War From the Ground Up (32 page)

Man Bahadur Ghimire had been shot in 1944 at the battle of Monte Cassino and showed me the scar. He remembered a few place names. Yet his relation of his experience of battle to me was exclusively aural. He re-created all the sounds from the mortar to the machine gun in detail, re-enacting ducking and diving to take cover. This was the common feature of many of the old soldiers I spoke to on that trek, most of whom had in fact fought not in Italy but in Burma. Thus former Rifleman Bom Bahadur Gurung remembered the names of the great battles he had fought in: ‘Kohima, Arakan, Meitktila'. He also described his experience by re-creating the sounds of battle. But above all what animated these accounts was the emotional recollection of battle: the chaos, fear, courage and death of friends. The names of the battles they fought in were only relevant as pegs on which were hung their human experiences of combat.

The worlds we inhabit profoundly shape the way we understand war. The old Gurkhas' narratives were distinctive precisely because they were so heavily situated in the emotional domain. They had little idea of the broader circumstances which created their war, and even of the logic of the battles in which they themselves fought. They could not tell you why their company was attacking the enemy, just that they were ordered forward, and then confronted the noisy chaos of combat. In a sense the old Gurkhas are for us an anomaly, a group who were in the war and fought in it but did not understand it in ‘rational' terms. While that may be the case for many soldiers in battle, rationality can be imposed retrospectively through historical understanding. Yet as they have continued to live in a different world in the Himalayan foothills, even this retrospective rationality has bypassed them.

In
The Face of Battle
(1976) John Keegan argues that writing the history of a battle without the interpretive structure provided by war would be like trying to write the history of a wild party in terms of the impossibility of describing the chaotic.
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This argument identifies how war is simply the definition one imposes on a series of human events. One does not need to use this definition. One can legitimately see chaos in what another would rationally define as a battle. A rational battle narrative can never claim to be definitive. Ahmed Rashid puts this in another way when he describes the conflict in Afghanistan:

‘war is always a mixture of different, conflicting stories, depending on whether you are crouching in a ditch or sipping tea at the Presidential Palace. To have
dinner with Petraeus and then tea with President Karzai is a central part of the story, as is journeying to the edge of the city to the tiny, unlit, unheated flats, to talk to a former senior Taliban official'.
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War, however, is usually understood in exclusively rational terms. In this form of narrative, events are selected and interpreted in terms of how everything relates to a war's rationale. Rationality is a centripetal force, as it seeks to unify the narrative of war. A rational narrative would say that this is what happened in the Second World War and this is why it happened. It acknowledges sub-narratives, but they all fit into the ‘big
picture' according to war's interpretive hierarchy. So a company attack at the battle of Meiktila has its own story, but was part of the wider narrative of the Burma campaign, the War in the Pacific, and the Second World War. Emotional response is a centrifugal force. Emotional narratives of war are fragmentary. There are endless personal definitions of what the war was for an individual. It is a completely different mode of understanding from the rational narrative of war, but is just as legitimate. This applies to civilians as well as combatants. Who is anyone to argue that how a bereaved family understands war is not a legitimate interpretation: that is the war for them.

While there are evidently majority opinions regarding, say, the Second World War, and established historiographical trends, this should not be confused with the idea that there can be a singular definition of what it was. People, both in the singular and the plural sense, will differ in terms of their conception of the experience, be it direct or vicarious. The war ‘was what it was' for the old Gurkhas. To assume that they ‘don't understand' the war they fought in would be mistaken on two levels. First, the essence of war is violence and in that sense it would be perverse to deny their understanding of it. Second, to say that they do not understand the war is illegitimately to claim that ‘the war' was a single, rationally defined event. War is a mosaic of individual experiences as much as the abstract phenomenon. For any individual, one's relationship to war in the abstract, its rationale, is mediated through that emotive experience.

How then are ‘rational' and ‘emotional' interpretations of war reconciled? Rational narratives are typically given preference by those for whom war has a function, from lance corporal to general to political leader: to understand the outcome of the fight they are in, rationality is required; a rational interpretation of events is required as a basis to plan how to influence them in the way one wants. For the historian, a rational interpretation of war can be required to link it to wider historical narratives. Emotional interpretations are not typically seen as functional. Beyond the domain of individual memory, emotional readings of war are typically found in art. This recognises the legitimacy of that mode of understanding without confusing it with functional understanding.

However, there exists an established tradition of strategic thought that recognises that, while war is planned using the rational mode of
understanding, the political and military leader must also pay attention to the emotional mode. In this tradition, the relationship between the rational and emotional is not one of compartmentalisation: the emotional is precisely what legitimises the rational. The two are intrinsically bound together.

Clausewitz stressed that the human, emotional component was intrinsic to war's nature and formed the ‘passionate' component of the trinity of war. Passion in the trinity was primarily associated with the people, one of the three components of the trinity's reflection in the state at war. The human passions unleashed in 1789 were for Clausewitz what caused the transformation of war during his lifetime: the emotional connection of the French citizen soldier with the state mobilised the entire resources of the nation to war.
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Moreover, human passion also interacted with the other two parts of the trinity of war: policy (as represented by the government) and ‘the play of probability and chance' (as represented by the army). Thus four elements make up the ‘climate' of war: ‘danger, exertion, uncertainty and chance'.
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War is as much a test of emotional resistance as a rational execution of policy. The ‘climate' of war produced ‘friction': ‘everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult'.
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In the light of this, the plan in the abstract, in war often thought of in terms of war on a map, had to be grounded in human reality, a concept which Clausewitz extended to strategic theory in general.

Clausewitz repeatedly stressed that the commander of the army must be attuned to moral factors as much as the plan in the abstract: ‘military activity is never directed against material force alone; it is always aimed simultaneously at the moral forces which give it life, and the two cannot be separated'. The commander perceived the moral factors through his ‘inner eye', his intuitive understanding of his men and the enemy, which combines the emotional and the rational: ‘when all is said and done, it is really the commander's
coup d'oeil
, his ability to see things simply, to identify the whole business of war completely with himself, that is the essence of good generalship'.
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By stressing that all the abstract, rational, theory of war had to be synthesised by a human being, the commander, who has to put it in its human context, Clausewitz presents a strong model for how the emotional and the rational are inseparable; by his account, they come together in instinct, the ‘X factor' of a good commander.

Clausewitz's attention to the emotional component of war is illustrated in many passages, for example where he is at pains to describe the feeling of a defeated army: ‘abstract concepts of this or that minor loss will never match the reality of a major defeat'.
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Clausewitz was also obsessed with the personage of Napoleon himself, who symbolised for him the unity of reason and intuition.

A perusal of Napoleon's maxims of war draws attention to why Clausewitz might have considered Napoleon's style as a battlefield commander in terms of a unity of reason and intuition. In some maxims Napoleon is cold and rational: ‘The first qualification in a general-in-chief is a cool head—that is, a head which receives just impressions, and estimates things and objects at their real value. He must not allow himself to be elated by good news, or depressed by bad'.
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Yet a remarkable number of the maxims show that Napoleon was acutely aware of the psychology of the private solider, and the need for a commander to be attuned to this emotional element: ‘The soldier is best when he bivouacs, because he sleeps with his feet to the fire, which speedily dries the ground on which he lies. A few planks, or a little straw, shelter him from the wind'.
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Napoleon has a realistic view of emotional intuition, in that continuous sensitivity to the issue is required of the commander, not sensationalism: ‘It is not set speeches at the moment of battle that render soldiers brave. The veteran scarcely listens to them, and the recruit forgets them at the first discharge. If discourses and harangues are useful, it is during the campaign; to do away with unfavourable impressions, to correct false reports, to keep alive a proper spirit in the camp, and to furnish materials and amusement for the bivouac. All printed orders of the day should keep in view these objects';
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alternatively: ‘Every means should be taken to attach the soldier to his colours. This is best accomplished by showing consideration and respect to the old soldier'.
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Napoleon stresses that it is an emotional quality that he desires foremost in his soldiers: ‘The first qualification of a soldier is fortitude under fatigue and privation. Courage is only the second; hardship, poverty, and want are the best school for the soldier'.
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Perhaps this maxim summarises Napoleon's view: ‘A good general, a well-organized system, good instructions, and severe discipline, aided by effective establishments, will always make good troops, independently of the cause for which they fight. At the same time, a love of country, a spirit of enthusiasm, a sense
of national honour, and fanaticism will operate upon young soldiers with advantage'.
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Clausewitz viewed as vital the general's ability to make decisions which were ‘promoted by strong emotions and by flashes of almost automatic intuition rather than being the product of a lengthy chain of reasoning … after all, waging war is not merely an act of reason, nor is reasoning its foremost activity'.
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To describe this quality Clausewitz used the word
geist
, which has no equivalent in English; the fact that it is usually translated as ‘spirit' or ‘intellect' reflects both the more emotional and more rational possibilities inherent in this concept.
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In summary, throughout
On War
we find Clausewitz stressing the unity of the rational and the emotional in war. Strategy had to unify both factors: ‘we must allow for natural inertia, for all the friction of its [war's] parts, for all the inconsistency, imprecision, and timidity of man'.
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The necessity to unify the rational and the emotional has been recognised by military thought concerned with tactical effectiveness. The work of French officer Colonel Ardant du Picq, published posthumously in 1880, stressed the importance of the individual soldier's psychology to combat effectiveness.
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He argued that fear was the natural response to battle, and that courage was a finite resource that would eventually be depleted. The key to overcome this was
esprit de corps
. The very language of
esprit
, ‘spirit', recognises emotive motivation.

The idea of the
corps
, ‘body', links the individual to his unit in a common emotive bond. This strand of thought developed in the French Army of the early twentieth century into the concept of
morale
, which is now employed far more widely. What has endured most in Du Picq's work is the training concept that tactics overcome fear through constant rehearsal and small unit cohesion. This is the idea that soldiers in combat fight primarily for each other rather than any wider cause. Moreover, tactical drills provide a default rational interpretation to understand the event. Thus getting shot at becomes ‘a contact' in which there is a set procedure for dealing with that situation which ideally culminates in the defeat of the enemy. Professor Anthony King has described the outcome of such drills, or set procedures, as ‘the repetition of an established choreography'.
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