The military style (for ![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
expectare and sunstealer)
Jan. 5th, 2010 09:45 pmfpbThere is a document that, two generations ago, every Italian knew more or less by heart. It is the final communique' from the Italian High Command, dated November 4, 1918, and informing the world that the war was over (even though it took Germany a week longer to realize it). I do not need to make any cuts: here is an English translation.
The war against Austria-Hungary, undertaken under the high leadership of His Majesty, supreme commander, by the Italian Army, smaller in both numbers and equipment, on May 24, 1915, and fought fiercely and relentlessly, with unbreakable faith and unyelding gallantry, for fifty-one months, is won.
The gigantic battle joined on October 24, in which took part 51 Italian divisions, 3, British ones, 2 French ones, one Czecho-Slovak one, and an American regiment, against 63 Austro-Ungarian divisions, is over.
25th Corps' sudden and most daring advance towards Trento, by closing off the path of retreat to the enemy armies of Trentino, which had been overwhelmed in the west by the troops of the Seventh Army and in the east by those of the First, Sixth and Fourth, caused the total collapse of the opponents' front.
From the river Brenta to the river Torre, the unstoppable drive of Armies 12, 8, 18, and of the cavalry divisions, keeps driving further back the enemy in its flight.
In the plains, HRH the Duke of Aosta is swiftly advancing at the head of his undefeated Third Army, eager to take back the positions they had conquered, and from which they had never been driven by force.
The Austro-Hungarian Army is annihilated. It has suffered tremendous losses in the stubborn resistance of the first few days, and lost enormous amounts of supplies of every kind, including more or less all their depots. So far, they have left in our hands three hundred thousand prisoners, including whole general staffs, and no less than five thousands pieces of artillery.
The remains of what was once one of the world's mightiest armies are climbing back, in disorder and without hope, the valleys they had descended in arrogant confidence.
The slight touches of rhetoric and courtier politeness towards the King (who is said to have been the one who chose Diaz as commander in the dreadful days that followed the disaster of Caporetto) are easily understandable in a document written in the exultation of total victory. However, what strikes one the most is the clarity, brevity and cumulative power of the communique'. To begin with, there is no sentence, almost no word, that does not add some piece of essential information. It is, to quote an Italian expression, tutto fatti e cose, nothing but facts and matter. And with that, it has the build-up of a poem. That is at the heart of its remarkable clarity: it is arranged with extraordinary order to a definite point. Starting with a description of the final move that turned the battle into a rout, it builds up by describing the actions of the Italian armies, moving west to east - as would have been clear to anyone familiar with the map of northern Italy - to embrace one by one the various units as they move forwards, coming to a climax with mention of the universally admired royal hero, the Duke of Aosta, the King's first cousin, six-foot-six of pure courage and chivalry, whose forced retreat in 1917 had been a bitter blow for everyone involved. The document closes with the picture of the annihilated enemy; without bragging or sneering - indeed, admitting that the resistance of the first few days had been dogged and valiant - the General again builds up his picture out of "facts and matter": the hundreds of thousands of prisoners, the whole general staffs taken, the entire enemy supply system captured (something whose importance would have been clear to every civilian in all the nations that had sweated for years to feed, clothe and arm their immense armies), the mountains of artillery that would no longer shoot against us. Only after these "facts and matter" have built up to a picture of total defeat does he allow himself one sentence (slightly ungrammatical, as someone observed much later) to describe, this time with a touch of emotion, the fate of an enemy that only one year before seemed to have put an end to Italy.
The thesis of this post is that there is such a thing as a military style, and that this communique' is an instance of it. The idea occurred to me when I realized how similar it is to what has been said for two thousand years of the style of Julius Caesar: that its deceptive simplicity manages to deliver facts and issues with such completeness that, as Cicero was the first but not the last to say, he left judicious men nothing to say. And bear in mind that this very high praise was delivered by a man who hated him, in a work addressed to Caesar's murderer. The quality of his writing was such that it forced itself, in his own lifetime, to his own enemies. There are few writers of whom the same could be said.
The quality of Caesar's writing was what Cicero called purity and clarity. He reported that Caesar had made a careful study of his own language, and held that good style begins with an understanding of the meanings of each word. That is all true and may easily be seen in Caesar's surviving works. (Sadly, his speeches, on which Cicero mainly focused, are almost entirely lost.) But a read of his Commentaries on the Gallic Wars shows another virtue, which is the virtue of General Diaz's communique': a close interest in facts and matter, and an ability to describe them with the minimum of verbiage and the maximum of effect. Together, these virtues achieve a kind of dignified and energetic simplicity, moving forward at a great pace without ever missing anything of importance. This, to me, is the military style. It is different from any other, and while not all soldiers necessarily have it, it definitely belongs among soldiers rather than among any other group.
It does not even necessarily result in works of literary genius. The memoirs of Field-Marshal Guderian, part of which I read, suffer both from an excessive interest in technical matters that can only interest other soldiers, and from a naive, perhaps self-deceived mind, in anything outside his own field of technical competence. But they still have that factual clarity and simplicity. For instance, Guderian clearly shows all his naivety - or perhaps his self-deception - when he wishes that Keitel, the Army Chief of Staff, had seen fit to make a common front with the other army commanders against Hitler's worst orders; Guderian does not realize, or perhaps does not want to see, what is clear to every historian - that Keitel had been chosen exactly because he would obey any order from Hitler, and that Hitler would never have chosen any less obedient army leader. But having said that, Guderian's statement is bald and perfect: "when confronted by a united front, Hitler usually gave way". A clear, unarguable statement of fact expressed in the least and clearest possible few words.
It is not a coincidence that some of the most laconic and pregnant quotations in history come from military men. A perfect example is General Sherman's reaction to the offer of a presidential candidacy: "If nominated I will not run, if elected I will not serve". There are words as clear and sharp as a sword, intended to put an end to every possible doubt. And this shows us one of the sources of the military style. A commander must issue orders and be obeyed; but to be properly obeyed, he must be clear. An unclear order led to the Charge of the Light Brigade. Sherman spoke to the Republican delegates as he spoke to his subordinates on the battlefield, so that his will should be clear.
Another feature of the military style is again dictated by the experience of the battlefield. Not only must orders be clear, but they must adhere to reality. The commander must be able to understand the whole picture near and far, see with his mind's eye - and as far as possible with his physical ones - the motion of groups of men as they clash in indescribable chaos, and, measuring all events at one time, react as the situation demands. Hence that gift that shines in Diaz's Communique', and that Caesar had supremely, the gift to be able to take in the whole situation and describing it both systematically and dynamically, as an evolving whole. That is something that no amount of reading and study can give a man; only the experience of command and responsibility can frame a mind to think in such terms.
Finally, there is another feature of military command that goes into the military style. An army commander cannot hide from facts. An army is, in many ways, just another bureaucracy; but if a civilian bureaucrat fails in his goals or performs below expectation, he has an infinite amount of excuses at his fingertips. And an army is also like a corporation, in being a competitive organization fighting opponents as well as the power of chance and circumstance, and relying on its own internal discipline and skill and on the insight of its leaders. But nothing could possible be less like a military memoir than the ego trips that most CEO memoirs turn out to be. Unlike CEOs and bureaucrats, an army commander cannot pretend that defeat is anything but defeat, disaster anything but disaster, surrender anything but surrender. And even in defeat, perhaps especially in defeat, it is his duty to keep that clear and comprehensive vision that had been his peculiar requirement at the beginning of the battle. He must save as many men as he can, strive to disengage his units from dangerous or deadly positions, coordinate as much as possible a retreat, and evaluate the possibility of surrender. A defeated army needs its general more than a victorious one does.
That a general cannot hide from the facts, from the reality of victory and defeat, is in my view at the bottom of the whole peculiar dignity and simplicity of the military style. There is no excuse for defeat, no denial for victory; facts are simply facts, and they need to be seen together, taken in, and understood, without denial or deceit, without ifs or buts.
The war against Austria-Hungary, undertaken under the high leadership of His Majesty, supreme commander, by the Italian Army, smaller in both numbers and equipment, on May 24, 1915, and fought fiercely and relentlessly, with unbreakable faith and unyelding gallantry, for fifty-one months, is won.
The gigantic battle joined on October 24, in which took part 51 Italian divisions, 3, British ones, 2 French ones, one Czecho-Slovak one, and an American regiment, against 63 Austro-Ungarian divisions, is over.
25th Corps' sudden and most daring advance towards Trento, by closing off the path of retreat to the enemy armies of Trentino, which had been overwhelmed in the west by the troops of the Seventh Army and in the east by those of the First, Sixth and Fourth, caused the total collapse of the opponents' front.
From the river Brenta to the river Torre, the unstoppable drive of Armies 12, 8, 18, and of the cavalry divisions, keeps driving further back the enemy in its flight.
In the plains, HRH the Duke of Aosta is swiftly advancing at the head of his undefeated Third Army, eager to take back the positions they had conquered, and from which they had never been driven by force.
The Austro-Hungarian Army is annihilated. It has suffered tremendous losses in the stubborn resistance of the first few days, and lost enormous amounts of supplies of every kind, including more or less all their depots. So far, they have left in our hands three hundred thousand prisoners, including whole general staffs, and no less than five thousands pieces of artillery.
The remains of what was once one of the world's mightiest armies are climbing back, in disorder and without hope, the valleys they had descended in arrogant confidence.
The slight touches of rhetoric and courtier politeness towards the King (who is said to have been the one who chose Diaz as commander in the dreadful days that followed the disaster of Caporetto) are easily understandable in a document written in the exultation of total victory. However, what strikes one the most is the clarity, brevity and cumulative power of the communique'. To begin with, there is no sentence, almost no word, that does not add some piece of essential information. It is, to quote an Italian expression, tutto fatti e cose, nothing but facts and matter. And with that, it has the build-up of a poem. That is at the heart of its remarkable clarity: it is arranged with extraordinary order to a definite point. Starting with a description of the final move that turned the battle into a rout, it builds up by describing the actions of the Italian armies, moving west to east - as would have been clear to anyone familiar with the map of northern Italy - to embrace one by one the various units as they move forwards, coming to a climax with mention of the universally admired royal hero, the Duke of Aosta, the King's first cousin, six-foot-six of pure courage and chivalry, whose forced retreat in 1917 had been a bitter blow for everyone involved. The document closes with the picture of the annihilated enemy; without bragging or sneering - indeed, admitting that the resistance of the first few days had been dogged and valiant - the General again builds up his picture out of "facts and matter": the hundreds of thousands of prisoners, the whole general staffs taken, the entire enemy supply system captured (something whose importance would have been clear to every civilian in all the nations that had sweated for years to feed, clothe and arm their immense armies), the mountains of artillery that would no longer shoot against us. Only after these "facts and matter" have built up to a picture of total defeat does he allow himself one sentence (slightly ungrammatical, as someone observed much later) to describe, this time with a touch of emotion, the fate of an enemy that only one year before seemed to have put an end to Italy.
The thesis of this post is that there is such a thing as a military style, and that this communique' is an instance of it. The idea occurred to me when I realized how similar it is to what has been said for two thousand years of the style of Julius Caesar: that its deceptive simplicity manages to deliver facts and issues with such completeness that, as Cicero was the first but not the last to say, he left judicious men nothing to say. And bear in mind that this very high praise was delivered by a man who hated him, in a work addressed to Caesar's murderer. The quality of his writing was such that it forced itself, in his own lifetime, to his own enemies. There are few writers of whom the same could be said.
The quality of Caesar's writing was what Cicero called purity and clarity. He reported that Caesar had made a careful study of his own language, and held that good style begins with an understanding of the meanings of each word. That is all true and may easily be seen in Caesar's surviving works. (Sadly, his speeches, on which Cicero mainly focused, are almost entirely lost.) But a read of his Commentaries on the Gallic Wars shows another virtue, which is the virtue of General Diaz's communique': a close interest in facts and matter, and an ability to describe them with the minimum of verbiage and the maximum of effect. Together, these virtues achieve a kind of dignified and energetic simplicity, moving forward at a great pace without ever missing anything of importance. This, to me, is the military style. It is different from any other, and while not all soldiers necessarily have it, it definitely belongs among soldiers rather than among any other group.
It does not even necessarily result in works of literary genius. The memoirs of Field-Marshal Guderian, part of which I read, suffer both from an excessive interest in technical matters that can only interest other soldiers, and from a naive, perhaps self-deceived mind, in anything outside his own field of technical competence. But they still have that factual clarity and simplicity. For instance, Guderian clearly shows all his naivety - or perhaps his self-deception - when he wishes that Keitel, the Army Chief of Staff, had seen fit to make a common front with the other army commanders against Hitler's worst orders; Guderian does not realize, or perhaps does not want to see, what is clear to every historian - that Keitel had been chosen exactly because he would obey any order from Hitler, and that Hitler would never have chosen any less obedient army leader. But having said that, Guderian's statement is bald and perfect: "when confronted by a united front, Hitler usually gave way". A clear, unarguable statement of fact expressed in the least and clearest possible few words.
It is not a coincidence that some of the most laconic and pregnant quotations in history come from military men. A perfect example is General Sherman's reaction to the offer of a presidential candidacy: "If nominated I will not run, if elected I will not serve". There are words as clear and sharp as a sword, intended to put an end to every possible doubt. And this shows us one of the sources of the military style. A commander must issue orders and be obeyed; but to be properly obeyed, he must be clear. An unclear order led to the Charge of the Light Brigade. Sherman spoke to the Republican delegates as he spoke to his subordinates on the battlefield, so that his will should be clear.
Another feature of the military style is again dictated by the experience of the battlefield. Not only must orders be clear, but they must adhere to reality. The commander must be able to understand the whole picture near and far, see with his mind's eye - and as far as possible with his physical ones - the motion of groups of men as they clash in indescribable chaos, and, measuring all events at one time, react as the situation demands. Hence that gift that shines in Diaz's Communique', and that Caesar had supremely, the gift to be able to take in the whole situation and describing it both systematically and dynamically, as an evolving whole. That is something that no amount of reading and study can give a man; only the experience of command and responsibility can frame a mind to think in such terms.
Finally, there is another feature of military command that goes into the military style. An army commander cannot hide from facts. An army is, in many ways, just another bureaucracy; but if a civilian bureaucrat fails in his goals or performs below expectation, he has an infinite amount of excuses at his fingertips. And an army is also like a corporation, in being a competitive organization fighting opponents as well as the power of chance and circumstance, and relying on its own internal discipline and skill and on the insight of its leaders. But nothing could possible be less like a military memoir than the ego trips that most CEO memoirs turn out to be. Unlike CEOs and bureaucrats, an army commander cannot pretend that defeat is anything but defeat, disaster anything but disaster, surrender anything but surrender. And even in defeat, perhaps especially in defeat, it is his duty to keep that clear and comprehensive vision that had been his peculiar requirement at the beginning of the battle. He must save as many men as he can, strive to disengage his units from dangerous or deadly positions, coordinate as much as possible a retreat, and evaluate the possibility of surrender. A defeated army needs its general more than a victorious one does.
That a general cannot hide from the facts, from the reality of victory and defeat, is in my view at the bottom of the whole peculiar dignity and simplicity of the military style. There is no excuse for defeat, no denial for victory; facts are simply facts, and they need to be seen together, taken in, and understood, without denial or deceit, without ifs or buts.
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no subject
Date: 2010-01-06 02:43 am (UTC)Of course, it doesn't always follow that all do.
But what a terrific, terse and vivid text indeed!
Also, it describes a war of movement, something we never think of in WWI.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-07 11:55 pm (UTC)"That a general cannot hide from the facts, from the reality of victory and defeat, is in my view at the bottom of the whole peculiar dignity and simplicity of the military style."
Doesn't stop them from playing hot potatoe when it comes to who gets blamed.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-08 03:02 am (UTC)