
John David Lewis |
Review of Kimberly Kagan,
The Eye of Command.
Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 2006. Pp. viii, 271. ISBN
978-0-472-03128-3. |
For centuries historians writing battle
narratives have often focused on the commander, who moved his troops
in faceless groups and whose deeds and character were the key to
explaining the outcome of a battle. There was an important truth at
the base of this approach: of all the participants, the commander
had the greatest effect upon the campaign. It is by his will that
troops come to a particular battlefield, and he tells them when to
stand, charge, or retreat. But this did little to tell us what the
vast majority of soldiers saw in war. Their physical and
psychological experiences were too often short-shifted in comparison
to tactical arrangements or the glories of the commander's
character.
John Keegan
challenged this orthodoxy.[1]
Beginning with his self-reflective comment that he had never been
in, or even near, a battle, Keegan concluded that, minus the actual
experience of combat, he had no more understanding of war than his
young students. He turned away from abstract analysis toward the
direct experiences of the soldiers; explanation gave way to
description, as every soldier's desire to save his own life was
elevated over the aims of the commanders. Keegan claimed that
soldiers fight not due to leadership, but rather "on the one hand,
for personal survival, which individuals will recognize to be bound
up with group survival, on the other, for fear of incurring by
cowardly conduct the group's contempt." "Without direct reference to
fear of death," Kimberly Kagan writes of Keegan's view, "no events
in combat can be understood" (10). The "face of battle" drives a
wedge between a commander's goal of victory and the goal of the
soldiers to live.
Kagan offers a powerful challenge to Keegan, but
without returning to an unrealistic view of the commander as
directing faceless armies. Her "eye of command" encompasses the
wider field of understanding held by the commander, which connects
the actual experiences of soldiers to the broader context of the
battle and the war. The commander must be as aware of the
psychological states of the soldiers, of their morale and
motivations, as he is of the strengths of forces and the best
tactical maneuvers. Consequently, Kagan maintains, only through the
eye of command can a historian engage critically analyze which
factors were causally important in a battle, a campaign, or a war.
For Kagan, the Roman history of Ammianus
Marcellinus exemplifies the "face of battle" approach, and Julius
Caesar's Gallic War illustrates the "eye of command"
perspective. Readers will find lively commentary on major battles in
their accounts, used to illustrate her alternative to Keegan.
Kagan's criticism of the face of battle type of
narrative stresses its adoption of a participant's perspective, its
impressionistic episodes and the "generic causality" that links
them, its "attempt to convey verisimilitude," and its inability to
explain the outcome of a battle. The latter is inherent in the very
approach, she maintains: soldiers on the ground are not aware of the
factors that most influence the overall situation, and the raw facts
of their experiences do not allow for the critical analysis needed
to determine causal connections. But the soldiers are not the only
ones lacking knowledge; we, too, simply cannot know the thousands of
details among thousands of men. Any attempt at enumeration is bound
to fail, most obviously from lack of information, but also from an
inability to determine which events and experiences are most
important.
To create vivid images, the face of battle writer
calls upon material that is assumed to have similar effects across
time. Weapons, for instance, have similar effects upon generic
classes of soldiers. Ammianus's own experiences (at the siege of
Amida, in A.D. 359) are one means by which he tells us the details
of a battle he did not himself witness (Strasbourg, in 357). He may
also draw upon common motifs in art, writing descriptions of the
"Dying Gaul" rather than using evidence from the battle. Keegan has
made similar leaps, from miniatures in medieval manuscripts and
modern newsreels of war protestors to his account of Agincourt.
Death, for Ammianus, becomes a "mass event, rather than an
individual experience" (36), categorized and generalized, all with a view
to making vivid for us what the fighting was really like.
The structure of such a narrative is episodic.
Small periods of time ("episodes") are set into patterns ("attack,
defense, retreat") connected by vague "generic causal connections."
Periods of intense activity are vivified while periods of lull are
telescoped or effaced; chronology gives way to a series of
generalized images. The result does little to explain the battle or
its outcome.
Kagan's final verdict on this pretense of realism
is harsh. Despite the vivid language of violence, face of battle
accounts tend to be less realistic than analysis taken from a
commander's perspective. Rather than a "Mask of Command," a mask of
imagery is created within the face of battle.[2]
The "attempt to convey verisimilitude" is a chimera; "the realism
that the reader at first perceives in Ammianus' accounts disappears
under further scrutiny, as it becomes clear that his general use of
similar imagery and structures adds primarily symbolic value to the
text" (70). It is not essential that the account be true, but rather
that it appear true—this is its symbolic purpose.
To introduce her alternative, Kagan turns to
Julius Caesar's perspective upon the battlefields of Gaul. His need
is to grasp the whole—and to evaluate which events are most
important—with a view to understanding rather than direct
perception. A huge part of the problem with the face of battle
approach is its reliance upon imagery, rather than a conceptual
grasp of the entirety of the context—an approach that makes it
impossible to analyze the situation critically. Like a historian, a
commander cannot rely upon direct perception apart from
understanding—Caesar was often in places where such a view was
impossible. Kagan stresses Caesar's use of animadvertere—"to
recognize," a cognitive act connected to observation—in his writings
(125–26). Critical analysis means abstract understanding, which
requires something other than a series of experiences.
Kagan's account of Caesar's actions in
Gaul—against the Helvetii, the commander Ariovistus, the Nervii, and
at Alesia—attempts to rescue Caesar from charges of bias and
self-aggrandizement. But his account also demonstrates his own lack
of direct experience: often he could not have known where in the
situation the decisive event would take place. The result highlights
the differences between persons, units and events rather than the
similarities that follow from the face of battle accounts. This is
the exact opposite of what one might expect. But Kagan's eye of
command stresses the need for a commander to integrate the
particulars of a situation—including those he has not seen, but must
infer— into his understanding, while avoiding unrealistic
generalities.
This integration includes a special concern for
friction—the effects of particular, localized occurrences upon the
outcome. Surely troops that do not perform as well as they should,
given physical, logistical or psychological shortcomings, can hamper
a commander's ability to bring about a desired result. A single
bottleneck can have dire consequences. But the illustration of
Gergovia—Caesar's only defeat by the Gauls in battle—is that an
excess of zeal by troops can also create such friction. According to
Caesar, three legions advanced farther up a hill than they had been
ordered to. They failed to hear the trumpets ordering retreat and
were also overly excited by what they thought they could accomplish.
The eye of command approach demands that a
historian, like a commander, take such particulars into account,
evaluating their importance against the entirety of the situation
and the campaign. A commander's tactical flexibility, not rigid
adherence to a pre-determined plan, while pursuing definite goals is
a virtue. Kagan argues against Clausewitz's view that a commander
needs "iron will-power," but perhaps the iron will-power must be
expressed through an intransigent commitment to act as the facts
demand, in a dynamic, deadly struggle for the highest of stakes.
The theoretical basis for Kagan's analysis, which
she presents after her discussions of Keegan and Ammianus, begins
with Clausewitz, but then broadens into an understanding of battle
as a non-linear system, with holistic emphasis on the entire context
rather than lines of causal relationships traced back to a single
primary factor. In such an interconnected system, a small event can
lead to a drastic change in the overall situation. For want of a
nail, the battle—and the kingdom—were lost.
Both the traditional "commander-glorifying"
narratives and the "face of battle" approach are unable to explain
such matters. Traditional accounts emphasize the hierarchical
positions of officers, whose orders flow down onto the soldiers in
proportion to their ranks, failing to assess those factors on the
ground that may influence outcomes to a degree that exceeds their
apparent importance. In contrast, face of battle narratives are
additive and assume that the overall flow of a battle is a summation
of individual experiences. The nature and results of a battle flow
upwards, and the commander is less in control than he may think. In
either case, an action anywhere leads to a result mathematically
proportional to its cause.
But this is a false alternative. Complex,
non-linear and synergistic systems—such as turbulent airflows and
weather systems—do not operate in such ways. In Kagan's view, it is
crucial to determine the importance of a factor in the overall
situation, not by tracing all causal lines (which is impossible),
but rather by finding the essential, decisive events. The commander
must evaluate the importance of such particulars or plan to allow
his people to take advantage of a changing situation. This, as Kagan
reads it, was a major strength of Caesar, who was often in the wrong
place (as he openly admits), but whose subordinates could turn a
situation around as it unfolded.
Kagan's central point, which separates her view
from the typical focus on the commander, is the commander's need for
cognitive integration. He must see the system as a whole, despite
gaps in his direct experience, not by forcing conformity on
particular circumstances, but by seeing the interconnections amid
variety. "Precisely because Caesar narrated two types of events,
those that he could and could not see, we can learn how he
integrated what he himself observed on the battlefield with the
known outcome of the battle as a whole. We begin to see through the
eye of command which concatenations of events are essential and how
they relate to one another" (134).
For the historian—and for the commander who
leaves a record of his campaigns—knowledge of the outcome is an
important part of the integration, for it confirms which events were
essential and decisive. A commander creates a tactical integration
of forces; the historian creates a literary integration. Both the
commander and the historian need the eye of command perspective, if
they are to understand the entirety of the battle and its decisive
moments.
A series of conclusions follow from Kagan's
approach, of which only a few can be considered here. For instance,
Keegan's disassociation of the commander's goal of victory from the
soldier's desire to stay alive is false. "Keegan fails to recognize
the critical importance of ‘winning' and ‘losing' to the morale of
the soldier and the degree to which a general's ‘losing' and a
soldier's personal fear of death are likely to be intertwined and in
some cases identical." Dying is a "much more imminent threat when
they are losing" (183, 186). A good commander connects victory,
without contradiction, to his soldiers' capacity to remain alive.
Kagan also observes that Ammianus and Caesar
changed their narrative styles over time. Ammianus became more
analytical, and wrote more of tactical issues, a progression that
might relate to his assumption of command; Caesar became more
refined in his recognition of causal, spatial, and sequential
relationships, which begin to emerge in his account of the campaign
against the Nervii in 57 BC. Caesar the master commander writes a
powerful narrative, meeting the need for integration common both to
military command and to writing about its meaning and its results.
Kagan's argument invites application to areas of
study beyond battle narratives. In the broadest sense, history is
not—as the face of battle suggests—a list of facts or images, to be
described but not explained. But neither is history, as traditional
commander-focused views might imply, a deduction from wide
abstractions to the particulars on the ground. Historians must
integrate what is important, given their purposes, into a coherent
whole, without distorting the overall description or misstating the
experiences of people caught up in events.
I do not think that Clausewitz was right, as
cited approvingly by Kagan, that the discovery of facts "has nothing
in common with theory" (101). Which facts shall we seek to discover?
The answer to that question presupposes some theoretical standard to
determine which facts are important enough to be sought. If our
purpose is to find out what the experience of battle was like for a
soldier, we will seek different facts than if our purpose is to
discover why one side was able to impose its political will for a
generation after a battle. Kagan is surely right that fixation on
particular experiences without regard for their integration into a
broader system cannot explain why soldiers ended up where they were
and why results followed as they did.
Social Philosophy and Policy Center
Bowling Green State University
classicalideals@yahoo.com
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[1] See The Face of Battle (NY:
Penguin, 1976) 51.
[2] From John Keegan, The Mask of Command
(NY: Penguin, 1988).
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