military history as a university study

MILITARY HISTORY AS A UNIVERSITY STUDY

The scholar, asked why he studies his subject, can only answer in the words of the famous mountaineer, ‘Because it is there.’ The military historian, like his economic, constitutional and political colleagues, can give no other answer to the ques- tion. For him the problem of how societies organize themselves for and conduct war seems at least as central, as urgent, and as worthy of the attention of students as the allied problems which concern hi;s conf~kres: as the constitutional problem of how men reconcile order and independence; as the economic problem of the relationship of the growth of society to its means of production; as the intellectual problems raised by mankind’s changing views of reality and of the moral order. It is not easy, especially for this generation, to escape the conclusion that war, or that disposition towards it which Hobbes rightly equated with the conflict itself, has always been an activity of society at least as persistent and as influential as commerce and production, as law and government, as artistic activity or as religious belief; and no apology should be needed for suggesting that its study should occupy a central and not an incidental part of the historical curriculum of schools and universities.

Such a demand has, during the past fifty years, been fre- quently made. The successive occupants of the chair of the history of war at Oxford have most convincingly pressed the claims of their subject to a greater degree of academic recogni- tion, but with a very small measure of success. Military history remains at best a peripheral and highly specialized study, and it is not difficult to see why. It is customary-and right-to emphasize the liberal and pacific traditions of British historio- graphy, laid down as they were in the golden years of nineteenth century peace. To the Victorians military affairs were peripheral. The tiny forces engaged on colonial campaigns were simply maintenance men, whose protective or punitory campaigns kept the vast economic structure in good repair. Mahan had yet to point out the element of force on which the apparently effortless supremacy of the British Empire rested. Moreover the conduct of military affairs remained firmly in the hands of a landed aristocracy and gentry whose predominance in the state had been firmly settled at the Restoration. The army, like

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the church, was part of an ‘Establishment’ from which the great mass of town-dwellers and businessclasses were excluded, and on which they were to conduct an unweaned attack. The men raised to dominance by the economic expansion of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had a non-military if not an anti-military attitude, shaped in part by their religious convictions, in part by their commercial aspirations, and perhaps most of all by their exclusion, for over a century, from partici- pation in state affairs. Statesmen like Cobden and Bright, intellectuals like J. R. and T. H. Green, saw war as simply a vested interest of the ‘Establishment’. When the ‘Establish- ment’ was abolished and sensible men took charge, war would quite certainly be no more. Experience in the conduct of affairs was to change the minds of many such doctrinaires, but not of all-as the resignations from Asquith’s cabinet in August 1914 were to show. It is a little ironic that, just as the intellectuals of the Victorian middle-classes believed war to be the result of the wickedness and folly of the landed aristocracy, so in their turn the thinkers of the Labour movement considered it to arise only from the conflicts of a capitalist society, the abolition of which would inaugurate a regime of universal peace.

It may thus be suggested that it has been the predominance of this ‘bourgeois‘ tradition in the writing and teaching of history that has resulted in an under-estimation of the military aspect of the subject, or at least its relegation to the more elementary levels. But the military historians themselves cannot go free of all blame. If the word ‘military’ evokes narrow and technical associations, the fault lies with the type of military history which we have been accustomed to read. For the word, we must be clear, has three distinct meanings. First, in contrast to the term ‘naval’, it can apply simply to armed forces by land. Secondly, in contrast to the word ‘civil‘, it can apply to the armed forces as a whole; and thirdly it can apply to the preparation for and conduct of war in all its branches: not only the narrowly military, but the political, the economic, the psychological, the juristic, the social. But military historians have not always been conscious of this wider conception of their task, and their works have tended to fall into one of two categories. Either they have limited themselves to a detailed and technical study of the armed forces and their

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campaigns, considered all to often in vacuo with little or no consideration of their social or economic background; or they have undertaken their study in a purely didactic spirit, in the manner Seen at its greatest-and its most unreadable-in the pre-1914 publications of the French and German general staffs, which regarded the military experience of the past as a quarry from which material could be drawn, for professional military purposes, for the construction of a ‘science of war’.

Now both of these lines of approach can be fruitful and both are very necessary; but neither by itself is enough. The place for the latter is not the history school of a university, but the military history department of a staff college: it bears to academic history much the same relation as ‘Bar Finals’ bear to the academic study of jurisprudence and constitutional history. As for the former, it is, like all detailed scholarly investigation, an essential part of the study of history; but unless it is informed and directed by a humane curiosity about wider issues and by a sense of its relevance to the nature and development of society as a whole, it will appear, to all save a handful of enthusiastic antiquarians, as a dessicated and insignificant by-way leading to a dead end. Such studies are essential to any branch of historical learning. The constitutional historian must study the development of legal practices and administrative institutions in re- condite and exhaustive detail; the economic historian has to analyse cEanges in productive techniques, or the growth and decline of the smallest commercial concerns, or the detailed statistics of trade; but they have also to show the significance of their material to their subject as a whole. So with the military historian. The investigation of his basic problem, how and perhaps why societies organize themselves for and conduct war, must, if properly pursued, contribute directly to that general understanding of the nature of historical development and of the past at which all historians ultimately aim. This is the conclusion that emerges most clearly from the work of Delbriick and his pupils in Germany, and from the brilliant constellation which the late Professor E. M. Earle gathered round him at Princeton during the second World War and whose light, more than any other, illuminates the path of the young military historian today.

In this light one can clearly see how much more is involved

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in military history than the study of weapons, of armed forces, or of the science of war-or, rather, how very significant such studies can be made for the general understanding of a period and its problems. It is, indeed, hard to think of any moment in the development of Europe, from the early middle ages, when military problems were not of urgent and far-reaching s@- cance. The medievalists should be tempted less than any other scholars to belittle their importance, for it was precisely by a military nexus that medieval society was held together. The feudal king was primarily the leader in battle; tenure from him of power and land was on a basis, not of rents, but of military service; and economic and constitutional questions arose from the central problem of producing a force adequately armed and ready to take the field. Feudal society, in fact, was an army and its supply services permanently in camp. When this social organization developed into one more complex, with a freer economy, in which the military element played an overtly smaller part, this was not due to any decline in the importance or incidence of war. Indeed it can be argued that it was brought about, to a considerable extent, by the requirements of longer and more arduous campaigns and by the development of weapons needing full-time training. When the princes of Europe learned that greater military efficiency could be obtained by extending scutage and building up professional military forces on the proceeds, the resulting impetus to the growth of a money economy was of vital importance.

During the era of professional armies which followed, the interaction of military and civil affairs was no less constant. The professional troops of the sixteenth century-the gens d’armes, the te~cios, the lanzknechts, the stradiots-made it possible for the princes of that age to undertake lengthy and distant campaigns with an ease impossible to a quarrelsome feudal host. But they were expensive weapons. The new artillery ate into the budget; so did the wages of the highly- trained infantrymen; and the money had to be found. To find it, the princes turned to their bankers; and it was largely their demands for military expenditure that led to the development of credit machinery and the exploitation of silver mines, and thus to the great inflation. Military expenditure bankrupted the crown of France in 1557, leaving it at the mercy of civil war.

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Military expenditure forced Spain to depend on American silver and shattered her incipient prosperity. Military expenditure, long staved off by Elizabeth, was to set the monarchy of England on the road to bankruptcy and ruin. If the period 1558-1648 is one of chaos and civil war in Europe, it is largely because the strong monarchies of the early sixteenth century had wasted so much of their substance on riotous military living.

For by the end of the century the great bankers had collapsed; and more and more were the princes forced to turn back to their own subjects to find money for their wars. But to deal with the constant wars and rumours of wars engendered by the ideological conflicts of Europe, the old fiscal system, by which the prince lived of his own and found subsidies from his Estates only in emergencies, proved totally inadequate. The ‘eating canker of want’ forced the prince either to submit to the control of his Estates or to find a way round them. Thus the perennial problem of ‘defence’ versus ‘economy’ became one of royal authority and prerogative against fiscal and hence political control by the representative assembly. On the mainland of Europe the problem of defence was urgent, and authority won. In Brandenburg, for example, the Great Elector was able to by-pass his Estates, thanks to his control over the excise and to a loophole in the imperial constitution which enabled him to raise money on his own authority for purposes of defence. This was exactly what the Stuarts attempted to do in England by means of Ship Money. But for the English the problem of defence was not urgent. They had no land frontier with a hostile power, and so no need of a standing army; and in conse- quence they were able to reduce the powers of the crown to an extent which on the Continent would have invited domestic chaos and foreign invasion. Military considerations go far to explain why the Bourbons and the Hohenzollerns succeeded in establishing absolute monarchies, and the Stuarts failed.

The absence of a land frontier thus enabled the British to remain politically free. It also enabled them to grow economi- cally rich. In the triangular struggle with France and the United Provinces at the end of the seventeenth century she enjoyed the immense advantage of having to spend no money on land defence, in an age when Vauban and Coehorn had made it prodigiously expensive; and in the eighteenth century the


French were to suffer fatally from the constant distraction of their attention and their resources to the struggle for Europe from the struggle for the world. The British, alone among nations, had found how to make war pay. Before the advent of the modem warship, naval expenditure was the only form of military expenditure which was not utterly wasteful and des- tructive. The same skills built and manipulated a merchantman and a man-of-war, and naval supremacy and trade supremacy went hand in hand. Thus eighteenth century England, even in wartime, lost nothing in liberty and gained hugely in wealth; while as for the French, their very victories overstrained the national economy and opened the way to revolution. Thus even in the pre-revolutionary age military considera-

tions were powerful, if not decisive, in shaping the nature of European society as well as the course of events; and in the era of mass-warfare which opened in 1792 it becomes virtually impossible to consider them in isolation. Under the impact of revolutionary thought and industrial development the ‘limited warfare’ of the eighteenth century expanded until, in our own time, it directly affected every member and every activity of society. In the age of von Moltke and U. S. Grant the decision on the battlefield became a test, not so much of professional skill as of rival industrial capacity, rival railway systems, rival conscription and mobilization schemes. The distinction between military and political policy became hopelessly blurred, where it did not, as in Imperial Germany, dissolve altogether; and the advent of democracy in the field of political organization created a host of new military problems. Who was to control the course and conduct of a war, the civilian leaders or the soldiets? What should be the object of strategy, civilian morale or the armies in the field? How far was the new ‘Nation in Arms’ to accept the leadership of the traditional, usually aristocratic military caste? To what extent was external and internal policy to be guided by long-term problems of defence? Above all, how was the money to be found, and how was its expenditure to be controlled? From these problems Britain was no longer to remain exempt; and it has been the requirements of military expenditure during the past sixty years, more than any other single factor, which have effected a social revolution as far- reaching, if not as violent, as any the world has ever seen.

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It is thus a truism to say that the conduct of modem war has for long been a matter extending far beyond the scope of the professional military services. Equally, its study demands f a r more than the limited resources and technique of the old-style military historian. This was clearly seen and provided for in the planning of the official History of the Second Wwld War, and it is here, surely, that the universities can make their distinctive contribution to the study of war. Instead of acting simply as the extra-mural departments of staff-colleges, they can provide facilities for the examination of‘problems which are as much the concern of economists, scientists, sociologists and lawyers as they are of strategists or historians. The University of London has recently pointed the way by introducing a course in ‘War Studies’ which involves the study of war not only through the eyes of the historian, but through those of the lawyer and the economist as well, in the belief that such a course will not only provide the intending professional soldier with a better background than would a narrow study of professional military history, but that it should prove of value and interest to any student of history and political affairs. Only in this manner can so vast and complex a subject be treated.

But even for the pure historian, if he is prepared to turn his attention to the broader aspects of military affairs, a large and fascinating range of problems lies open, explored only by a few pioneers whose findings should be promising enough to start an academic gold-rush. How much work, for example, has been done on the archives of the war ministries of the European powers for the period 1871-1914, in comparison with the ple- thora of diplomatic studies? In the field of British history the work of A. J. Marder on English naval policy covers only a small, though a vital section of the whole field of British defence policy and military reform, which lies almost untouched from 1815 up till the First World War. For the Napoleonic Wars, what have we, for example, on war finance? Or on the techniques of convoy and blockade? Or on economic problems and policy, apart from the work of those two great neutral historians, Hecksher and Mahan? What have we, even, on the political direction of the war? There are the excellent works of Professor Holland Rose, but they have too long stood a l o n e and they do not deal with the war’s latter phases. For the wars


of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Professor Pares and Sir George Clark have brilliantly illuminated the interaction of economics and strategy; but the very excellence of their work shows how much more there is to be done. In the same way Mr. John Ehrman’s book on the navy under William I11 has shown how fruitful can be the study of the services themselves if it is approached, not with the pietas of the regimental historian, but with a dispassionate desire to analyse their structure and their relationship to civil and political society. A study of the politics of the navy between 1714 and 1832 awaits the pen of one of Sir Lewis Namier’s more adventurous

The military historian, therefore, cannot plead lack of material and opportunity, and he has little need to justify the importance of his subject in the general field of historical studies. Surely he can with reason suggest that it might occupy a more substantial place in the university curriculum than it holds today?

pupils.

MICHAEL HOWARD’

bir. Michael Howard, M.A.. is lecturer in modem history at King’s College in the University of London.

military history as a university study

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