War: How Conflict Shaped Us

The Persians were to learn in the most costly manner just what that Greek way of war could do to an enemy. ... Centuries later knights on horseback were to learn a similar lesson in fighting from the massed infantry of Swiss soldiers who, like the Greek hoplites before them, fought with and for each other as equals. We now think of the Swiss Guards who stand on duty at the Vatican in their multicoloured Renaissance uniforms as a charming detail and Switzerland as peaceful and bucolic, home to good chocolate, discreet banks and, as the character Harry Lime in The Third Man unkindly says, the cuckoo clock. For 200 years, until a square was finally broken in 1515, the Swiss formations, bristling with pikes and sheltering archers with their deadly crossbows, were the terror of Europe and the key to victory, at least for anyone who could afford to hire them. ‘Pas d’argent, pas de Suisse,’ as the saying went.

Religion, and it can merge into nationalism as orthodoxy does with the Serbs and the Russians, offers both a cause worth dying for and the promise of eternal life. The crusaders did not leave their homes all over Europe and make the long and dangerous journey to the Holy Land just to acquire loot and land. There was more and better to be had much closer to home. They were driven by what they thought was a divine mission, to retrieve the land where Christ had once lived for Christendom. Many crusaders – kings such as Richard I of England, the Lionheart, and Philip II of France and great landed magnates – left behind properties, position and families and many never returned. Egged on by religious leaders such as Pope Gregory VII, who reminded the faithful of the passage from the Book of Jeremiah ‘Cursed be he that keepeth back his sword from blood’, they killed indiscriminately those they thought of as infidels. In the massacres in Jerusalem in 1099 the streets were said to have run with blood, in some places up to the knees of the crusaders’ horses. ‘None of them were left alive; neither women nor children were spared,’ said a contemporary account.

How groups of humans contemplate and plan for wars is also affected by their culture, including geography. Island nations or those with long coasts have understood and invested heavily in sea power. In the case of Britain, its navy – tellingly called the Senior Service – has absorbed more resources and had much greater prestige over the centuries than its army. While paintings, poems, films and histories memorialise the great naval battles – Salamis, Lepanto, Trafalgar, Midway – when one navy destroyed another, the main strategic purpose of navies is to control the seas, and the highways that criss-cross them, and prevent their enemies from doing so. Even today land communications are vulnerable to disruption, either man-made or natural; how much more so in the past before surfaced roads and railways?

Civil wars are hard to forget, even when peace comes, because they so often leave peoples living side by side who have very recently been enemies. Forgiveness is difficult and it is hard for the losers to accept defeat and the victors to be magnanimous. The Act of Pardon, Indemnity and Oblivion, for crimes committed in and just after the [English] Civil War, which the Parliament passed in 1660, is all too rare in history, although today we are seeing more systematic attempts, in places such as Rwanda, Colombia, Northern Ireland and South Africa, at peace and reconciliation. More usual is what happened in Franco's Spain: "a long uncivil peace", as one historian described it. Order of a sort returns, as it did in Spain or Tito's Yugoslavia, but the bitter memories of the savagery and atrocities on both sides simply go underground. The Roman poet Horace warned of "fire/smouldering under ashes". The arguments over the past can still divide the Spanish today, as the recent furore over the fate of the memorial to General Franco in the Valle de los Caídos shows. In the former Yugoslavia, where memories are much rawer, it is difficult even to discuss what happened in the 1990s. Over a century and a half later, the American Civil War still casts its shadow, in the arguments over the flying of the Confederate flag or the statues of Confederate generals or the tangled racial politics and the lingering resentments of Southern whites.

War has its own laws and one of the oldest and most persistent is that those who have surrendered and civilians, where possible, should be spared. Yet we all know the stories or have seen pictures of the sacking of cities, the execution of prisoners of war, the shelling of churches filled with refugees, or the farm buildings deliberately set on fire, and we remember names such as Oradour or Wounded Knee or Nanjing. For any American who lived through the Vietnam War the incident at My Lai, when a representative group of ordinary American soldiers rampaged through a village, has come to represent the barbarism of much of that war. (The Vietnamese forces committed their own atrocities, but Vietnam has been slow to come to terms with them.) In 1968 American reporters in the country started to hear stories about the murder in cold blood of some 500 villagers, of all ages, by an American patrol. One courageous helicopter pilot who was there did his best to save the Vietnamese and later filed a report with his superiors, who did nothing.

Today of course we have religious wars again and the targets are again without limit until the final goal is achieved. Sadly even wars which are meant to be about ending war itself take on that limitless character. If the purpose is to remove for ever the scourge of war, then whatever atrocities and cruelties are committed in its name will be justified because the sacrifice is surely worth it. In the lead-up to the Thirty Years War radical Calvinists, espousing an extreme form of Protestantism, came to believe that the Habsburg monarchy was the force of darkness which must be eradicated before the righteous could be saved. When the radicals in the French Revolution prepared to wage war on Europe it was for earthly salvation. As one revolutionary said in 1791, ‘It is because I want peace that I am asking for war.’ The enemy, as in religious wars, becomes the enemy of humanity itself and must be utterly destroyed not merely defeated.

The assumption that it is the men who should be warriors seems to be almost universal through time and across cultures and, while there are examples of women warriors, the overwhelming majority of those who have fought are men. And when rules of war have developed in different societies, women, along with old people, children and, sometimes, priests have been classified as non-combatants. The reasons why men have largely done the fighting and women have not are as much debated as the origins of war itself, and again the explanations range from the biological to the cultural. If gender differences are averaged, men come out higher on the scale of strength and size and possibly aggression, but there are many big strong women who can match and surpass men. The fact that men have more testosterone than women may make them more prone to being aggressive – although scientists are far from reaching a consensus – but there are many men who are gentle by nature and do not want to fight. Militaristic societies such as Sparta or the military through the ages would not have spent so much time on training which inculcates the ‘right’ attitudes if the great majority of men were natural-born killers. Women, when they choose or are obliged to fight, can be as fierce as men.

Blinded by their own racial theories and driven by the increasing demands of the war to extract whatever they could from occupied territories, the Axis powers in both Europe and Asia drove civilians into active opposition. Forced labour, punitive taxes, indiscriminate killing and deliberate genocide gave people a stark choice of resisting or probably dying in any case. As armed resistance grew across Asia, from the Philippines to China, and throughout Europe, the Axis powers cracked down ever more severely, the Japanese with such policies as the Three Alls in China and the Nazis with collective punishment for any locality where there were resistance activities. As one German diplomat in occupied Greece said after German forces massacred Greek villagers, ‘The wonderful result of this heroic deed is that babies are dead; but the partisans continue to live.’ Ukrainians who had welcomed Nazi troops with the traditional gifts of salt and bread as their deliverers from Soviet rule formed partisan groups as the Nazis started their killings and mass deportations of slave labour to the West.

Resistance in the Second World War was picking up a gun or blowing up railways, but it was also listening to the nightly news bulletins on the BBC, as thousands did all over Europe even though that was punishable by death. Resistance was also printing and distributing information about the occupations and the state of the war. In Belgium around 12,000 people were engaged in putting out and distributing some 300 underground papers. In occupied France audiences clapped British soldiers when they appeared in newsreels and moved if a German sat next to them. In Poland a German officer complained that Polish children were always rude to him. In occupied Denmark citizens gathered in large numbers in the open air to sing Danish folksongs. The Dutch planted flowerbeds in their national colours. The streets in Prague were empty on the anniversaries of the Munich Agreement, which had destroyed Czechoslovakia. Such gestures may have seemed futile but they helped to keep hope alive.