De Maistre on the fog of war
/
In a short break from my fall semester prep this morning I went back over my Goodreads highlights in The Executioner, a small selection from arch-conservative reactionary Joseph de Maistre‘s St Petersburg Dialogues. I’d love to run down a complete edition of this late work someday, as in addition to its central subjects de Maistre, the original Trad Chad, also makes characteristically trenchant and incisive remarks on a host of tangential topics.
Here’s one that I’d forgotten about. How, I don’t know, as it’s an observation very close to my personal, artistic, and academic interests:
“People talk a lot about battles without knowing what they are really like.”
People talk a lot about battles without knowing what they are really like. In particular, they tend to consider them as occurring at one place, whereas they cover two or three leagues of country. They ask you seriously: How is it that you don’t know what happened in this battle, since you were there? Whereas it is precisely the opposite that would often have to be said. Does the one on the right know what is happening on the left? Does he even know what is happening two paces from him?
De Maistre takes a moment to imagine what it was like:
On a vast field covered with all the apparatus of carnage and seeming to shudder under the feet of men and horses, in the midst of fire and whirling smoke, dazed and carried away by the din of firearms and cannon, by voices that order, roar, and die away, surrounded by the dead, the dying, and mutilated corpses, seized in turn by fear, hope, and rage, by five or six different passions, what happens to a man? What does he see? What does he know after a few hours? What can he know about himself and others? Among this crowd of warriors who have fought the whole day, there is often not a single one, not even the general, who knows who the victor is.
Compare Sir John Keegan’s observations throughout The Face of Battle on the experience versus the reconstructed God’s-eye view of combat, or David Howarth’s imaginative reconstruction of what command and control, much less communication, must have meant during the Battle of Hastings:
How could [Harold Godwinson] have controlled a line eight hundred yards long and eight men deep? How much of it could he have seen, over the heads of the crowd? How long would an order have taken to reach the ends of it—an aide on foot shoving his way through the ranks to search for some captain who was also on foot? Could even a bugle call in those days . . . have carried such a distance among the other sounds of battle?
This principle, evoking “the fog of war,” is applicable from the ranks of foot soldiers and company runners all the way up to commanders of corps and armies. Good histories, military or not, will at least suggest some of this. The most famous example may be Douglas Southall Freeman’s RE Lee, which narrates Lee’s command of the Army of Northern Virginia based only on what he could or did know at any given time. I’ve recently seen some writers criticize or even mock Freeman’s technique, suggesting it is… artificial? too forgiving? something?
I’ve honestly never understood this criticism. If history is to have any meaning or applicability, it needs an understanding of in-the-moment contingency as well as our later omniscience. This, as I posted last week, is the place of imagination in historical study. Fail to imagine how historical figures—whether a private in the front line or a commander at a map table—both did and did not understand what was happening to them, and you will ultimately fail to understand what did happen.
I read The Executioner in an inexpensive Kindle edition from the Penguin Great Ideas series. It’s worth checking out, especially as de Maistre’s work is so hard to find in affordable English editions.
