Soldiers and Ghosts: A Review

When you have a hobby, you tend to get cocky about it.  You think about how smart or skilled you are to be pursuing something because you enjoy it and not because you're in school or because it's your job.  If you're not careful, you eventually begin to think that you can't possibly learn anything new about your subject.

I purchased Soldiers and Ghosts with an Amazon Gift Card last year, and I finally got around to reading it, thinking that it would be fun to read a fresh account of Cannae or read Hannibal's life story.  Again.  What I wasn't expecting was a psycho-cultural analysis of the motives behind the tactics of ancient warfare, starting with the early Greeks.  And I certainly wasn't expecting the first battle I read about to have taken place during the Vietnam War.

Spoiler Alert: the Ancient Romans weren't even involved in the Vietnam War for some reason.

It is a common assumption that warfare has always been about practicality and pragmatism.  The Greeks used the phalanx with great success, and we assume that they chose it primarily for its effectiveness.  However, we often forget that the Ancient people lived in a very different world than ours; a world of augury and divination, of mysticism and heavenly conflicts, of invisible forces that haunted their every step.  They did not look at the Olympic Pantheon as a rustic mythological belief system; it was what they believed.  It stands to reason that their motivations went way beyond simple pragmatic strategy.

My first clue to the Romans' lack of pragmatism is that they all seem to be wearing their baseball caps backward.

But J. E. Lendon puts it best when he explains it this way: "These [people of Papua New Guinea] are peoples who fight wars in ways we call ritualized, meaning they allow their beliefs to dictate a mode of fighting less ruthlessly efficient than we could devise for them.  There are other ways, too, in which beliefs draw modern armies away from purely efficient methods of killing: the reluctance, since World War I, of many armies to employ poison gas and the practice of preserving the lives of prisoners.  Such restraints are powerfully reinforced by the scorpion sting of the Golden Rule: soldiers do not want to be gassed themselves, and they want their own surrenders to be accepted.  But such restraints are grounded also in shared belief: the belief that war has rules, however fragile, and that there are appropriate ways of killing and methods of killing too horrible to be used." (pp.3-4, emphasis mine)

Other highlights and insights include:

• "Sometimes the glory of the victor depends not only upon his observed performance, but also on the excellence of the defeated; this is a second, quite separate, mechanism for gaining glory in battle." (p. 26)
• "But the ethos that lay underneath this cooperation [of the phalanx] was only superficially cooperative, for those who fought in the seemingly unheroic phalanx conceived of what they were doing in Homeric terms . . . if grave reliefs were our only evidence we would never imagine that the Greeks fought massed in the phalanx rather than as heroic individuals." (pp.44-45)
• "Amidst the showers of spears and arrows and stones, amidst the running to and fro and confusion and stabbing by surprise, men of high standing would go down, killed anonymously by stray missiles and the spears of low wretches, trampled by horses, or crushed ingloriously by stray chariots.  In the confusion the high deeds of the brave would go unnoticed, along with the cringing of the cowardly." (p. 46)
• "Yet it is not in spear fighting in which the hoplite competes but holding his place in the line, and the courage of holding one's place is perhaps the form of martial behavior whose success in the real world is most in the hands of the warrior and subject to the least external influence." (p. 53)
• "The irony of Thermopylae is that, although the Spartans went to their deaths according to the hoplite code, they did not in their last hours fight entirely as hoplites, bravely holding their ground." (p. 66)
• "Xenophon urges the hiring of foreign mercenary cavalry chiefly to inspire a sense of rivalry in the Athenian cavalry." (p. 103)
• "Macedonian leaders had to fight with their own hands because that is how they commanded the obedience of their soldiers." (P. 137)
• "Soldiers fight well not because they are compelled from above but because they do not want to let down their comrades." (p. 171)
• "For disciplina [Roman Discipline] was not primarily a system of imposed or felt rules to make an unwarlike people place themselves in danger or to do something unnatural to them . . . it is conceived primarily as a brake to overly aggressive behavior." (p. 177)
• "The Roman soldier did not primarily think of himself as part of a team, and he was not treated as such by his officers.  Rather, he regarded his comrades as his competitors in aggressive bravery." (p. 185)
• "The manipular legion was the fruit of compromise resulting from the meeting of an imported method of fighting, the phalanx, with a people whose martial values, whether inherited or new-acquired, made fighting in the phalanx a heroic challenge for them." (p. 190)
• "After a loss a Roman general might be prosecuted for personal cowardice, but not for tactical stupidity." (p. 207)

So, yeah.  I highly recommend reading this book if you're ready to go beyond the surface-level of Ancient-world tactics and strategies to learn about the cultural forces that drove them.  I'm pretty busy with other plans at the moment, but I'll probably have a few blog posts related to the claims in this book coming up in the near future, so look forward to that.