determinative technology needs
to take another beating.  In what is perhaps a signature phrase, Lynn argues
that “Armies made choices within menus of possibilities consistent with
necessity and technology” (p. 124).  For Lynn those choices were shaped
by “culture.”  More specifically, Lynn defines culture as the complex of
values, expectations, and preconceptions about war, which he sums up in the
word “Discourse.”  While discourse may seem an odd word choice, it is fair
enough:  we’d *like* to know what a society’s values were, but all we have
are their texts, and thus their “discourse.”  (Lynn departs from his reliance
on texts in Chapter 8, inferring conception from action).

        The other historiographical pendulum in play here is that created by
Victor Davis Hanson, and furthered by John Keegan [1].  I assume that this
forum is broadly familiar with Hanson’s characterization of a “western way of
war”; its popularity and influence at the moment are extraordinary.  Lynn
appreciates the cultural approach taken by Hanson and Keegan--that ideas,
values, and social structures matter in shaping military behavior--but he is
vehemently opposed to the universalism and continuity asserted in their
argument.  Lynn doesn’t reject all of their conclusions, only that there has
been a constant “western” style opposed to a constant “oriental” or eastern
style, and that the western way has been successful nearly universally.  For
Lynn culture is highly idiosyncratic--not “peculiar,” but more in the
original Greek sense of the word, a blend specific unto itself.  People are
creatures of their context, and thus so is their style of war.  To make his
point, Lynn provides eight chapters of idiosyncratic war making.  In the
remainder of my comments I will try to briefly summarize the thesis of each
of the first six chapters, with case-specific comments or critiques, and then
at the end I will make some more general comments about Lynn’s overall
model.  I will leave commentary for the two 20th-century chapters for other
commentators.

        In Chapter 1 Lynn essentially accepts Hanson’s argument that the
ritualized style of Greek phalanx combat was a deliberate creation designed
to fight short decisive battles, allowing their citizen-soldiers to return
home.  In Lynn’s terms, for the Greeks Discourse virtually dictated Practice
(rather than merely shaping it, as in later cases).  Hanson’s argument has
always been the most compelling for the Greeks; it *is* his specialty.  But
even for the Greeks there are problems.  I will avoid the technicalities of
evidence here, but I would like to point out a circularity in the argument.
Lynn accepts and repeats the idea that the shift to phalanx warfare begat
wider political rights.  The later Athenian emphasis on the fleet begat even
wider democracy.  But then how did they get to the decisive phalanx battle in
the first place?  Part of Hanson’s argument is that widespread citizen
participation in the army meant that battles had to be fought (to defend
their farms) and that they had to be decisive (so the war would be contained
in time).  Part of the evidence for this argument are the peculiarities of
the phalanx battle itself.  But without the phalanx battle (and all its
peculiarities) one doesn’t get widespread political power, and without
widespread political power, one doesn’t get the ability of the citizen
soldiers to dictate the style of the phalanx battle.  Which came first?  Who
wanted short decisive battle in the first place, and thereby empowered the
citizens by making them soldiers, who then wanted short decisive battle?  Is
there no sense here that the hoplite phalanx might in part have been a
calculation of military effectiveness?  I don’t know the answer to this
question, and the sources won’t help us much more than they already have.  It
is surely true (as Lynn and Hanson point out), that the topography of Greece
would seem to make the choice of phalanx warfare an odd one from an
effectiveness point of view.  I might suggest that we could push the culture
argument even deeper: the phalanx did not create political participation,
rather a profound sense of collective solidarity inherent in the *culture*,
not the political structure, of the polis, created the phalanx.

        For the rest of this chapter Lynn properly questions the continuity
of Hanson’s thesis past the Romans, although accepting the idea that the
Romans did inherit the “western way of war,” adding to it the invention of
total war.  Here of course is a major opportunity to refute Hanson that Lynn
has missed.  The true inventors of total war were hardly the Romans, but the
Assyrians.  For those who might question the issue of continuity from the
Assyrians, I would respond: “Exactly! and the same applies to Greece.”  But
the Assyrians sure don’t fit the “oriental” model of avoiding decisive
clashes through indirect strategies either.

        In Chapter 2 Lynn embarks on a much more speculative exploration of
early South Asian and Chinese warfare.  Here he is confined mainly to
examining discourse, having very little solid evidence on practice for those
periods and places.  His main point is to deconstruct the unitary vision of
an eastern way of war.  The Indian and Chinese discourse and method differed
profoundly, and the Chinese in particular developed an ability to fight large
scale battles with disciplined close-order infantry not unlike the supposed
western way of war.  Furthermore, Lynn asserts that “early” societies
progressed through “stages” of military development.  Early Greek, Indian,
and Chinese conventions were very similar because they were in the same
stage.  The problem comes, Lynn says, when one compares the early Greek to
later Indian (Mauryan) or Chinese (Warring States era) discourse and
practices.  These are, as Lynn says, apples and oranges.  The better
comparison is Vegetius, writing during an equivalent “stage” in western
military development.  There is a teleological quality to this “stage”
business that makes me uncomfortable at times, especially when one is
comparing hundreds, if not thousands, of years of development and still
referring to it as “early,” but it is a worthy point to note that Vegetius’
works are not unlike Chinese ideas in the advocacy of indirect strategies.
And in support of Lynn’s take on Vegetius and his later interpreters (which
he deals with again in Chapter 4) I offer the comments of Robert Monro, a
Scottish mercenary commander serving in the Thirty Years War, who wrote,
praising Gustavus Adolphus, “we see his Majesty with clemency doth follow the
example of the ancient Romans, who, of all victories, thought that victory
best, which least was stained with bloud, having given quarters and service
to three thousand Emperiall Souldiers, without drawing one drop of blood."[2]

        With Chapter 3 Lynn really begins to come into his own in the
development of his model. The basic argument is that the Practice/Reality of
war in the late middle ages so diverged from the idealized chivalric
Discourse, that an alternative, “perfected” reality was developed in the
tournament.  Meanwhile the church’s appalled reaction to the reality of war
led them to offer a substitute reality in the Crusades, which could be made
to fit the discourse more closely.  Lynn is careful to show that even here
the discourse could shape reality, despite its frequent divergence, but the
primary causative agent in this chapter is psychological disjuncture.  “The
way we fight is SO different than the way we talk about it, and fighting is
SO important to our conception of ourselves, that we must create an
alternative universe in which we can actually act out our values (rather than
actually change the way we fight).”

        In chapter 4 Lynn turns to enlightenment warfare, or as he styles it:
linear war.  Here he sees cultural values very strongly patterning the nature
of war, in an era where practice usually has been explained by reference to
developments in gunpowder technology.  Lynn focuses on  early modern
aesthetics, the theoretical literature of the “Military Enlightenment” which
advocated a scientific approach to war rooted in universal principles, the
development of international codes or laws of war regulating behavior, and
finally, aristocratic honor.  This is Lynn’s home turf, and there are a lot
of subtleties here; I will wrestle with only one of them.  Lynn argues that
the military enlightenment avoided battle because of its bloody indecision.
Enlightenment rationalism sought to deemphasize luck, and thus their cultural
vision preferred the engineered predictability of siege.  I would suggest,
however, that a better interpretation is that there existed a kind of mental
tug-of-war, between believing in and *wanting* decisive battle, but fearing
that achieving one was profoundly difficult to do.  Battle was *believed* to
be decisive, and for that reason was usually avoided.  Risktakers like
Frederick and Marlborough tried it, and their inability to achieve decision
has convinced us in hindsight that battles were in fact not decisive.
Furthermore, Lynn hints that one preference for siege was to avoid the heavy
losses of expensively trained troops in battle.  Here I would like to see a
comparison of how many troops were lost in a siege; not just in a storm or in
the approaches (although that could be bad enough), but by dying of disease
in camp.

        Chapter 5 is a fascinating return to India.  Lynn examines how the
European colonial powers overwhelmed native rulers, not with technology
(which Lynn argues was a tide floating all boats in eighteenth-century
India), or with a western way of war, but with a unique combination of
western techniques with Indian values of duty, loyalty and honor made
manifest in the Sepoy troops, and resting on the stability and longevity of
the European bureaucracies to whom they remained loyal.  This is a very
convincing argument, but the one aspect that needs elaboration is this last
phrase.  When Lynn confronts the issue of why native rulers using western
style troops continued to repeatedly lose to European administrators using
primarily Sepoys (thus both sides using native men trained in western
techniques), the difference between them, he suggests, was bureaucratic
stability.  Indian rulers suffered through constant internal political flux
and thus never built up the dedicated loyalty Lynn argues for the Sepoys.
That is the crux of the question, but it gets only a short treatment here.

        Chapter 6 addresses the shift from a Military Enlightenment to
Military Romanticism in the years after the French Revolution.  Lynn suggests
that the French Revolution provided a kind of blank slate opportunity to
impose a developing idea of the motivated citizen soldier (modeled on
antiquity) onto reality.  Here he again fronts the “menu of choices” aspect
of cultural influence (or as I have preferred to phrase it in the past:
the “horizon of possibles”).  Revolution and military necessity mean change,
but what kind of change?  It would be interesting to compare here the choices
made by George Washington and the American colonies in a similar situation.
They too held a mental template of the effective citizen soldier as a
replacement for the presumed ancien regime automaton, but their enactment of
it followed a very different course (also, I would argue, for cultural
reasons).  The new French citizen army proved to be tactically “freer” from
relying on individual initiative, capable of huge expansion, and also more
willing to absorb the heretofore fearful casualties brought by battle.   To
this patriotic mix Napoleon brought professionalism and consequent success.
Here Lynn dodges, I think, the question of what role patriotism continued to
play (or not) in French military success under the empire.  But Lynn’s larger
concern is how perceptions and interpretations of Napoleon’s success were
colored by the ongoing Romantic intellectual currents.  He finds Clausewitz
both an exemplar of Romanticism (although not a unique one), and rising above
it.  In Clausewitz’s theory, heavily influenced by Romantic thinking, will,
psychology and passion reassert their position within war.  The supposed
timeless principles of war suggested by enlightenment thinkers are in fact
time-bound (I would be interested to hear Lynn’s explanation of why
the “principles of war” nevertheless continue to hold such currency in the
modern military).  I think  this is a much better reading of Clausewitz than
Keegan’s dry, state-bound, emotionless version, but it raised an interesting
question in my mind.  Consider how discourse (using Lynn’s terminology) sets
the level of “decision” in war.  In the Enlightenment, where all sides’
discourse focused on tactics, a tactical loss had decisive implications.
Tactical failure meant overall failure.  In the maturing Romantic era (post-
Napoleon), the discourse a la Clausewitz shifted the center of gravity to a
higher level: “will.”  Under this kind of thinking the conflict must become
more all-consuming and all-destructive, because to destroy the will requires
a great deal more destruction than merely to destroy an army.  This is the
era, and the thinking, that produces attacks on the will like that of
Sherman, Grant, and Douhet.

        I have now gone on for much too long, and I have a great deal less to
say about chapters 7 and 8 (as interesting as they are), so let me conclude
with a few comments about Lynn’s model.  Lynn’s model conceives of war as a
dialectic between thinking about war and the actual fighting of war.  This is
an important insight, and keeping it in mind can help clarify historical
thought, but I would like to make a couple of suggestions.  First, it would
be helpful to remember that it is a *punctuated* or episodic dialectic.
Unlike other potentially dialectical processes (economics, class relations,
race relations), war is not continuous.  In one sense this makes his model
even more functional:  first we examine pre-war discourse, then wartime
reality, then post-war discourse and voila, we can see causation at work.
The model also demands, however, that cultural analysis be very attentive to
the details of “Reality.”  In Lynn’s formulation Reality is a little bit like
a black box:  discourse enters in and comes out stunned and shaking its
head.  Lynn is too careful a scholar to allow it to be a truly inexplicable
black box–he shows us the details of a medieval _chevauchee_ so we can see
how it differed from discourse.  But consider as an example the debate
between Gerald Linderman and James McPherson over the nature (or question) of
discourse/value shift in the minds of Civil War soldiers during the war.  For
Linderman the reality of war exerted a profound shift in soldiers’ values,
separating them from the home front where values remained more static[3].
For McPherson, the soldiers remained true to their discourse throughout the
war(4).  To choose between these arguments requires a very careful study of
the ongoing process of discourse *during* the reality of conflict. All of
which is to suggest that Lynn is right about the dialectic process of
discourse and reality, but also to suggest that historical investigation of
how it works requires great care, and enormous archival attention.  This is
especially true, as Lynn points out, because there is frequently more than
one discourse on each side, separated by class, gender, and eventually,
profession.  Each discourse would then have its own influence on practice.

        Furthermore, it would seem that one must ask what gives
values/discourse(s) staying power in the face of the seemingly
overriding “military necessity”?  It has often been argued that calculations
of necessity lead to the discarding of pre-war conceptions and values--this
is particularly true when speaking of restraints on violence within war.
Lynn repeatedly argues, however, that values retain their ability to shape
the practice of war even within the cauldron of war.  I obviously think he is
right, but we should investigate each context to determine why those values
retain their salience--surely it is more than cultural inertia?  In my own
work I have suggested that the need for legitimacy provides a practical
impulse to the retention of values of restraint in war.  Waging war according
to expectations (i.e., according to the discourse) helps keep the uncommitted
on your side, or at least keeps them on the fence.[5]  As Lynn himself
advises in the war on terror: “the task is to defeat the terrorists with as
little harm as possible to those who are sympathetic to their cause and to
the usually far larger neutral population” (p. 327).

        Finally, in the end technology may get too short a shrift here.
Again, I think Lynn is pushing the debate in the right direction, and he may
be overstating his case to make a point, but one still gets the nagging
feeling that western dominance in technology at certain key points made the
crucial difference.  William McNeill’s formulation in _Pursuit of Power_
seems at least partially right: western capitalist development accelerated
technological development beyond the capacity of many non-western societies.
[6]  There seems little doubt of its significance, for example,  in many of
the continental conquests of the late 19th century.

        But I had come here to praise, not bury.  _Battle_ stands as a
challenge to the rest of us to work more carefully in building links from
thought to tool to action.  That has always been the challenge, and Lynn has
helped provide a useful new model for the task.

Wayne E. Lee
University of Louisville

[1] Victor Davis Hanson, _The Western Way of War_ (New York:  Alfred A.
Knopf, 1989); Victor Davis Hanson, _Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in
the Rise of Western Power_ (New York:  Doubleday, 2001); John Keegan, _A
History of Warfare_ (New York:  Alfred A. Knopf, 1993).
[2] William S. Brockington, ed., _Monro, His Expedition With the Worthy Scots
Regiment Called Mac-Keys_ (Westport, Conn.:  Praeger, 1999), p. 202.
[3] Gerald F. Linderman, _Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the
American Civil War_ (New York:  The Free Press, 1987).
[4] James McPherson, _For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil
War_ (New York:  Oxford University Press, 1997).
[5] Wayne E. Lee, _Crowds and Soldiers in Revolutionary North Carolina: The
Culture of Violence in Riot and War_ (Gainesville: University Press of
Florida, 2001).
[6]  William H. McNeill, _The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force and
Society Since A.D. 1000_ (Chicago:  The University of Chicago Press, 1982).


--
Regards,
Janet G. Valentine, PhD
H-War Book Review Editor

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