If the study of military history teaches anything worth knowing, its principal lesson is that modern war never means what the people who are fighting it thought that it was going to mean. This is not merely because it involves infinite physical destruction, but because it turns loose social forces that get completely out of hand. It brings results that were neither foreseen nor desired. It means profound change.
For war disrupts the ground on which people were standing when they took up arms. It erases the status quo—which one side or the other, if not both, believes itself to be fighting to preserve. The very process of fighting creates the certainty that nothing is ever going to be the same again.
This bears with especial weight on the military men themselves, for they are the men whose routine decisions bring about these changes. Their profession compels them to strive for immediate, tangible results, and the profound intangibles that will grow out of the things they do when they try to gain those results are likely to be invisible to them. By their training, they tend to be the most conservative of living mortals; in wartime, without in the least realizing it, they are apt to become the world’s most ruthless radicals.
All of this is brought to mind by a reading of Cyril Falls’s meaty book, The Great War. Mr. Falls, a British military critic, undertakes to examine the generalship of the leading soldiers in the First World War, and his book can be taken as a classic case history of the way in which professional soldiers of high competence, striving earnestly to do one thing, managed in the end to do something everlastingly different.
More than any other war that readily comes to mind, the First World War was under the firm control of the soldiers themselves. From the moment the ultimatums were exchanged in August of 1914, the civilian powers all across Europe turned everything over to the generals. To a very large extent, the generals acted as they saw fit, with a minimum of interference by emperor, king, prime minister, or parliament. Here was a soldiers’ fight. How did the soldiers do?
The Great War, 1914–1918, by Cyril Falls. G. P. Putnam’s Sons. 447 pp. $5.95.
Mr. Falls, taking the narrowest of purely military viewpoints, considers that a good many of them did very well indeed. The two great captains of 1918, he believes, were the French Foch and the British Haig. They had military skill, great qualities of leadership, indomitable will power: “Both were men of unconquerable souls.” Ranking closely behind them he puts the German Ludendorff, although he confesses that Ludendorff was “without their virtues of character.” Joffre receives better marks than he is often given, and the Austrian Conrad von Hötzendorf similarly gets a high rating. The Russian Brusilov comes in for praise, as does Prussia’s Falkenhayn; and not many British writers have been as warm to the American Pershing as is Mr. Falls.
In substantial detail, Mr. Falls studies the battles and the campaigns in which these and other generals played their parts. He is dealing, of course, with a scene that is a little too big for any single book. The First World War was a stupendous, sprawling convulsion, and to describe it in fewer than five hundred pages calls for more compression than the traffic ought to be asked to bear. Nevertheless, within limits, this book does what it tries to do; it offers a solid, thoughtful, informed analysis of the war in strictly professional terms.
And the only trouble is that those terms are altogether too narrow. As technicians, the great generals of the First World War may indeed have been very able men, serving to the best of their considerable abilities the countries that had trained them, and the breakthroughs, the stirring defenses, the encirclements and so on, which they achieved at various times, will no doubt be studied in the textbooks for years to come. But what finally came of all of this?
What came of it was something the governments that employed these great soldiers would have run from, screaming, if they could have seen it in advance. For what these governments really wanted out of the First World War was the continued existence of a society that had room for a Russian empire, an Austro-Hungarian empire, a German empire, a British empire, a France trailing the memories of the Little Corporal, and so on: a stable society, in which rival empires might indeed gain this or that advantage, but which preserved the old order and permitted no room for any substantial change. And what they got was the end of everything they had lived by.
These empires were, as Mr. Falls insists, ably served by their military servants. But look at what happened. The Austro-Hungarian empire vanished in thin smoke, literally obliterated, its bits and pieces surviving quite separately—more happily, perhaps, than they were before, but not seeking and getting that happiness in any way which a servant of the empire could have countenanced. The Russian empire-well, no comment that could be made here would do justice to the upheaval that came about. The German empire broke, passed into the hideous tetanic spasm that brought about Hitler and a second war, and exists today in divided fragments which disturb the peace of all mankind by their separate existence. Italy got Mussolini, humiliation, and an existence as a vacation spot. France fell into the position of a second-class power, alive today by sufferance and the aid of many non-Frenchmen. And the British empire, which Sir Douglas Haig fought so hard to maintain? Sir Douglas assuredly would not recognize it, and would not want to recognize it, as it is today.
In plain language, these professional soldiers, trained to the hilt and given their heads, managed to bring on wholesale revolution, overturn, and permanent change more rapidly and decisively than anything that could have been accomplished by what they believed they were fighting against. They won battles and campaigns and lost everything they were fighting for. In his own way, each man was trying to preserve what we can now call the pre-1914 way of life, and precisely because they fought so long and so hard they made the pre-1914 way of life one with the dodo and the great auk.
Great technicians these men may have been; great captains they assuredly were not. They could see nothing but victory, and they were willing to buy victory at the most inconceivable price. They made unendurably excessive demands on their people; they tried to buy military triumph at prices that left all of Europe bankrupt. Knowing all that could be known about the military arts, they knew nothing whatever about the human societies that had to pay for the exercise of those arts. They gave mankind a Somme and a Verdun, a Masurian Lakes, a Passchendaele, and a Caporetto—and looking back at this distance we can only say that something essential had been left out of their training. Never were learned men so ignorant.
It appears that once or twice the generals themselves sensed this. Falkenhayn apparently wanted the war to end in “a good peace,” and he dimly felt, as Mr. Falls remarks, that this would involve “a correct calculation of the extent of the victory needed to obtain it.” But this was beyond most of them. Thinking only of victory, they could not think of what victory might cost. So the war went on and on, destroying lives, the accumulated riches of the past, habits of thought, social organizations—and in the end the soldiers, who imagined that they were defending the established order, fought mankind’s way into a situation where a new order had to be built from scratch.
Today’s world contains many frightening things; among them, a superweapon whose mere existence gives all of us a bad case of nerves. But it may be that a much more frightening thing than the weapon itself is the narrow professional who looks only at the weapon and who has never been taught to think about what may happen after the weapon has been used.
Excess of Caution
By BRUCE CATTON
Yet this is where the shoe really pinches. The professional soldier, probably of necessity, spends his life learning how to beat an enemy to his knees, and he does his best to learn this by studying the ways in which the last enemies were beaten. Then the world moves out from under him, and his body of knowledge becomes a hindrance rather than a help—and, once again, history turns a corner.
A French military historian, Colonel A. Goutard, examines this problem in The Battle of France, 1940, and the book makes a good companion piece to the study written by Mr. Falls. Colonel Goutard says bluntly that the soldiers of France—a nation whose army had a military tradition as good as any in Europe —had learned from World War I nothing except a few outmoded lessons in tactics, and that France lost its part of the Second World War as a direct result.
The French, Colonel Goutard suggests, missed the boat several times: specifically, right at first, by consenting to the inactive phase of the “phoney war,” from the moment war was declared in the fall of 1939 to the outbreak of the German offensive in the following May. Germany was vulnerable then, he insists, and a sharp French offensive might have settled things in short order. He quotes German generals as confessing, much later, that a French drive in the fall of 1939 could have crossed the Rhine and occupied the Ruhr; after which, as the Reich’s General Westphal admitted, “the whole face of Europe would have been changed.”
The Battle of France, 1940, by Colonel A. Goutard, with a foreword by Captain B. H. Liddell Hart. Ives Washburn, Inc. 280 pp. $4.
But this was the last thing French military thought could contemplate. The French Army was put on the defensive, not because it was unprepared, not because the government had not given it proper equipment and training, but because the wrong lessons had been learned from the earlier experience. The overriding principle was to sit tight, to play for time, to wait until this, that, or the other circumstance would make a real show of force advisable.
Unfortunately, the Germans refused to play it that way. Colonel Goutard is blunt about it: “Our defeat in May 1940 was achieved by tactical and strategic surprise against our High Command. The tactical surprise was because our ideas were inherited from 1918, as against the German lightning war.” The Germans had learned something—one lesson (its sharp edge presently to be blunted) being that a modern war, whatever else it does, had better be short if the people who have made it hope to get what they want. They hit hard and suddenly, they tossed the supposed tactical teachings of 1918 out the window, and they knocked France out of the war. And this, Colonel Goutard insists, was not because France was overmatched. Once the German offensive began, there were plenty of opportunities to restore the balance. The will to take advantage of the opportunities was lacking. The French generals “did not fight”; and although inviting chances for counterattack were offered, “in actual fact no one really wanted to counterattack.”
The French defeat, of course, was a complicated business. In part it came out of political mistakes made during Hitler’s rise to power, out of general confusion among the soldiers regarding what the government really wanted, out of tactical blunders in the field, out of the decision to surrender rather than to carry on the war from North Africa. But in the main Colonel Goutard’s verdict holds: “Fundamentally, … our defeat was due more to our conservatism of outlook and our unrealistic and preconceived ideas than to any military weakness inherent in our nation.”
The soldiers, in other words, to whom much had been given and of whom much was expected, had learned their lessons wrong. In the olden days this might not have mattered so much. In the modern world, where incalculable things hang on the outcome of a war, it mattered beyond reckoning.
Consider what these French generals were carrying on their shoulders in the fall of 1939 and the first six months of 1940. Just about everything that has happened in the world since then would have happened very differently if they had learned to understand something more about war than the mere technique of waging it. (That they learned that technique wrong was an additional error which compounded the effect of the basic error.) Understanding nothing but the business of fighting, they played the military game in a vacuum. Strategy, as Colonel Goutard truly says, parted company with common sense, and the result was unrelieved disaster.
Generations ago the professional soldier needed to know nothing but the intricacies of his own profession. Wars were limited, once; the soldier used the means that had been given him, did the best he could with them, and in ordinary circumstances his country could live with the result. It is not like that any longer—has not been like it, indeed, for a century and more; and simply because nations today fight wars with the utmost intensity of which they are capable, the soldier’s responsibility once war begins has a weight of terrifying proportions. All-out war is revolutionary war, even though no one means it that way. When we begin a war we invite the future to change.
The Great Incalculable
By BRUCE CATTON
Perhaps it is the intensity of the fight that makes the difference. Everything that a nation has is put into the struggle. New powers are developed, new forces are let loose, new capacities are discovered and exploited, and these have a permanent effect. Beyond either victory or defeat they go on working; it becomes impossible for the warring nation to go back to its prewar status simply because the effort of fighting the war has destroyed that status forever.
The classic example of this is, of course, that hardy perennial of the modern book lists, the American Civil War, and Allan Nevins examines the process in an excellent new book, The War for the Union. He subtitles his book “The Improvised War,” and he is chiefly concerned here with how the improvisation took place and what it finally led to.
If ever two peoples were unprepared for war, the peoples of the North and the South were unprepared in 1861. They had to make the war up as they went along, and in the end almost nothing that happened came because anybody had really planned for it. The first year of the war is a long record of mistakes. Problems of finance and equipment had to be solved catchas-catch-can; armies had to be whistled into existence according to the obsolete military tradition of the time, which meant that in matters of discipline and training they were almost entirely out from under central control; generals had to be created out of any material that came to hand, and strategic planning (where it existed at all) was a singular blend of political considerations and dimly understood military principles, carried out by officers who in many cases tried their best to be virtually independent of the national government.
The War for the Union: The Improvised War, 1861–1862, by Allan Nevins. Charles Scribner’s Sons. 436 pp. $7.50.
The record of the first year, accordingly, is apparently indecisive. In the East, the Union government suffered the disgraceful setback of Bull Run; in the West, it had the equally humiliating setback of Wilson’s Creek. Only in West Virginia, in Kentucky, and at isolated spots along the Atlantic seacoast did the national government record any definite advances, and these seemed to be peripheral matters that might easily have been canceled out by more extensive reverses later on.
Yet it is clear that an immense job was done. More than 500,000 men were brought under arms, a new fleet was created, the industrial mechanism to support an all-out war effort was slowly brought into being, and the amorphous enthusiasm for “restoring the Union” was somehow hardened, by slow degrees, into the grim determination that would finally insist on driving ahead to all-out victory at any cost. And amid all of this, the shape that the war would finally take was determined.
For what was taking place was in fact a genuine revolutionary effort. Never before had the American people made such a tremendous effort of organization and preparation; and, as Mr. Nevins remarks, “No government, after such an effort, could ever sink back to the old level of small enterprises pettily pursued. Behind the drilling troops and scurrying ships new industries were taking form, new factories were belching smoke, banks, stores, and warehouses were being enlarged to seize new opportunities, and the wheels of transport were turning with new speed.” The very attempt that was being made to .fight the war on the required scale was making a permanent change in the country. Nothing would ever be the same again, because a whole new order was coming into existence.
Mr. Nevins sums up the situation succinctly:
Had some miracle of compromise ended the war in the summer of 1861, the country would have emerged with but minor changes in non-political fields. Bull Run had made it certain that a considerable socio-economic revolution would occur. If the mighty military effort planned for 1862 succeeded, it would be merely considerable. But if it failed, and the conflict continued, the country would face a major revolution, altering many of the organic functions of society.
The effort did fail, of course, and the major revolution did take place. And it is a melancholy and instructive fact that the responsible leaders on both sides wanted nothing of the kind to take place. The America of 1860 was a happy land, a loose-jointed and informal sort of place in which, barring the thorny slavery-States’ rights dispute, there were no great problems and no great pressures. North and South alike, men believed that they were fighting to restore that happy situation. Fighting to restore it, they ended it forever.
Modern war can make its long-range effects felt in several ways. As Mr. Falls has indicated in his book on the First World War, the sheer destructiveness of the fighting can destroy the things men believe they are trying to preserve. Yet the generals of France in 1940, instinctively drawing away from the fearful destructiveness of the earlier conflict, ruined their country by an excess of cautious conservatism. And in our own case we can see how the mere task of harnessing all of a country’s energies for war can set in motion forces that take men in directions they had no intention of traveling.
Modern war, apparently, is the great incalculable. It can be controlled only to the most limited degree. Won or lost, it means profound change; change, usually, that never entered into the calculations of the men who started it.
