War by Margaret Macmillan

Author:Margaret Macmillan [Macmillan, Margaret]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

In societies such as the Roman, the prevailing culture had already partly prepared young men to become soldiers. In other times and places, however, the hold of civilian society over recruits has had to be firmly severed, symbolically and literally, before they can be molded into good soldiers. Taking off civilian clothes and putting on uniforms, standardized haircuts and living in barracks all mark the passage from one world to another. Old loyalties, to family, friends or communities, must be superseded by newer ones to the regiment, the ship or the squadron. Standards, the bronze or silver eagles the Roman legions carried, for example, flags, stories of past triumphs or defeats are part of a new shared identity. When the Emperor Augustus recovered two Roman eagles which had been lost to the Parthians, he built a temple to house them and struck a coin in their honor. In the sixteenth century the fearsome German mercenary companies, the Landsknechte, greeted new members with an elaborate, quasi-religious ceremony. The recruits passed under an arch made from halberds and pikes for their enrollment, which included the inscribing of their names on a register and their acceptance of their first pay. They then listened to a reading of the fierce discipline code and took an oath to accept it. To keep their memories fresh, gallows, drawn or actual, marked off their territory. And the gallows would be used.

Military discipline has always depended in large part upon fear of punishment, from being confined to barracks to execution. From the ancient Greeks to the Iroquois, the military have used the gauntlet, with the victim running between his fellows as they strike at him. Prussian officers beat their men with the flats of their swords, while the Spanish used the ramrods from their muskets. For centuries the British army and navy used the cat-o’-nine-tails, which could lay a man’s back open. The future admiral Jacky Fisher fainted as a thirteen-year-old cadet when he saw his first flogging. While the sorts of crimes soldiers can be accused of have changed—if blasphemy were still one most Western barracks would be largely silent—some remain remarkably consistent across time and space. Failure to obey orders, losing one’s weapon and desertion are all a threat to order and unity and that is particularly dangerous in battle. “A soldier,” said Frederick the Great, “must fear his officer more than the enemy.” In a very different time, a very different man, the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, said much the same thing: “A soldier must be faced with the choice between a probable death if he advances and certain death if he retreats.” Like many others before and since, Trotsky’s Red Army used summary executions on the battlefield, as did the Soviet armies in the Second World War.

In 1941 William McNeill, a young American who had been drafted, along with millions of others, encountered another, equally ancient way that the military make individuals into soldiers. On a dry and dusty Texas plain he had to submit to endless drilling as an “illiterate non-com” shouted orders.

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