Featured Excerpt: A Rage to Conquer

In A Rage to Conquer, award-winning author Michael Walsh brings history to life as he considers a group of courageous commanders and the battles they waged that became crucial to the course of Western history. Read on for the introduction from A Rage to Conquer.

Introduction:
To Fight For

The more ignorant men are, the more convinced are they that their little parish and their little chapel is an apex to which civilization and philosophy have painfully struggled up the pyramid of time from a desert of savagery. Savagery, they think, became barbarism; barbarism became ancient civilization; ancient civilization became Pauline Christianity; Pauline Christianity became Roman Catholicism; Roman Catholicism became the Dark Ages; and the Dark Ages were finally enlightened by the Protestant instincts of the English race. The whole process is summed up as Progress with a capital P.

—George Bernard Shaw, Notes to Caesar and Cleopatra (1899)

War has been an essential part of the human condition as long as there has been a human condition; there is nothing inhuman about it. It is the principal agent of societal change, waged by men on behalf of, and in pursuit of, their gods, women, and the sheer joy of combat, and in so doing to impose their will upon other men through extreme violence. Destructive though it is and must necessarily be, war is a primary engine of both scientific and cultural progress, driving both external technology and the inner exploration of the soul through the arts. Its terrible wrath and beauty compels us to ask ourselves what it means to be human, superhuman, subhuman, inhuman, antihuman. It is essential, elemental, masculine. It is an important facet of every culture, from the highest civilization to the lowliest primitivism. For better or worse, our world is unthinkable without it. Then again, our chimp ancestors could have told us that.

In the long view, no problem is ever fully solved, no border settled, no solution final, no religious faith universally embraced as supreme. Such is the eternally recurrent nature of human contentiousness; in this regard at least, Nietzsche was right. But it is absurd to say, as contemporary political correctness has it, that war, or at least violence, never solves anything; in fact, it provides at least a temporary, and often quite long-lasting, solution to most of the world’s most intractable conflicts. The battlefield is not the place for negotiation. It is the place for extreme, dispositive violence. It is not abnormal; as we shall see, it is merely a mechanism by which policy is conducted with means other than jawboning. Few major conflicts end without a winner, and certainly none of the epochal battles considered herein: great martial, cultural, and civilizational turning points, after which the world was never the same.

Change is, as Heraclitus continues to remind us, the only permanence. Nonetheless, war brings at least a temporary stasis. It rearranges the pieces on the chessboard, offering each second or third generation (because that is usually the distance separating conflicts) a chance to have a throw of the dice, to test itself in the eternal human contest of wits, strength, and will. The Trojan War (a poetic interpretation of something that happened in antiquity) announced the millennia-old conflict of East vs. West—a war we are still fighting today, with the front lines more or less at the Bosphorus, as they were in Homer’s time. Wars are not ended at the bargaining table; all the great confrontations of history have ended violently. It is only when wars temporarily have been halted via “negotiated settlements” that they inevitably continue. “Negotiation” rarely settles anything; rather, it is the face-saving aftereffect of either victory or defeat. If you’re negotiating, you’re losing.

A look at the long list of warlike peoples and bellicose great powers that no longer exist—from the Parthians to the Prussians—is proof enough of the theorem. Peace is not the absence of war but the temporary aftereffect of its conclusion. War may be hell, but it brings peace. Like every great commander before him, the American Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman articulated this principle when he wrote during the hostilities to the Confederate commander John Bell Hood:

You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out. I know I had no hand in making this war, and I know I will make more sacrifices to-day than any of you to secure peace.

Since the end of the Second World War, this is a lesson entirely forgotten by the political leadership of the United States, a defect that is likely to have unhappy consequences for the nation as it approaches its 250th birthday.

A successful war is one that accomplishes its objective. That might be territorial gain, plunder, the definitive elimination of a deadly rival, or simply a matter of physical and cultural survival. One of the first wars in Roman history was fought over women. According to Livy, the early Romans, faced with a dearth of females and thus having no prospect of survival beyond the living generations, fought a war with their Sabine neighbors, a war conceived in treachery that resulted in the abduction of the most desirable and fertile Sabine women but which ensured the survival of the young city. When some years later the Sabine men mounted a military campaign to liberate them, the kidnapped Sabine women, rather than rebelling against their new husbands, interposed themselves between their new masters and the Sabine men who had come to rescue them:

Then the Sabine women, whose wrong had given rise to the war, with loosened hair and torn garments, their woman’s timidity lost in a sense of their misfortune, dared to go amongst the flying missiles, and rushing in from the side, to part the hostile forces and disarm them of their anger, beseeching their fathers on this side, on that their husbands, that fathers-in-law and sons-in-law should not stain themselves with impious bloodshed, nor pollute with parricide the suppliants’ children, grandsons to one party and sons to the other.

“If you regret,” they continued, “the relationship that unites you, if you regret the marriage-tie, turn your anger against us; we are the cause of war, the cause of wounds, and even death to both our husbands and our parents. It will be better for us to perish than to live, lacking either of you, as widows or as orphans.” It was a touching plea, not only to the rank and file, but to their leaders as well. A stillness fell on them, and a sudden hush. Then the leaders came forward to make a truce, and not only did they agree on peace, but they made one people out of the two. They shared the sovereignty, but all authority was transferred to Rome.

The men had made the war; the women—the objects of the conflict, now allied with the stronger of the two parties—had forced a peace, to the Romans’ benefit and at the cost of the Sabines’ independence.

The present volume, a companion to Last Stands (2020), continues that book’s central thesis that war is of necessity and biology a masculine preserve. A world without belligerent men might be a world without war—but there has never been a successful society ruled directly by women. Western attitudes regarding the proper relationship of men and women extend back to, and originate with, the earliest voices of our literature —the Bible, Hesiod, and Homer—and those attitudes are inextricably tied up with warfare and the battlefield: the quintessentially male, unsafe space, whose danger must be embraced rather than be denied, regretted, or ameliorated. Any culture that is forced to rely on women in combat is destined to lose, and lose badly.

It is to be emphasized that this is an interpretative cultural and military history: the principal battles are viewed in the context—sometimes a very long context—in which they occurred. A reader expecting a dry enumeration of unit movements will be disappointed; one open to seeing (mostly) well-known battles in the broader cultural milieu that gave rise to them may find himself enlightened.

One thing the reader will not find is the anachronism that has come to be called “presentism.” In simple terms, this is defined as judging the actions of the past by the standards of the present, a dangerous error on several counts. First, history is a one-way street: we are able to examine the lives and actions of people in the past, but they could not possibly conceive of our existence except in the broadest possible terms. Second, it presupposes that modern—and ever-changing—social and cultural standards are always to be preferred to the manifest benightedness of the past. This is an outgrowth of the cultural Marxist notion of the “arc of history,” which itself derives from the classically Marxist postulation of the “iron laws of history.” In turn, the origin of these “laws” are an outgrowth of (1) the late eighteenth and nineteenth century’s passion for taxonomy and (2) a bastardized Christian notion of a teleological universe, parodied so memorably by Voltaire in the character of Dr. Pangloss in Candide, who believed that we are living in the best of all possible words. Throw in the benign autosuggestion of the French psychologist Émile Coué (1857–1926), who enjoined his patients to say and believe: ous les jours à tous points de vue je vais de mieux en mieux (every day in every way, I am getting better and better), and you have the modern, supercilious view of the march of history.

Third, and most important for our purposes here, it prevents and occludes historical understanding and accuracy in the service of contemporary ideologies of every stripe. Today, for example, we look upon the institution of human slavery with horror, often associating it exclusively with the African slave trade in the New World. And yet the most cursory reading of history—and not just Western history, either— demonstrates that slavery is as old as mankind itself. The ancient Hebrews did it, the Greeks did it, the Romans did it, the Turks did it, and it is still ongoing today in some countries of the world, mostly but not exclusively Islamic. Toppling statues and chipping names off buildings, however, does nothing to rectify what we currently perceive as a moral wrong. All we, the living, can do is not do it. And thus it is with all instances of “presentism.” In order for us to live our lives by our moral precepts, we must allow the people of the past to have lived their lives their way as well.

Accordingly, we shall examine a tangled skein of conflicts from the beginnings of Western history to the present, battles and campaigns each of which at their conclusion left our world a very different place: changed, changed utterly as Yeats says in “Easter, 1916.” Not all victories have happy endings. Each generation must be ready to fight for its freedom—if freedom any longer matters. And it will only matter as long as there are real men willing to fight. Since the Trojan War, the earliest2 war in Western history and the cornerstone of Western literature as well, the men of the West have been studying and practicing the art of war. The phrase itself is culturally significant, for while it may derive from the Chinese military philosopher Sun Tzu’s treatise, 孫子兵法, known to us in translation as The Art of War, the notion that war is an “art” is quintessentially Western. It absolves its participants from the mistranslation of the Mosaic biblical commandment, “thou shalt not kill,” because while faith in any of the Abrahamic religions proscribes murder it does not preclude righteous killing. Indeed, in both Christianity and Islam, it is wholeheartedly endorsed via the apologias of the Augustinian “just war” and the Koran’s advocacy of jihad. The ancient Hebrews were as warlike as anybody else, according to their holy book waging genocidal war on the Canaanites in order to claim the land that, according to their scriptures, was promised them by their god, although there is little or no historical evidence that such a conflict ever happened.

Still, war is foundational to every society, in every epoch. Pacifistic, nonviolent cultures rarely survive first contact with an outside enemy. However much it offends current Western sensibilities, war will never vanish, never be abolished, and never lose its attraction for young and virile men.

With it often comes a definitive conclusion, arriving suddenly, even overnight. Most of the battles contained herein conform to that observation. In 331 B.C. Alexander the Great could hardly have anticipated that he would change the course of Western history during his final confrontation with the “Great King” Darius III at the Battle of Gaugamela. When Caesar accepted the surrender of Vercingetorix at Alesia in 52 B.C., he could not have known he had just fathered one of the principal nation-states of Europe, the “handmaiden” of a Church that had not yet announced itself, but would build itself upon the ashes of Rome. As Constantine watched his rival Maxentius drowning in the Tiber after a brief clash of arms at the Milvian Bridge outside Rome in October of 312, did he have a vision of the triumph of a new, Christian pontifex maximus (once one of Caesar’s titles) sitting not only upon the throne of Empire but upon that of St. Peter and ruling over the largest faith on earth? Unlikely. But they all knew something had happened.

The Germans call these moments in time Wendepunkte, turning points, when the polite but malignant fiction of the “arc of history” suddenly ricochets off some unknown object or force and heads in a completely different direction. Indeed Clio, the Muse of History, is herself a born dramatist, staging at the Catalaunian Plains in 451 one of the great clashes between East and West as the dying gift of Rome, the great mother of the West, expiring in the childbirth of Europe, protecting her progeny with her last breath.

Clio, however, takes no sides and has no stake in the outcome. There are no “iron laws” of history, and man’s attempt to project human emotions onto impersonal events in an effort to foretell the future is always doomed to failure. Civilizations rise and fall, and some in fact never even rise. None lasts. There is a futility to fidelity to god and country, a bitter irony, as every soldier knows. Soon to confront death himself in Flanders’s fields, Wilfrid Owen (1893–1918) articulated the sentiment of a generation—likely, of every generation—in his poem, “Dulce et Decorum est”:

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

But is that really a lie? In the fourth act of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the Danish prince encounters an advance guard from the Norwegian army of Fortinbras, marching through Denmark on their way to battle “the Polack” over a worthless scrap of land. Frozen by inaction, Hamlet admires their willingness to fight and die over nothing: “What is a man if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more,” he soliloquizes.

Witness this army of such mass and charge,
Led by a delicate and tender prince,
Whose spirit with divine ambition puffed
Makes mouths at the invisible event,
Exposing what is mortal and unsure
To all that fortune, death, and danger dare,
Even for an eggshell. Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honor’s at the stake. How stand I, then,
That have a father killed, a mother stained,
Excitements of my reason and my blood,
And let all sleep, while to my shame I see
The imminent death of twenty thousand men
That for a fantasy
and trick of fame
Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot
Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause,
Which is not tomb enough and continent
To hide the slain?

Hamlet thus curses himself for his inaction, his cowardice; the fight might be meaningless, but what does it matter? The fight is everything— even for an eggshell.

And so, for all their horror, wars are fought, and will continue to be fought, as long as men of hot blood are there to fight them. All that is required are men who have studied and internalized the timeless principles of warfare as embodied by their fellow warriors from Achilles to Patton, and understand how to put them to best use. As it happens, these have been best articulated by a German veteran of the Napoleonic Wars whose most famous aperçu has been consistently mistranslated and thus misunderstood, leading to all sorts of subsequent mischief: Carl von Clausewitz. It is to him we now turn to conduct our tour of the great battlefields of Western history, for it was there that we were born.