Fellow H-Warriors,

Following is the first of four panelists' comments on John Lynn's _Battle_.
Each panelist's comments will be posted individually to avoid possible server
problems with long messages, and to facilitate list member responses on
Wednesday and Thursday.

So that the discussion can procede smoothly, please be sure that your subject
heading clearly identifies your message as a contribution to the colloquium
so that the list editor, Jill Russell, can see that it is posted in a timely
fashion.

You will find Dr. Grimsley's first comments below my signature.

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



The OSU history department offers a mid-level elective course on the History
of War from neolithic times to the present, a course designed to introduce
students to the basic themes involved in the academic study of military
history.  This spring the course is being taught my colleague, Mike Pavelec.
In Mike’s edition of the course, three books are required: _ World History of
Warfare_, by Christon Archer, John Ferris, Holger Herwig and Timothy Travers;
_Carnage and Culture:  Landmark Battles in the Rise to Western Power_, by
Victor Davis Hanson; and _Battle:  A History of Combat and Culture_, by John
Lynn.

_Carnage and Culture_ is the only one of these books that I too assigned when
I first taught the course last winter.  _World History of Warfare_ became
available too late to order for the course, and _Battle_ was not published
until June 2003.  However, my students did get the benefit of _Battle’s_
author:  late in the quarter John Lynn guest lectured to my students in
person  while I went elsewhere to lecture by videoconference to some of his.
I wish I could have been there to hear him, because afterward I received a
spate of emails—“Awesome!” “Profesor Lynn rocked!”and so on—which left me in
no doubt that John had hit a home run.

Prominent among the reasons that students liked John’s lecture was his
measured but firm critique of _Carnage and Culture_, whose thesis about
continuity in the western way of war contained “a hole big enough to drive
the Middle Ages through.”  The students had felt somewhat tyrannized all
quarter by _Carnage and Culture_, for although privately I shared most of
John’s reservations about the book, I relied on it extensively in class and
insisted that my students gain a firm understanding of its basic argument
concerning the relationship between western values and western military
success.

In the short run, _Carnage and Culture_ received a great deal of more or less
uncritical adulation, thanks to the intellect and literary skill of its
author, the elegance of its thesis, and—to be perfectly frank—the fact that
most military historians are more correctly described as historians of
specific wars.  Get them away from the war in which they specialize and their
expertise drops off rapidly.  Consequently, I think many of us overrated
_Carnage and Culture_ because we lacked the comparative knowledge base on
which to evaluate its claims.  In the long run, _Carnage and Culture_ is
likely to have lasting impact--but as one of those great, bad books whose
eloquence and intelligence force critics not just to disagree, but to think
more carefully about their field as they do so.

_Battle_ is the first book to point us in that direction.  It is much more
than a rebuttal of the Hanson thesis, and John conceived, researched, and
wrote most of it before _Carnage and Culture_ appeared.  Nevertheless it is,
particularly in its early chapters, a strong and to me persuasive critique of
the excesses in the interpretation set forth by _Carnage and Culture_.  That
makes the two books a rarity:  works of military history that create a
dialogue on broad, longitudinal and comparative issues which the rest of us
can join and on which we can build.  Aside from the debate on the military
revolution in early modern Europe, such dialogues are few and far between.
Mike Pavelec wanted to expose students to this dialogue in his History of War
course, hence the inclusion of both works.  (One could even have gone in a
different direction and paired the cultural determinism of _Carnage and
Culture_ with the geographical determinism of Jared Diamond’s _Guns, Germs,
and Steel_.)

Having already seen the initial comments by two of my co-panelists, Wayne Lee
and Stephen Badsey, I find little reason to write a third extended critique.
I wouldn’t have time to do so even if I wished.  Still, I hope that in this
colloquium we will consider not just Battle in its own right, important as
that is, but also how we as a field might extend and refine the dialogue
that  Victor Davis Hanson and John Lynn have begun.

Mark Grimsley, The Ohio State University

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