Of all the supposedly civilised and legitimate activities pursued by modern man, Military History probably comes second, after Sport, as the area in which you can most easily get away with displays of blatant nationalist pride, prejudice and bias. In the case of Sport you can do this under cover of the plea that 'It's only a game' (regardless of how professional the whole thing seems to have become in recent times); whereas in the case of Military History the obscurity and distinctly 'minority' interest of the whole thing can serve as an equally good cover. Since very few people tend to read very much serious military history in a properly critical manner, very few warnings tend to be sounded about its often deeply nationalistic sub-texts and hidden agendas. Attitudes are often taken unconsciously which in other contexts would stand out as ignorant stereotyping at best, or highly offensive racism at worst. Only occasionally does this problem come to the surface of popular debate, for example in the heated recent controversy over how the fiftieth anniversary of Pearl Harbor should be commemorated - and watch out for a real humdinger over Hiroshima in 1995. Yet in these cases it is perhaps understandable that the issues should be contentious, since many people who are alive today were eye-witnesses to the actual events, and many millions more were directly affected by their immediate results. Although they happened long ago, they do not yet really qualify as 'history' in the full sense of the term. With the battle of the Boyne, however, it is different insofar as the event happened as far back as 1690 - almost a century before USA existed, and before the birth even of our great great great grandfathers. Yet some Irish people still feel so strongly about this particular piece of military history that they will parade under banners proclaiming it, and singing songs in its praise, while other Irish people will have an extreme disinclination to recognise its existence at all. The most direct attack against the battlefield itself (ie as an historic battlefield site) came in 1923, when the stone monument there was blown up with dynamite; [1] but many people have been killed and wounded in the parades since 1968, and the latest trouble over them came only a month before this present article was being written. Obviously it will be very difficult to write impartially about the battle of the Boyne if one is Irish, British, French or Dutch - or Protestant or Catholic - since all of those causes were heavily engaged in the struggle. But at least the reader will be forewarned that he is entering difficult territory, since the battle has retained such strong contemporary notoriety. With much of the rest of military history, however, this caveat simply does not apply, since the potent nationalistic feelings attaching to most historical events have tended to become hidden by the passage of time, thereby making the events appear 'neutral' to the modern student, even though in reality they are not. In some cases this can lead to serious misunderstandings, since what seems to be a 'neutral' and 'past sellby date'piece of military history to one student can still be highly charged with emotion for another. For example wargames representing the Second World War German army and SS are played very widely within the hobby community, even though it does not take very much imagination to see how they could be deeply offensive to some people. Then again, it was only last month that there was a storm of protest in the Scottish press against David G Chandler's innocent project to perform a full dress re-enactment of the battle of Culloden ( 1746) upon the battlefield itself. [2] To many Scots, that particular piece of their national heritage is too sacred to be played around with. Not even events as far back as Biblical times can escape this sort of reaction, eg the siege of Masada (73 ad) took on a wide new contemporary symbolism as soon as Israel started to build its own nuclear weapons, and analysts began to identify a 'Masada complex' within the Israeli national psyche. Indeed, the whole of military history (from Joshua to Schwarzkopf and from Kadesh to Khe Sanh) has in recent times come under fire from feminist writers, since it is a subject that has always been made by men at the expense of women, and is still studied almost exclusively by persons of the male gender. [3] One person's harmless antiquarianism can thus turn out to be another's provocative political symbolism but what are we to make of the very common case where a particular historical event appears 'neutral' to both sides in a discussion? At first sight it seems to be easy for two adult males to talk impartially and responsibly about battles long ago, in which neither feels any strong contemporary political emotion. If they disagree about what actually happened, they are presumably doing so for purely technical reasons - ie they have differing understandings of the original sources - rather than for reasons of ideology or national doctrine. That, at least, is a very widespread but very misleading assumption. In the present article, my argument is that a hidden ideological agenda - especially a nationalistic one - will almost inevitably lie behind even the most apparently harmless discussion of military history. Indeed, it is more likely to distort the debate precisely because it is concealed and unnoticed. In the pages of Empires, Eagles and Lions, therefore, we should make ever greater efforts to expose and under- stand bias of this type. [4] We must come to terms not just with the reliability of data in our original sources, but also with the subconscious spin we put upon our subsequent interpretations. The Napoleonic period is an excellent case in point, because it is sufficiently far away in time to appear ,neutral', and of no more than academic interest. Surely we can sit back and study the manoeuvres of armies 180 years ago without having to worry about the underlying politics? Surely no one today can still possibly care about what did or did not happen to such obscure figures as, er, the king of Westphalia, can they? [5] Why, not even Napoleon himself can possibly still be of interest as a continuing political issue, can he, to anyone except a few no-hope last-ditch Bonapartists in Paris (however interesting he may be for other reasons)? Such would be our natural first instinct; but it does nevertheless seem to be true that there is in fact still a wide continuing political debate about the Emperor, and this is admirably illustrated in Peter Geyl's essential text Napoleon: For and Against. [6] No one who studies Bonaparte can do so without looking at him through the eyes of some very opinionated observers living not only ' in his own time, but also in every subsequent generation up to the present day. He himself deliberately set up a cult of French 'Glory' which was consciously perpetuated in the Second Empire and became ineradicably linked to the French self-image during the traumatic period between 1871 and 1919 when the humiliation of the 'Occupied West Bank' was the primary concern of national policy. But at least inside France the Bonapartists represented only one strand of the argument about what had really happened in Europe between Marengo and Waterloo: they had to defend their views against various types of Republicans and Royalists who interpreted things in some very different ways. Within France there were several conflicting visions of what Bonaparte actually represented. Elsewhere, however, the Bonapartists sometimes became almost the only voice that was heard. To some extent this was even true in Britain, the supremely antiBonapartist victor of the wars. For Britain the wars were fought by proxy in most of Europe outside the Peninsula and Waterloo, so the general public had little direct experience of (or concern with) what had happened in the major land campaigns. The story of the operations in central Europe had to be pieced together later, and in the event this was done via largely Bonapartist sources. During the late nineteenth century there therefore grew up a rather odd brand of British Napoleon-worship which somehow managed to co-exist quite peacefully alongside the home grown (and hence naturally stronger) Wellington-worship. It was reinforced at that time by a growing perception that Britain might soon have to fight a very major war in continental Europe, so it would therefore be wise to study recent examples of major wars on the continent. In USA, which had fought as Napoleon's ally against the redcoats, the influence of Bonapartism was even stronger than in Britain, whereas Wellington's genius was somehow deemed to have been negated by a combination of the Boston Tea Party and the battle of New Orleans. USA was also increasingly being populated by immigrants who no longer had distinctively British-sounding names such as Winfield Scott, Jackson, Stuart, Grant or Lee; but who had new names from continental Europe such as Lochet, Zuparko, Koontz, Nafziger or Radakowitch. The family background of such immigrants was likely to have included not only wide and diverse skills in European languages, but also a direct encounter with the GrandeArmee (either within its ranks or fighting against it - or even more probably, both). Despite the extensive English-language literature of Wellington's campaigns, therefore, it has always been the campaigns of Napoleon himself which have dominated US thinking about the military history of 1800-1815. This national bias is faithfully reflected in EE&L today, where one can still sometimes be condemned for being British as if it were some sort of disease. [7] We must remember that Americans and Britons no longer even speak or write the same language. At the time of the civil war (ie the American one, although the same is true even more so for the English one), there had still been a considerable unity of phrasing, pronunciation and spelling between the two sides of the Atlantic. Since then, however, the two sides have wandered down ever- divergent paths, despite the best efforts of Hollywood to convert British audiences to American English usage (and to cast actors with British accents in the more villainous roles). A recent survey in New York showed that British newspaper journalists working there tended to come over to US readers as far more arrogant and aloof than their American colleagues. Although the British writer may mean one thing, he tends to be read by New Yorkers as meaning something significantly different - which is perhaps scarcely surprising insofar as Limeys are foreigners in so many senses of the term, however much common heritage they may share from the past. Conversely it was demonstrated during his presidency that Ronald Reagan, who to Americans generally appeared as an avuncular and comfortable figure, seemed in European eyes to be geriatric and uninformed to a dangerously threatening degree. Such cultural differences always pose a major problem to Napoleonic military historians, like myself, who are writing in England for the benefit of a US readership. This problem is two-edged. In the first place I find it is hard for me to be properly understood by my American readers, because I express myself in a literary style which happens to be foreign to them (and it is in a way even more foreign than Jean Lochet's lapses into 'Franglais'). For example in Scott Bowden's piece in EE&L#1 I know that I had already met all his objections to my theories in my original writing; [8] yet he has apparently not understood very much of what I said, and so still continues to condemn me for things he assumed I meant, but which I didn't. Secondly, it is often difficult for me to sympathise with what Americans are trying to say about Napoleonic subjects, because they seem to be coming from such a very different ideological direction from my own. I read their words, and am grateful that they are written in English: but I am sometimes astonished that they can ignore such vast areas of the particular subject they are talking about. To put this another way, I am sometimes baffled when they fail to explain their starting assumptions (simply because they are incorrectly assuming that all their readers will automatically share the same, 'American', starting assumptions). If we take the case of French Napoleonic assault tactics, it seems that Americans in general will tend to agree with Commandant J Colin [9] that the French relied mainly on firepower from deployed lines, whereas Brits in general will tend to agree with Sir Charles W Oman [10] that the French relied mainly on shock action from heavy columns. Your Yankee somehow seems to feel inwardly comfortable with a linear and 'firepower' explanation of French tactics, whereas your 'Rosbif' feels inwardly more comfortable with the idea that psychological shock was the true determinant. But why should this be? The most obvious explanation must surely be that, if it is really true that Americans value Napoleon and the Grande Armee more highly than Wellington and his redcoats, then they will also prefer more modern French experts like Colin to the equivalent British experts like Oman. So far so good, and it also seems to be fair to say that American society generally values engineers and scientists more highly than does British society. Therefore Americans will like to look to 'hardware' explanations more readily than do their more literary British colleagues. [11] More importantly, however, is the difference between the types of evidence that the two sides are using in their search for clues as to what the French actually did in their assaults. Whereas British historians will naturally tend to look at the large mass of eyewitness accounts of tactics, in English, which have come down to us from the Peninsular War, [12] US commentators will often look instead to whatever (non-English language) accounts are left over from Napoleon's campaigns on the Danube, the Po, the Oder or the Vistula. If that evidence proves to be frustratingly sparse for low level tactics - as it usually is [13] - then it will be supplemented by reference to theoretical drill manuals rather than to first hand accounts by British observers. Thus on one side we have plenty of biased but very detailed British impressions of what the French did in their Iberian sideshow, while on the other side we have a highly unsatisfactory mixture of poor eyewitness accounts from 'the big league', combined with a detailed body of theoretical precepts for what the drill masters believed ought to have happened. Clearly these two sets of evidence cannot fairly be taken as equivalent to each other, and each of them has its own particular strengths and weaknesses. The strength of the British evidence from the Peninsula is that most of it was written by lowly soldiers for whom the local details of their experience were personally very important. They therefore give us an authentic I worm's eye' view of combat, in a quality and quantity that is unobtainable in any other language for any other part of the Napoleonic wars. I do not believe that this point is widely appreciated; but I believe that it should nevertheless lie at the very root of our understanding of Napoleonic tactics. However, the weakness of these accounts is also glimpsed only dimly by modern commentators - namely that we must not take every word as Gospel Truth. When a British soldier says he was attacked by a 'column', he may mean nothing more than a line four or six deep (which is almost a 'regulation' line, if you remember that one or two of the ranks will consist of serre-file ncos). When he says he was attacked by '2,000 men', he will invariably mean at best a half of that figure. From Vimeiro to Waterloo the point has been proved so repeatedly that I will not labour it further. And by the same token, when he tries to describe what the French officers were telling their men to do at the critical moment, he is just as likely to be mistaken as when he reports the supposedly 'verbatim' words of his own officers (There are no less than eight fully documented - but different - accounts of what Wellington said to Maitland's brigade at Waterloo, when it was assaulted by the Imperial Guard). Against all this, it must be admitted that the strength of the 'continental' evidence lies mainly in the drill manuals. There, written out in explicit detail, and in many different languages, is the official prescription of just how an ideal army was supposed to manoeuvre on an ideal battlefield. But -just wait a minute! - this is also surely the major weakness as well, because surely everyone knows that drill manuals fall apart almost as soon as they are exposed to the real stress of real combat? Such a fate often befell the British manuals, as we know from the accounts of eye-witnesses, so why should it not also have overtaken the French, Austrian, Prussian and Westphalian manuals, too? The second major weakness in our evidence for 'continental' tactics seems to be that there really are very few detailed first hand accounts of low-level tactics, written by genuine eye-witnesses, which have been left to us by either the Grande Armee or its enemies - and that applies to 1806 as much as to 1813. We have political, strategic and 'operational art' accounts in profusion - but not (repeat NOT) many truly 'tactical' accounts. When I tried to assemble a set of references to the 'range at which fire was opened', a few years ago, I received about ten British examples for every usable 'continental' one. It was a very dispiriting experience. Seriously folks, I really would like it to be true that for reasons of national or linguistic bias - I have simply failed to locate the massive body of evidence for lowlevel 'continental' tactics that is probably lying around unreported and unexploited, somewhere out there, such as might equal the quantity and quality of the well-known body of British firsthand accounts for the Peninsular War and Waterloo. But after thirty years of searching, I am starting to lose hope that it actually exists. So please can you help? Whether you can or not, the main point surely remains that hidden nationalistic agendas are almost inevitable within the academic discipline of military history, since its subject matter consists precisely of conflict between warring nations. In order to study them, the researcher is subconsciously lured into taking sides. In the case of the Napoleonic period, that seems to mean a choice between the British of Wellington, in his small-unit sideshow, and the French or central Europeans (including many modern Americans) of Napoleon, in his big unit big league. I maintain that it will be better if we recognise these nationalist tendencies for what they are, than if we simply repeat them blindly and uncritically. Endnotes [1] Enda O'Boyle, The Battle of the Boyne (Duleek Historical Society, Navan 1990), p.45. [2] Sunday Times 'Scotland' supplement, 8th August 1993. [3] Some attempts to write feminist military history may be found in Men, Women and War, edited by T G Fraser and Keith Jeffery (Lilliput Press, Dublin 1993). [4] It was in fact EE&L which first showed me the extent of this problem, in the early 1980s - so my thanks for that go to all members of the editorial board! [5] Whoops! [6] Trans. 0 Remer, Penguin / Peregrine edition, London 1965. [7] Eg by Scott Bowden in EE&L #1, p. 13, although of course there are places called Bowden in both Devon and Derbyshire, and people with 'Scotty'-type accents living all over north Britain... [7] Bowden, Ibid., coyly refers to a specific section of my Forward Into Battle (New edn., Crowood Press, Swindon 1990), pp.31-37, without acknowledging the source or, apparently, having read the half of it in which I seem to agree with his own ideas almost completely! [8] J Colin, La Tactique et la Discipline dans les Armies de la Revolution (Paris, 1902), is a classic digest of the tactical findings of the Section Historique de IArmie de Terre just before the Great War, although it should also be remembered that some of the other works emanating from that fruitful centre of Napoleonic studies believed in the column rather than the line. Nothing I read in either the Vincennes archives or the published works of the SHAT convince me that French generals, even in 1806, were particularly adverse to making attacks in column if they thought they could get away with it. [10] The most memorable version of Oman's view is his article 'Line and Column in the Peninsular War', in Proceedings of the British Academy, vol 4, London 19 10 (and later reprinted in other collections). It is derived from the same author's A History of the Peninsular War (7 vols, Oxford 1902-30). A modern discussion is James R Arnold, 'Column and Line in the Napoleonic Wars. A Reappraisal', in Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research, Vol. LX, 1982, pp. 196-208. [11] Admittedly Oman himself made an erroneously firepower- based and 'hardware' interpretation of British Peninsular tactics; but in the case of the French he refused to fall completely into this trap. On the contrary, he showed both that the French always seemed to advance in column and, when they did try to deploy into line to give fire, it was usually only as an afterthought. [12] Readers of the 'Old' EE&L will be familiar with Ned Zuparko's profusion of tactical snippets, taken mainly from British accounts. [13] The point cannot be made too strongly that French accounts tended to take the regiment of three battalions as the norm for tactical descriptions, and the large scale of their operations meant that after-action reports were generally pitched at the level of 'operational art' rather than of true 'tactics'. Against this the British used a one-battalion regiment and appeared to be genuinely far more interested in the tactical sequences that occurred within it. Not even for the 1806 Jena campaign, when the Grande A rmee was undoubtedly far more skilled at drillbook manoeuvres than it would be in 1808-9, do we get truly 'tactical' descriptions that can rival the quality that was normal and routine within Wellington's literate legions. Back to Empire, Eagles, & Lions Table of Contents Vol. 2 No. 3 Back to EEL List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1993 by Emperor's Headquarters This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com