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August 23, 2006, 6:41 a.m.
The Soul of Battle…
…the soul of America.
By Joseph Morrison Skelly
Who are these men and women? Who, exactly, are the 130,000 Americans fighting today in Iraq, the more than 20,000 standing tall on the front lines in Afghanistan, and the hundreds of thousands of other soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen who have served courageously in both theaters of war since the autumn of 2001? What motivates these warriors to travel thousands of miles to foreign theaters of war? What sustains them in the heat of the desert and in the heat of battle?
Answers to these questions can be found in history, especially as illuminated by the classical scholar and NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson in his book The Soul of Battle. This volume, published in 1999, two years before September 11, is a tour de force that merits close reading by students of the past and the present alike. Essentially a study of democracies at war, it highlights one of their enduring, but often overlooked, martial qualities. The “great military strength of such open and free societies,” Hanson reminds us, is “the dramatic manner in which we can mobilize people in a tremendous retaliatory” campaign, often “led by men whom we otherwise do not appreciate — an asset greater even than the excellence of our technology or the sheer superabundance of our military equipment.” On short notice democracies “can produce the most murderous of armies from the most unlikely of men, and do so in the pursuit of something spiritual rather than the mere material.”
What fires these fights? It is, according to Hanson, “the soul of battle.” This is a “rare thing indeed that arises only when free men march unabashedly toward the heartland of the enemy in hopes of saving the doomed, when their vast armies are aimed at salvation and liberation, not conquest and enslavement. Only then does battle take on a spiritual dimension, one that defines a culture, teaches it what civic militarism is and how it is properly used.”
Hanson calls these democratic drives into the core of enemy territory “epic marches of freedom.” He vividly recounts three examples in his book: the first was led by Epaminondas of Thebes, whose army of small farmers sacked ancient Sparta in 370 B.C. and freed the oppressed helots; the second was William Tecumseh Sherman’s fiery march from Atlanta to the sea in 1864, which snapped the spine of the Confederacy, liberated an entire American underclass, and actually ensured the reelection of Abraham Lincoln; and, finally, General George Patton’s break-out from Normandy in the late summer of 1944 and his headlong rush across the Rhine and into the gut of Nazi Germany. “Theban hoplites, Union troops, and American GIs,” Hanson asserts, “were ideological armies foremost, composed of citizen-soldiers who burst into their enemies’ heartland because they believed it was a just and very necessary thing to do. The commanders who led them encouraged that ethical zeal, made them believe there was a real moral difference between Theban democracy and Spartan helotage, between a free Union and a slave-owning South, and between a democratic Europe and a nightmarish Nazi continent.”
What is more, these men waged war in an ethical manner, for they all “saved more lives than they took, [and] helped to free an enslaved people” — a theme that Hanson illustrates with copious examples. This includes, contrary to much received wisdom, William Sherman, whose men destroyed the war-making machinery of the slave-holding South, but not its people, while fighting for a cause greater than themselves. “There is,” Sherman claimed, “a soul to an army as well as to the individual man, and no general can accomplish the full work of his army unless he commands the soul of his men, as well as their bodies and legs.” In short, Hanson boldly asserts, “When men like Epaminondas, Sherman and Patton go to war to stop evil and save lives, there is a soul to their battle that lives on well after they are gone.”
ECHOES OF HISTORY
True, democracies at war exhibit frustrating weaknesses. Hanson delineates many of them. Democratic states “can change military policy precipitously and without reason,” which reflects the mercurial nature of the electorate. They “sometimes curtail needed military action out of the terror of human and material losses,” which recalls the final stages of Operation Desert Storm in 1991. “In times of peace and prosperity they relax their guard with often disastrous subsequent consequences,” which is a recurring pattern throughout history. On this last point, writing in 1999, Hanson sounded a warning about the paralyzing effects of democratic indifference. “The great danger of the present age is that democracy may never again marshal the will to march against and ultimately destroy evil… But an even greater peril still in present-day democratic society is that we may simply have forgotten that there finally must be a choice between good and evil, that the real immorality is not the use of great force to inflict great punishment, but, as the Greeks remind us, the failure to exercise moral authority at all.”
Hanson’s observations captured the zeitgeist of the 1990s. September 11, 2001, however, shattered the comfortable consensus of that age of leisure. It demonstrated that the operating assumptions of a large swath of the nation’s intelligentsia and media elite were untenable. Fortunately, while those attitudes were pervasive, they had not permeated all levels of society. Our nation’s response since 9/11 demonstrates that American democracy has retained much of its steely resiliency. The writings of scholars like Victor Davis Hanson, in fact, have done much to reinforce democratic resolve by reminding us of earlier democratic traditions of warfare. Hanson’s analysis in The Soul of Battle is especially relevant: it provides a historical framework for grasping the bold, military response of America and its allies to the attacks of 9/11. Today, the echoes of history resound in Afghanistan and in Iraq, where democratic armies, led by the United States, have once again marched into the heartlands of their enemies. The hundreds of thousands of troops who have served on these battlefields are not mere statistics. Instead, they can proudly take their place alongside the Theban, Yankee, and American soldiers of earlier eras. They are inspired by the same democratic approach to war, and know that they defending our country at home by liberating others abroad.
Acute observers of military history may balk at this analogy. Indeed, there are differences between the campaigns of Epaminondas, Sherman, and Patton and the current wars in Southwest Asia and the Middle East. The marches of the three generals ended in decisive, clear-cut victories, with their armies melting away within months of the end of hostilities, while today Coalition forces are still battling stubborn terrorist insurgencies long after their initial, successful entries into Kabul and Baghdad. Likewise, the swift pace of mobile warfare contrasts sharply with the more static battlespace of an insurgency. No military leader has yet captured the American imagination in the way that Sherman and Patton did. And, the U.S. military in 2006 is composed primarily of professionals, not the citizen-soldiers of the 1860s and 1940s.
Still, the parallels are real. The American assault into Afghanistan and the Theban thrust into Laconia both traversed inhospitable, merciless terrain far from home, while each invading army was assisted by indigenous forces. In the autumn of 2001 the Northern Alliance joined U.S. special forces in routing the Taliban. In 370 B.C., as Victor Davis Hanson records, on the “winding and difficult march southward from Thebes to [Sparta], a number of allied northern Greeks were eager to follow Epaminondas, perhaps an additional 9,000 to 10,000 Euboeans, Locrians, Phocians, Thessalians, and Acarnanians, and an untold number of camp followers and hangers-on who had their own grudges against the Spartans.” In 2003 the Coalition’s lightening strike into Iraq and the U.S. military’s swift capture of Baghdad, notwithstanding the difficulties of the post-liberation phase, constitute one of the classic maneuver campaigns of recent history, the rapidity of which recalls Patton’s race across occupied France. So, too, does the code name for the American advance to the Iraqi capital, “Cobra II,” an echo of “Cobra,” the code name for Patton’s sprint in August, 1944. Alas, today many take for granted what two American democratic armies, operating thousands of miles from our own shores, have achieved in Afghanistan and Iraq. The limitations of the modern imagination obscure the challenges they have overcome and the enormity of their accomplishments.
There are other similarities. Yes, large numbers of Coalition troops remain in Afghanistan and Iraq, but both the Civil War and World War II were followed by the stationing of troops in the South and in Germany for extended periods of time. Yes, the majority of service men and women in the American military today are full-time professionals, yet they are joined by the twenty-first century equivalents of the citizen-soldiers who marched with Epaminondas, Sherman and Patton: the thousands of Army Reservists and National Guardsmen who have been deployed for extended tours of duty overseas. Most important, both the active duty and reserve personnel of today’s military embody the same democratic ethos that animated the soldiers who marched into Sparta, Savannah and the Rhineland.
WHAT ARE ARMIES FOR?
This timeless democratic spirit is reflected in the nature of our presence in Afghanistan and Iraq, a feature that distinguishes our troops from the legions of infamous marauding generals of the past. In The Soul of Battle Professor Hanson records how “Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, Napoleon and other great marshals used their tactical and strategic genius to alter history through the brutality of their armies. None led democratic soldiers. They freed no slaves nor liberated the oppressed. They were all aggressors…They and their armies were without a moral sense and purpose, and thus their battles, tactically brilliant though they were, were soulless.” On the other hand, Epaminondas, Sherman and Patton “were as great in battle and far greater in war; the killing they did and the magnificent armies they led were to save not take lives, to free not enslave, and to liberate, not annex ground. We military historians, if we claim a morality in our dark craft, must always ask not merely what armies do, but rather what they are for.”
What, then, are American armies for? They fight ferociously in war until victory is achieved, but once the shooting has stopped they have consistently promoted renewal rather than conquest and subjugation, even for their former enemies. After World War II the United States utilized the Marshall Plan to revitalize Western Europe, pouring over $13 billion into post-war reconstruction. Contrast this generous policy with the Soviet Union’s imposition of tyranny in Eastern Europe over even its supposed allies, a stark reminder of which is this year’s fiftieth anniversary of its brutal suppression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956. Today in Afghanistan and Iraq the American military and its Coalition partners are funding economic revival, advocating constitutional self-government and regenerating the sinews of civil society. These processes are not flawless, nor without their difficulties, but the progress in each country is substantial. Contrast the Coalition’s democratic vision for the Middle East with the dark, dictatorial designs of Al Qaeda terrorists, Taliban holdouts and Baathist insurgents. There is a profound moral difference between these two worldviews. One Iraqi general understands the positive implications of America’s rehabilitation of war-torn societies for his own country: this past winter Brigadier General Jallel Khalef Souail, commander of the Iraqi Army’s First Brigade, was quoted in a newspaper as saying, “We need a long-term commitment from the United States in Iraq. Look at Japan, look at Germany, look at Italy. They all have American bases and they’re successful societies. We can be the same.”
THE SOUL OF BATTLE, THE SOUL OF AMERICA
Victor Davis Hanson closes his book with a warning against historical amnesia: “Armies of liberation are the precious dividends of democracy, and we abandon the memory of Epaminondas, Sherman, and Patton and what their hoplites, Westerners and GIs did only at our great peril.” Why is this so? Because the custom of democracies “mustering quickly huge armies, to be led by eccentric fighters, on a moral trek into the heart of slavery, is not the stuff of romance and it is not a fantasy from our past, but rather a rare and hallowed tradition as old as the beginning of the West itself. In the West epic marches for freedom across time and space have liberated us from our own worst enemies.” In 2001 and 2003, American soldiers and their democratic allies freed us from our terrorist enemies and the regimes that sponsored them. In the difficult years since then they have proved that democracies can sustain military campaigns over time in addition to mounting swift expeditionary marches. Things are not perfect in Afghanistan or Iraq. Much hard work remains. But a great deal has been accomplished. Measured against any historical or contemporary standard, the progress has been impressive. It has been achieved by selfless soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen. One must ask: Who are these men and women? They are the soul of battle, the soul of a great democracy, the soul of America.
— Joseph Morrison Skelly, a college history professor in New York City, is a soldier in the United States Army Reserve and a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
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