WARFARE

The wars of the Nineteenth-Century were fought along outward lines from the social and economic centres of European Civilisation. The grand battles of Grand Armies on the plains of Italy or Bohemia took centre stage, but these wars were decided at the periphery, at Borodino or Waterloo, or in the state rooms of ministers and diplomats. There were also other battlefields and these were not so glorious, they were a rich exploitation of the semi-feudal regimes of Africa, Asia, and, at an earlier time, South America. In A Connecticut Yankee in the Court of King Arthur Mark Twain imports high-technology warfare back to a European Civilisation which had spent a millenium staving off anihilation from Asia. His purpose was to describe his own Dark Age, which is an adumbration in miniature of our own.

In a more realistic vein Henry Adams portrayed the military adventures of the feudal Normans, the military senators of Europe. Outside of Byzantium, theirs was the most advanced military technology in Europe, and they also possessed the boundless zest which the Byzantines lacked.

This panoramic overview points to a triarchial relationship; war, technology, history. The disparate strands of this relationship are crystalized in Trotsky's famous aphorism, "War is the locomotive of history." Firstly, war advanced the rate of technological innovation, as well as increasing the sheer mass of production. One of the primary techno/military innovations of the Nineteenth-Century was a more sophisticated use of communications: hence the locomotive. Clerk Maxwell's equations produced a background in physics for the production of the wireless and the steam powered ironclad. Our own century can be characterised by the work of Einstein and Oppenheimer. However, not only does science provide a basis for military/technological innovation, it also endows it with a language with which to speak itself. The most emminent military theorist of the Nineteenth-Century, Von Clausewitz, made use of the philosophical and scientific language of Immanuel Kant and Isaac Newton to discuss the deployment of armies;

In the art of war, as in mechanics, time is the grand element between weight and force...the essence of war is conflict, and the great battle is the conflict of the main Armies, it is always to be regarded as the main centre of gravity of the war. According to our idea of a People's war it should be a kind of nebulous vapory essence, never condensed into a solid body; otherwise the enemy sends an adequate force against this core and crushes it.1

The next vertice of our triarchy is the meeting place, the interface, of war and history. The Social Darwinists felt that war would afford a purgation, a cleansing of civilisation through the destruction of social impurity. Blood and Iron would clear the way for a Thousand Year Utopia. The early Marxists took quite a different stance:

In their view (ie Marx and Engels) revolution was not purely or even primarily a military phenomenon, the avoidance of military blunders might be useful to the survival of a revolution once begun, but courage and training alone could not create a revolution. 2

Engels said that,

Military science was like mathematics and geography in its freedom from political coloration. 3

Not until the October revolution would there be the question of the formation of a revolutionary army. So for Marx and Engels military considerations were not at a premium. Trotsky saw the intimate connection between the failure of economics, the catastrophe of war, and the possibilities for revolution. He was the first Soviet military commisar, notable for his use of the locomotive as a kind of forward lying flying column. Trotsky's locomotive is at the forefront of technology's civilisation building:

The power of the railway system had enormously increased since 1860. Already the coal output of 160,000,000 tons closely approached the 180,000,000 of the British Empire, and one held one's breath at the nearness of what one had never expected to see, the crossing of courses, and the lead of American energies. 4

The twin tracks of 'progress' were leading to the development of the Bomb and the technological enchancement gained from the experiments in rocket technology in Germany during World War Two.

Technologies develop in histories. This may be a Darwinian account of history:

Black Berthold is a purely legendary figure like Robin Hood. He was invented solely for the purpose of providing a German Origin for gunpowder and cannon, and the Freiburg monument with its date of 1353 for the discovery rests on no historical foundation.5

The origin of gunpowder in alchemy suggests a mental conflation of war with the mystical, for these were magical weapons:

If anything were needed to make the origins of war plausible it is the fact that war, even when it is disguised by seemingly hard-headed economic demands, uniformly turns into a religious performance; nothing less than a wholesale ritual sacrifice. 6

Mark Twain's hero Hank Morgan uses his own technological magic against the natural magic of Merlin. Morgan's trainee "magician" uses the language of the new magic:

…and it was handsome to see him chalk off matematical nightmares that would stump the angels themselves, and do it like nothing too - all about eclipses, and comets, and solstices, and constellations and mean times, and sidereal time, and dinner time, and bed time. 7

To Henry Adams the chief technological innovation of his day, the dynamo is a conundrum, a mystical disunity:

No more relation could he discover between the steam and the electric current than between the cross and the cathedral. 8

The sheer scale of military technological production had, by the Nineteenth-Century, come to overshadow all other centuries put together. This was the age of the Singer Sewing machine which uniformed the armies of the North during the Civil War, of the growth of supportive technological infrastructures. However, of ancient warfare we have no clear picture, for figures were constantly distorted by the victor's chroniciers. In the Nineteenth-Century there was the advent of accurate statistical methodologies; men could be measured accurately enough to facilitate the rise of mass armies, who could now be fed, clothed and housed. Napoleon's citizen Army was a fully democratized and integrated unit. There were no levies and no elite.

It was not just that technology afforded the upward explosion of man's destructive potentialities; it also allowed a condensation, a miniturisation. Take. for instance the power and horror of the Gatling gun, with the aid of such technology Hank Morgan is able to massacre thirty thousand armoured knights with the help of only fifty four boys. The fact is that the armoured knight actually met this kind of treatment and, as we can see from Don Quixote, became an anachronism. The power of technology is always a relative one, and never follows an even process of development. All the nations who participated in the First World War brought cavalry detachments with them, and they were all disbanded in the first few weeks of the war. The armoured knight met his end at Mons, and not at Agincourt, for it is a symbol, albeit a dead one, of the hegemony of feudalism. The force of a symbol lasts long after any putative ideological significance has disappeared. Nothing that exists is an anachronism, just more or less ridiculous.

The ratio which connects these scales is an uncertain one:

An explosion proper is combustion, ie. a rapid oxidisation, the oxygen being drawn from the surrounding atmosphere. In other words, there is no distinction between the explosion of a mass of gunpowder and the rusting of an iron nail except in regard to the speed of oxidisation. 9

The explosion is an accelerated and symbolic form of the chemical changes which underlie it. The dunamo symbolises the invisible current which flows through it. The technology which underwrites civilisation is concretized in symbolic, often deadly forms, what Lewis Mumford callls 'negative creativity'. A clear instance of this is our own nuclear tomb. We may never really understand these forms, for they exist in a mystical penumbra, disguised by the force and disclarity of esoteric jargon which cannot be simplified. We can, though, understand something of the psychological impact of the chariot, the rifle, the atomic bomb. However, there is no easy historical linkage to be made, for one age cannot be said to be completely analogous or similar to another. Lewis Mumford says that:

It was as a military machine that the whole pattern of labour organisations earlier described, in squads, in companies and larger units was transmitted from one culture to another without substantial alternation, except in the perfection of its discipline and its engines of assault. 10

What Mumford fails to see is that as the 'engines of assault' change, so does the nature of war and society. The gun makes warfare democratic, armour becomes wasteful and useless display. In feudal societies the handgun was derided by the aristrocracy, and given into the hands of burgers and freemen. As Herman Melville says:

The inventions of our time have at last brought about a change in sea warfare corresponding to the revolution in all warfare affected by the original introduction from China into Europe of gunpowder. The first European firearm, a clumsy contrivance,was, as is well known, scouted by no few knights as a base implement good enough peradventure for weavers too craven to stand up crossing steel with steel in frank fight. 11

These 'weavers' cheerfully destroyed both knights and their retainers and imagined a world as yet uncreated. Hank Morgan desires to establish a society on the lines of the French Republic, but the Arthurian world cannot stand very much of his reality:

We were in a trap you see - a trap of our own making. If we stayed where we were, our dead would kill us; if we moved out of our defences, we should no longer be invincible. We had conquered; in turn we were conquered. 12

Mark Twain was describing a process which actually occured. Technological forms evolved, or were observed to evolve. But the fact that a form could be manufactured did not mean that there was any real imperative to bring it into reality. The Byzantines, for instance, invented a fire which could burn on water. They called it 'Greek fire' or naptha. The same substance was deployed by the Americans as Napalm in Vietnam, yet it had disappeared from battlefields for nine centuries. The possibilities for its manufacture were always present, but it had no utility. Forms vanish which may still have usages, obsolete forms continue and flourish.

Representations of warfare have existed since earliest times. The walls of the palaces of Ninevah and Babylon were covered with the documentation of warfare, of symbols of warfare and military technology. From these images we can determine the styles and modes of technology utilised. We can also see something of the structures of societies, of the way in which caste functions as an indice of military worth. Literary as well as pictorial artists depicted warfare. In his Life of Alexander Arrian claimed first place in the Greek community of letters, for having found and depicted a subject worthy of his study. Homer sang of wars as well as a woman. In our own age we only have to cite Tolstoy's War and Peace to see that the preoccupation continues. Not only is war one of the major social activities, it is also the symbolic activity par excellence.

In the Nineteenth-Century it was newspaper print and photography which encapsulated the activities of armies, not stone, tapestries, or papyrus. War became a spectacle. Henry Adams tried to gain access to the Alps to view the Franco-Austrian battlefields. All battlefields had their coterie of avid spectators. Mass publishing and photography meant that everyone could enjoy the show. American Civil War photographers would arrange the bodies of the dead in memorable poses for their syndicated columns. In a shocking satire of this kind of voyeurism Mark Twain says:

Sir Launcelot smote down whoever came in the way of his blind fury, and he killed these without noticing who they were. Here is an instantaneous photograph one of our boys got of the battle for sale on every newstand. There - the figures nearest the queen are Sir Launcelot with his sword up, and Sir Gareth gasping his latest breath. You can catch the agony in the queen's face through the curling smoke. It's a rattling battle picture.13

In our own day we need only think of the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald, or of the kind of footage shot in Vietnam. In the states the Dime novel depicted merry carnage, mayhem for fun.

Obviously warfare is the great male adventure. Except in the October Revolution (the Death's Head women's battalion defended the Winter Palace against the Bolsheviks) and in more mythical times, women have rarely been deployed as soldiers. In all wars huge numbers of camp followers, the wives or mistresses of soldiers, followed in the rear of armies. Domestic armies of seamstresses clothed the soldiers, and, in this century, women left the home to take over the munition factories where male labour was required for the mass armies at the front. Women, then, though largely absent from the battlefield make up an auxiliary force which makes war possible. They also appear on the battlefield in imagined symbolic forms. For instance, in the First World War the Germans dubbed their largest calibre howitzer 'Big Bertha'. There is a direct link between the size of the weapon and pregnancy, fecundity, not with the mythology of the phallus. In an amazing piece of military technological innovation, which sounds like the basis for an Edgar Allen Poe short story:

The Confederates too fielded a few balloons but gave up after their best remembered 'gas bag' - 'the Silk Dress Balloon', so named because it was made from strips of dress donated by patriotic Southern women - was captured in 1863. General James Longstreet, in a rare moment of romanticism, bemoaned its loss as 'the meanest trick of the war'."14

During the Second World War there was such a demand for silk stockings by the military that women found them almost unobtainable. The serious point of all this is that there is a tension between warfare as a purely masculine activity, and the thought that women may be present in symbolic psychological formations. The symbiosis of women and the machine, whether it be a positive or negative one, points to a kind of male hysteria, an hysteria which defies the absolute of the female's body and which conflates it with the utopia of the machine, the ahistorical and eternal:

Through their syndicated columns they (Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons) reached 75,000,000 readers and exerted an influence difficult to imagine today in a more liberated society which no longer considers that a married star has been seen out with a young chorus girl as news on a par with the explosion of the first atom bomb.15

The Virgin and the Dynamo, the Chorus Girl and the bomb.

Henry Adams called himself a "pilgrim of power". The magnitude and grandeur of his civilisation was a numerical one, which describes the sheer massed accumulation of power;

5,8000,000 rifles and carbines
102,000 machine guns,
28,000 trench mortars,
53,000 field and heavy guns
I cannot tell how many projectiles, fuses and mines. 16

This amounts to a numerical fetishism. One basis of the numerical is mysticism, and indeed these numbers are numerical, quasi-sexual. They are not just an indice of power; they speak a language of their own.

We live today in an arms economy which was in an embryonic state one hundred years ago when Mark Twain and Henry Adams were writing. Perhaps the Marxists are correct; the arms economy, war itself, is necessary for the survival of the economic system. Our technologies have become systems of inertia, we have passed the 'take-off point of self-sustained growth' and are levelling off into nothingness, the placid, herbivorous growth of inertia.

In 1916 D.H.Lawrence read Plutarch's The Fall and Rise of Athens. He saw it as a dreadful prophecy of the demise of his own civilisation in the horrors of the Somme and Verdun. At the same moment Ludwig Wittgenstein was in eastern Europe fighting for the Austrian army. Lenin was in Zurich biding his time. The world had changed without the philosophers, and it had done so through sheer accumulation of inertia, through the tiredness of renewed exploitation, the paranoia of ambition, through access to every back water, every feudal estate on the globe. There was nowhere left to go but back into the centre. The Ptolomaic map of the world had vast wastes of uncertainty, ours has none.


Endnotes


1. Clausewitz, Von, On War, p270

2. Berger, Martin, Engels, Armies and Revolution, p41

3. Berger, Martin, Engels, Armies and Revolution, p51

4. Adams, Henry, The Education of Henry Adams, p330

5. Hogg, O.J.F., Clubs to Cannon, p214

6. Mumford, Lewis, The City in History, p425

7. Twain, Mark, A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court, p231

8. Adams, Henry, The Education of Henry Adams, p381

9. Hogg, O.J.F., Clubs to Cannon, p214

10. Mumford, Lewis, The Myth of the Machine, p216

11. Melville, Herman, Billy Budd, Sailor, p154

12. Twain, Mark, A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court, p406

13. Twain, Mark, A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court, p382

14. Johnson and McLaughlin, Battles of the American Civil War, p28

15. Anger, Kenneth, Hollywood Babylon, p217

16. Eliot, T.S., The Triumphal March, Collected Poems, p139


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