STUDIES ON THE NAPOLEONIC WARS 009
The Negation of Real History
2. A Defense of Military History (1)
The Negation of Real History
“Every battle of the warrior”, wrote the prophet Isaiah, “is with confused noise and garments rolled in blood.” Between his age and our own there have been many worthy people, including no small number of historians, who never arrived at any clearer notion of the meaning of military operations than that they involve many loud and discordant sounds, abhorrent to the civilian’s ear, and are attended by a lamentable loss of human life. Thus felt many a cloistered chronicler of the Middle Ages, and thus too many a writer of more modern times, who strove to justify his personal dislike for, or ignorance of, military things by depreciating their importance and significance in world-history.
One may dislike war just as one dislikes disease; but to decry the necessity for studying it, and estimating its meaning and effect, is no less absurd than it would be to minimize the need for medical investigation because one disliked cancer or tuberculosis. After all, war has been, throughout the ages, one of the most prominent phenomena in man’s dealing with man. One may hold that it is fundamentally immoral, but that does not excuse one from the necessity of endeavouring to discover its characteristics. Even the most convinced pacifist cannot deny its existence, and he is but deluding himself if he tries to maintain that it is a negligible quantity in the annals of mankind.
Yet there was a generation of historians who were blind enough to hold this view. To show their mentality I may quote a paragraph drawn from the History of the English People by J. R. Green, a typical product of the old Liberal optimism, which still today has its thousands of readers because of its attractive literary style. He wrote:
It is the reproach of historians that they have too often turned history into a mere record of the butchery of men by their fellow-men. But war plays a small part in the real story of European nations, and in that of England its part is smaller than in any. The only war that has profoundly affected English society and English government is the Hundred Years War with France (1336–1451), and of that war the results were simply evil.
This is an astonishing paragraph, and the perversity of the mental attitude implied in it seems to grow more gratuitous as we ponder on each of its sentences. Did Green, who was after all an historian, conceive in truth that the campaign of Hastings did not profoundly affect English society and English government? Did he regard Plassey and Quebec as negligible happenings in the history of the development of the British Empire? Still more, perhaps, might he wonder at the implied judgement that the campaigns of the War of American Independence, which forced Britain to give up her old theory of colonial administration, had no effect on the future government and growth of her empire. We cannot now in fairness ask, for the historian is long since dead, whether he would have persisted that the miserable “Hundred Years War” was to have more permanent and marked effects on the nation than the war of 1914–18. Would that cataclysm, one wonders, have upset his comfortable theory of humanitarianism and pacifism? Perhaps it would: it gave a severe shaking to the mentality of many an old Liberal, who, reared in the optimism of mid-Victorian thought, had spoken of war as an antiquated bugbear, unworthy of the serious study of civilized men. Hypnotized by the XIXth-century conception of “Progress”, as the explanation and end of all human activity, and fortified by the happy invention of the term “evolution”, a whole generation tried to ignore the obvious facts of history. They decided that war was wicked, and therefore it was useless to interest oneself in its details.
One may trace several separate strands of prejudice in the mentality of those who decried military history. One was mere reaction against what they called the “drum and trumpet” history of their predecessors. The Democrat who has gone to the opposite extreme of unwisdom, and has determined that, as Green put it, “history is the history of peoples, as opposed to the personal adventures of kings and statesmen”, is prone to decry the influence of individuals on the long tale of the centuries. If “the people” is to be the protagonist, the historian gets infected with the old “equalitarian” dislike for figures that seem too great to fit into the frame of everyday national life. He will try to whittle down the outstanding personality into a mere typical development of the tendencies of his age and his race—whose greatness shall not offend the susceptibilities of smaller men, and sin against the great doctrine of equality. If the story ends by making the hero a mere incarnation of our race or our Zeitgeist, it is all the more flattering to ourselves. And an allusion to evolutionary necessities of time and place may often disguise the real abnormality of the mighty individual.
Against vague theories of inevitable world-movements and regular processes, no fact protested more strongly than the prominence of war in the accepted history of the world. Therefore the attempt was made to decry its importance in the annals of mankind, and to explain that it was normally a mere tiresome, disturbing element in human progress, which settled nothing. This is pacifist and humanitarian prejudice falsifying the real record of the ages; it is simply a negation of real history.
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