Problems and Complexities of a

Cultural Approach to Military History

John A. Lynn
University of Illinois

What a pleasure it is to participate in an AHA meeting with War and Peace as its theme.  However, I would caution those who may want to celebrate this meeting as a victory dance for military history.  I doubt that today’s historical profession will change much, it will continue to judge importance by what appears on the pages of the AHR, not the first section of the New York Times.  No, I do not see this as a victory dance, but as a rain dance.  We want something good to happen, and if we perform at our highest level here, maybe we will gain some benefit.

My paper today offers suggestions as to how we might raise that level of performance by being aware of inherent difficulties and pitfalls in applying a cultural approach in military history.  Throughout my career I have sought to uncover the cultural roots of military thought and practice.  My first book, Bayonets of the Republic (1984) emphasized popular and military culture.  Then, in 1997 I was so bold as to advocate that military historians explore gender history and the new cultural history.[i]  Finally I took my own advice and wrote Battle: A History of Combat and Culture, which came out this past June.  The journey from Bayonets to Battle probably taught me something; let me share it with you.

          Although I have reservations concerning excess and obscurity in cultural history, I thoroughly accept the importance of cultural constructions in shaping military institutions and the conduct of war.  To me the promises of a cultural approach are immense and obvious.  It contradicts the tendency to give way to technological determinism.  It exiles the notion of the “universal soldier” – the conviction that armies are armies and war is war, always have been and always will be the same.  It also forestalls tendencies to great-man theories and counter-factual guesswork that weaken military history.  However the problems of the cultural approach are less obvious, and worth our consideration.

A model of discourse and reality

Let me begin by presenting my model of discourse and reality in the history of combat, because I need it to go any further.  I warn those of you who have already read Battle, this model is modified from that in the book. 

We begin by differentiating between the reality of war and the way in which a society conceives of war.  Despite my resolve to eschew the language of cultural theory, I have found it convenient to borrow the term “discourse” for the conceptual pole of my model.  For me, the term signifies the complex of beliefs, preconceptions, expectations, etc., on a particular subject.  Many cultural historians include those practices that reinforce values in their definitions of discourse, but I would like to keep action separate from conception.  It is also necessary to point out that a single society can harbor several discourses on war that vary by class, gender, and profession.  Thus aristocrats might think of war very differently than did peasants, men than did women, and career soldiers than did civilians. 

Discourse and reality seem fated to be quite distinct, the one not matching the other.  Perhaps this is a reflection of the unavoidable difference between desire and achievement.  Certainly, the existence of multiple discourses dictates that they cannot all reflect reality.

For a number of reasons, through a process of Reformation, the discourse on war tries to modify reality to make it more nearly resemble conceptions of how war should be.  Thus societies impose conventions and laws on the conduct of war.  In addition, the recognition that discourse is out of phase with reality may see reality impose an adjustment on discourse, if for no other reason than survival.  So the heroic ideals of warfare as Europe spiraled toward World War I had to give way to much grimmer notions to cope with the reality of the trenches.  This basic feedback between discourse and reality, represented in the simple model, is the most important statement I am making, basic as it is.  However, it is more complex, and more interesting, so we must refer to the full model. 

Two categories of more complex feedback pose particular challenges to societies and militaries.  If a great gap separates the ideal from the real, and if reality cannot be modified to approach conception, then a society might feel compelled to set aside Modification for Replacement: substituting an artificial and highly ritualized form of military behavior that better matches the discourse, in whole or in part.  Such a Perfected Reality could take the form of a kind of mock combat, such as the medieval tournament, or the less war-like, but more deadly, practice of dueling.  A need for the artificially perfect may also explain the survival of archaic drill and ceremony in modern militaries.  Violent sport may also qualify as a perfected form of warfare.

On the other hand, if the actual practice of combat fundamentally clashes with a society’s definitions of war or the warrior and, consequently, cannot be accepted as war, then a society might Reject it as such and create an Alternative Discourse to deal with it.  In other words, a society constructs a very different set of expectations, values, etc. outside the normal conception of war.  However, as it does so, Alternative Discourse abandons the conventions associated with armed conflict and, therefore, justifies a more Extreme Reality of war with few if any restraints.  If, for instance, an enemy’s behavior is considered utterly barbaric, then that enemy may be regarded as having forfeited any human consideration, and massacre replaces battle.

There is another form of rejection as well, and this is a society’s or a military’s Refusal to Consider a particular form of conflict at all.  We see that today in Iraq.  One journalist has noted that many American officers involved in the occupation share a common “inability, or perhaps a reluctance, to recognize what was happening as a war.”[ii]  This does not generate an alternative discourse but rather a belief that this is really not what an army should be doing.  Pragmatic, ad hoc, responses may be necessary, but not the creation of new doctrine.  This amounts to a lack of willingness to accept such combat as a legitimate part of a military’s range of activities. 

Problems of evidence

          If the crux of the cultural approach to military history is the relationship between discourse and reality, we must know both, and herein lies the greatest problem of all.  So many of our sources deal with discourse alone or funnel the information on reality through strongly colored conceptions that it is hard to know what actually happened.  This is always a concern, but it usually increases the further we go back in time.  For the ancient world, particularly ancient China and India, this is more of a problem that it would be for “medieval” epochs; and the task becomes still less insurmountable in modern times, although it never disappears. 

          Linguistic turn types might simply say they told us so and, therefore, forget about reality.  That is giving up too easily.  There are usually some gambits we can pursue.  The nature of sources also can be telling.  It is one thing to try to reconstruct combat from religious texts that deal with warfare only tangentially and quite another to use military treatises that take it head on.  Also, a single society can produce multiple discourses on war, and we can check one against the others.  We can sometimes cross-check with materials generated by visitors from another culture.  To me the observations by Greeks and Chinese in India are essential supplements to South Asian writings on war.  Archeology provides help, although often less than expected.  And then there are wonderful administrative documents that are concerned with just getting a job done rather than portraying war and warriors in a particular light.  Law-court records, financial accounts, and muster lists are of immense value when found.  We need not be trapped by lack of information, but it often takes ingenuity and effort to pull off a successful escape.

          We have to develop strategies to uncover reality in discourse without constructing circular arguments.  We are somewhat protected by the very hard demands of war.    A society can safely generate and maintain all kinds of cultural and social myths without paying a terrible price for the gap between the ideal and the real, but the costs of a flawed concept of warfare can be death – of individuals and regimes.  There is more pressure to tell it like it is.  This cannot get us everywhere we want to go, but it can help.

Using discourse to establish a reality:  War and the tournament

After all these generalities, let us deal with one specific example, taken from what I have found to be the most illuminating era, medieval Europe of the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries.

          A good deal of excellent scholarship explores the literature on chivalry and contrasts it with the rough world or war as it actually was.  I refer in particular to works by Maurice Keen, Richard Kaeuper, Nicholas Wright, and Clifford Rogers.  The extensive literature on chivalry demands high standards of the “knight.”  The language of piety pervades chivalry, although this does not require subservience to the church.  Understandably much is made of the warrior traits of prowess, courage, and honor.  The great emphasis on prowess makes the literature more about virtu than virtue.  It does not stint on bashing and cleaving. In describing an actual campaign, Gerald of Wales awarded high praise to the knight Meyler Fitz Henry:  “Meyler, thus left alone, and surrounded by the enemy on every side, drew his sword, and charging the band, boldly cut his way through them, chopping here a hand and there an arm, besides hewing through heads and shoulders, and thus rejoining his friends.”[iii]  (Rejoining his friends it would appear by disjointing his foes.)  Loyalty was of immense importance in this aristocratic world held together personal bonds. As lords, aristocrats were also to distribute largesse and practice courtesy. His courtesy required love of the Church and avoidance of pride, boasting, envy and slander.  The knight must also protect the helpless, particularly women, widows, and orphans.  The Mainz Pontifical, one of the fundamental texts for the dubbing ceremony, blesses the sword, “that it may be a defense for churches, widows and orphans.”[iv]  In Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur, King Arthur requires an oath of his knights that includes a promise “always to do ladies, damsels, and gentlewomen and widows succor.” [v] It also leads to the next and last element in this survey of chivalric tenets – “that he should be a lover and that he should love truly for love’s sake.”[vi]  What we are used to calling “courtly love” provided an elaborate code for the relations between the sexes.  The knight’s heart must not only be courageous but courtly.

          But should we expect this aristocratic discourse on violence to determine the nature of warfare we would be sadly mistaken.  It was not chivalry but the brutal mounted raid, or chevauchée, that typified campaigns.  Certainly warriors fought with prowess and courage on a chevauchée, but they also engaged in indiscriminant violence.  Chevauchées colored medieval warfare with flame-red fury.  Armies intent on keeping moving could rarely stop for systematic demolition, but they could enlist fire to do the work for them.  Along with driving off livestock, burning proved the most effective means for a mobile army to ravage the countryside.  Writing of the Black Prince, a master of the chevauchée, the Chandos Herald reports that “the English to amuse themselves put everything to flame.  They made many a lady a widow and many a poor child an orphan.”[vii]  Henry V quite literally took relish in flames; he asserted with zest, “War without fire is as worthless as sausage without mustard.”[viii]  Women, instead of being the subjects of veneration became the victims of rape.  Soldiers admitted to, or boasted of, “raping women and deflowering virgins.”[ix]   Sophisticated historians point out that the emphasis on prowess guaranteed bloody war, that largesse required pillage to provide the wealth that made generosity possible, or that codes for protection of women were directed at noblewomen not commoners.  Yet glaring inconsistency still separated the tone of chivalry from the fact of campaigning. As Honoré Bouvet despaired in the fourteenth century: 

In these days all wars are directed against the poor laboring people and against their goods and chattels.  I do not call that war, but it seems to me to be pillage and robbery.  Further the way of warfare does not follow the ordinances of worthy chivalry or the ancient custom of noble warriors who upheld justice, the widow, the orphan and the poor.[x]

          So different was the discourse on chivalry from the reality of war that the gap could not be closed.  This caused chivalry to create its own perfected version of combat, the tournament, to approach what warfare should be.  True tournaments were not one-on-one jousts, but contests between “teams” of aristocratic knights fought over extensive areas of ground.  Fatigued knights could enter roped-off sanctuaries to rest themselves and their mounts, but outside the sanctuaries they were fair targets to be attacked, captured, and ransomed, as in real war.  Weapons might be dulled, but the fighting still could be injurious or fatal.  Speaking of a late-twelfth-century tournament one contemporary reported, “Horses fell down there thick and fast, and the men who fell with them were badly trampled and injured, damaged and disfigured.”[xi]  At the tournament of Neuss (1241), eighty knights were supposed to have died. [xii]  Tournaments mixed war with a kind of violent theater, replete with an audience of admiring and knowledgeable observers.  Acts of prowess were seen and lauded.  Women were an important presence and allowed for the courtly aspects of chivalry in a way that actual campaigns could not.  Women even participated in such shams as attacks on a “casle of love,” in which fair damsels defended mock battlements with flowers and rosewater against assaults by ardent knights.  The imagery of women employing flowers and men swords is embarrassingly transparent.

          The medieval contrast between tournament and actual war is applicable in other historical settings.  My model argues that the reality of war is influenced by the discourse on war; in other words, warfare is generally limited by culturally imposed conventions to a greater or lesser degree.  Highly conventionalized war can approach the tournament.  As historians we know that highly conventionalized and ritualized warfare was quite common.  Consider conflicts between Greek city states, wars hemmed in by an elaborate system of conventional restraints, although the actual fighting was bloody in the extreme. 

The perfected, tournament-like, character of conventionalized combat hit me particularly hard when I tried to deal with ancient South Asia.  We essentially lack any hard historical accounts of it.  Faced with this void, we must turn to statements about warfare imbedded in Vedic and Epic literature, such as the Bhagavad Gita.  Obviously this is mythic, but it says certain things about combat that historians repeat as our best guesses.  One of these general statements, for example, concerns the low status and importance of infantry, which may have provided certain valuable services on campaign, but was pretty much fodder for destruction by chariot-born heroes in battle.  The Vedas and the Epics speak of a highly conventionalize form of warfare, and the conventions have the ring of perfected reality about them.  The notion of a tournament is suggested not only by the conventions imposed on combat, but by the presence of male and female spectators.  In fact, one of the revered conventions of war forbid doing any violence to individuals who had come to observe the battle.  One king even supplied spectators with entertainment, such as poets and singers.[xiii]  An historian proposes that “warfare was reduced to the level of a large scale tournament and might even be something of a festive occasion.”[xiv]  The discourse may have been little more than a chronicler’s daydream, or it may have succeeded in creating a ritualized tournament, but in either case it probably does not supply an accurate portrayal of real war.

We get some glimpse of the problem if we consider the meager role ascribed to infantry in the discourse.  Luckily, we have some alternate information on that, because about 300 B.C. a Greek ambassador, Megasthenes, visited the court of the Mauryan emperor and reported about it.  As repeated by Arrian, his description of the Indian infantry bow implies a value to infantry hardly hinted at in the classic Hindu sources:

Their infantry have a bow equal in length to the man who carries it.  Placing this downward to the ground and stepping against it with the left foot, they discharge the arrow, drawing the string far back.  Their arrows are little less than four and one-half feet long; and nothing can withstand one shot by an Indian archer, neither shield nor breast-plate nor anything else that is strong.[xv] 

Put in the light of this report, the Hindu the texts upon which we place so much reliance possibly, or probably, give us a prejudiced and flawed view of South Asian warfare.  Although sources continually downplay the value of the plebian infantry, these accounts were written for consumption by privileged elites.  Social prejudice could conceivably have warped discourse to hide reality in order to compliment the audience.  If the Indian longbow was as potent as Megasthenes claims, could it not have been critical in combat?  Powerful archery might have determined the form and result of battles.  Literary sources may well have slighted common-born archers; it would not be the last time this would happen.  Neither Norman archers at Hastings nor English longbowmen at Crécy received their due, particularly among the aristocratic elite of France.  The effectiveness of infantry archery might go some way to explain the paucity of horse archers among the Indians, another trait established by literary and religious texts.  If infantry carried a superior bow that could outrange and overpower a short horseman’s bow, then horsemen would do much better not to trade arrows with infantry. 

***

          In conclusion, let me distill some counsel.  When pursuing a cultural approach, expect discourse to shape the reality of combat in some way; in my experience it always does.  To establish the fascinating relationship between discourse and reality, try to separate the two.  Discourse is fairly easy to establish; it leaves evidence everywhere.  Reality is another thing, since our best information on it is often embedded in the literature of discourse.  How, then, do we avoid passing off discourse as reality?  Appeal to contrasting discourses within a society, if they exist.  Use comparative and contrasting sources – not only moral and military literature but travel accounts, administrative records, and archeological finds.  Give special attention to sources more remote from the core of discourse.  Always be aware that you might be dealing with pure discourses or perfected reality when you think you have discovered actual reality.  Beware the tournament when searching for war. 

          Be creative and inventive; you may have to establish patterns, fill in gaps, project the unknown.  But don’t get crazy.  The cultural approach tends to reward speculation, but we must respect the evidence above all.  Nothing is as seductive and dangerous to good history as is seemingly watertight logic in lieu of fact.  With apologies to Samuel Johnson, I would counsel that cultural history should not be allowed to provide the last refuge for a scoundrel.