Review Essay - The Soldier: A History of Courage, Sacrifice and Brotherhood by Darren Moore
The Soldier: A History of Courage, Sacrifice and Brotherhood,
Written by: Darren Moore,
Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd, Crows Nest, Australia, 2009,
ISBN 9781848310797.
Reviewed by: David Goyne, Strategic Policy Division, Department of Defence
‘... man is the fundamental instrument in battle’ according to the nineteenth century French infantryman, Charles Ardant du Picq, who added, ‘Nothing can wisely be prescribed in an army—its personnel, organisation, discipline and tactics, things which are connected like the fingers of a hand—without exact knowledge of the fundamental instrument, man, and his state of mind, his morale, at the instant of combat.’1 Despite this realisation, it surprises me how little we know about soldiers in battle. We teach soldiers how to use their weapons and how to operate tactically, but we are still poor at teaching them how to understand their own reactions to combat and how to manage these, at least in so far as they can be managed.
Partly this is because there is little written to guide us. Only a few significant books have been written on this subject. Notable examples are Men Against Fire by S L A Marshall,2 one of the first; The Anatomy of Courage by Lord Moran,3 another pioneer work; The Warriors by J Glenn Gray,4 which is as much about the philosophy of men in war; The Sharp End of War by John Ellis,5 about the soldier’s experience in the Second World; Firing Line by Richard Holmes;6 and most recently On Killing by Dave Grossman,7 which deals with the psychology of killing in war. All of these serve to illuminate at least some aspects of man in battle; none are sufficient alone. This is surely a limited, if not exhaustive, list. If I was to try to catalogue instead books on the German Army in the Second World War, or the SAS, or the merits of different tanks, all the Army journals published this year would not be sufficient room. I don’t decry books on these subjects, but this balance only highlights how poorly the soldier in battle is addressed. Surely logistics is the only other field so poorly covered.
A new book, The Soldier, by a former Australian Army officer, Darren Moore, has joined this short list and is not the least ambitious, covering the soldier’s experience from the Napoleonic wars until today. Its scope is also broad, addressing the relationship of the soldier and the state, recruitment, preparation for battle, the physical and psychological costs of battle, the relationship of war and sex, killing, media-military relations and the rationale—or lack of it—for war. The central act of soldiers killing is extensively covered with chapters on killing the enemy, friendly fire and military executions. This is a broad canvas and the question is, how does Moore cover it, and how well?
His methodology is to draw on personal experiences from published reminisces. He uses an impressive range of books, many of which were new to me. This approach depends on the judicious selection of who and what to quote. Here Martin Windrow’s comment in his history of the French Foreign Legion is apposite:
‘... I am all too conscious that junior ranks frequently tell lies about their own lives—on the page, as well as in the pub.... I have allowed a discount not only for lapses of memory, but also for the tendency of story-tellers or their ghost-writers to reshape, embroider, or simply invent in order to give the public of their day the type of material that they expected. Some cross-checking has occasionally been possible, but in the end the sifting process can only be a matter of reasoned guesswork.’8
Generally, Moore’s reasoned guesswork seems about right. Any empirical research is limited as a battlefield is not a controlled experiment. Du Picq circulated questionnaires to fellow officers, but was forced to rely as much on Greek and Roman classics on war. S L A Marshall could have used his mass battlefield interviews for an empirical approach, but that did not suit his more intuitive and journalistic nature.9 The only modern widely based empirical study I am aware of is the Second World War volumes by S A Stouffer and his colleagues based on questionnaires to US soldiers.10
An area of caution with Moore’s approach concerns the commonality of the soldier’s experience across time, armies and cultures. At one level the experience of fear, pain and physical stress is ageless; Homer writing of battle on the ringing plains of windy Troy still resonates. On the other hand, I am cautious that the attitudes of, for example, a British soldier of the Napoleonic wars may not match those of a modern Australian or Western soldier. Changing cultures have remoulded expectations and attitudes to war. Similarly, the motivations and attitudes of Japanese kamikazes or modern suicide bombers are alien to mine. Each reader will have to judge for themselves this universal approach of The Soldier.
Moore’s wide scope means that he sometimes stretches himself thin compounded by his coverage of marginal areas, for example, executing comrades is a limited experience and gains undue proportion here. However, I fully endorse his coverage of love and sex. These are central to the soldier’s desires and experience and are too often ignored. In war soldiers crave and seek out a female touch, not necessarily even in a sexual sense, as a link to a softer world beyond his immediate experience.
If you are interested in man in battle this book is well worth your time. It is not the final word on this topic; attempting to comprehensively distil the soldier’s experience must fail in the face of the range of experience of the millions of soldiers there have been. Moore brings an Australian perspective to The Soldier, but I was pleased that he did not restrict himself to one national experience—this is rightly far from a chest-beating volume. Moore is pursuing a PhD at the University of New South Wales. I hope he continues to interest himself in and write on this area. We need more thinking on the fundamental instrument of battle.
Endnotes
1 Charles Ardant du Picq, Battle Studies; Ancient and Modern Battle in Curtis Brown (ed), Roots of Strategy Volume 2, Stackpole Books, Pennsylvania, 1987, p. 65. Ardant du Picq and this review uses the term ‘man’. I recognise that today, and at times historically, this includes women.
2 S L A Marshall, Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command, University of Oklahoma Press, Oklahoma, 2000.
3 Lord Moran, The Anatomy of Courage, Constable, London, 2007.
4 J Glenn Gray, The Warriors: Reflections on Men In Battle, University of Nebraska Press, Nebraska, 1998.
5 John Ellis, The Sharp End of War: The Fighting Man in World War II, David & Charles, Newton Abbot, 1980.
6 Richard Holmes, Firing Line, Jonathan Cape, London, 1985.
7 Dave Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1995.
8 Martin Windrow, Our Friends Beneath the Sands: The Foreign Legion in France’s Colonial Conquests 1870–1935, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 2010, p. liii.
9 Marshall’s free use of statistics led to controversy about his conclusions.
10 S A Stouffer, et al, The American Soldier, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1949.
