EpheS^Jg^^^i Alexandria-the-Furthest CAPPADOCIA C ARMENIA Cyropolis ^ Maracanda Halicarnassv^S^ARIA Xanthus VSoli^^—^I^us MESOPOTAMIA CYPRUsC-^^ / / J > r Gaugamela \ Nineveh^ \ A r b e l a MEDl Sidor Ecbatana Damascus 'f Alexandria Pelusium'^. X;;^, • ' - j The challenge was arrogantly personal; follow we - and remember how I have led you into action before - against him the contemptible Darius and his haughty b,ut hollow minions, and victory will result. After the victory of the Granicus, Alexander proceeded on a mopping-up campaign of those ancient Greek cities along the M- 42 T H E MASK OF COMMAND western coast of Asia Minor that had fallen into Persian hands. Hitler's dictatorship represented the most ! Grant understood that, as his handling of his first regimental command clearly demonstrated: My regiment [the 21st Illinois] was composed in large part of young men of as good social position as any in their section of the State. The abbot recorded that, 'we showed him his room. 'I have just learned from a reliable [runaway slave],' he telegraphed to Washington on March 27, 1863, 'that most of the forces from -GRANT AND UNHEROIC LEADERSHIP 215 Vicksburg are now up to the Yazoo leaving not to exceed 10,000 in the city.' Grant's Ohio birth was therefore both appropriate and at the same time formative in its influence on his outlook as an American. Hill, among his divisional commanders, was the only general to whom he both spoke and wrote freely. . He may have been cross with the King's German Legion light battalion for losing the farmhouse, or with himself for letting them run out of ammunition. Darius had arrayed them - there was not much choice in pre-gunpowder times - with cavalry on each flank, slingers on the right, and infantry in the centre, across a front of some 4,000 yards. He made no success even of working as a clerk in his father's leather business in Galena, Illinois. The combination's point of vulnerability was the hinge, hence the fortification lavished on ports during the early years of Mediterranean naval warfare. We have no word-for-word record of anything that he said or of anything that he wrote. As he finished each page, he simply pushed it off the table on to the floor. 'I didn't vote for you,' jeered an Indiana private, 'and I wouldn't vote for any damned Irish son of a bitch. T h e other is not much better . The phenomenon of the conqueror-Alexander, Caesar, Genghis, Napoleon, Hitler - cannot, however, be wished away simply because conquest is an exceptional result of the use of military force. Wellington, still watching from the ridge to the rear, though action was now intensifying near the crossroads, was acutely concerned. As had become his custom, he was wearing civilian clothes: a blue coat over white buckskin breeches, short boots, a white neckerchief. . -GRANT A N D UNHEROIC LEADERSHIP 179 'riding and fencing for civility, but constant parade-ground drill for discipline. He had crossed the sea in the teeth of Persian naval superiority, taken Asia Minor and the cities of Phoenicia. And since all were equal for electoral purposes, none felt subordinate to the man who took rank first in military formation and passed on orders from those higher up. To keep the regard of such men, the war leader had constantly to excel - not only in battle but in the hunting field, in horsemanship or skill at arms, in love, in conversation, in boast and challenge, and in the n?arathon bouts of feasting and drinking that were the hero's lepos du gtienier. 'There is not much difficulty,' he wrote in 1814, 'in posting a British army for a general action, or in getting the officers and men to do their duty in the action. That, and infantry musketry, held it at bay. Given that he was in the right place at the right time (perhaps called there by tell-tale puffs of musketry smoke), Wellington would search for visual reinforcement of aural impressions. But that, as his own description of his tactical system made clear, was at the heart of his method. The decision to do so was deliberate and the effort by which he achieved it intellectual. We have a record of eight wounds, four slight, three serious and one nearly mortal. Wearing an old brown linen jacket and trousers worn through by constant contact with the saddle, 'his very clothes, as well as the crows' feet on his brow, bore testimony to the strenuousness of the life he was living'. Greek states were frequently at war with each other; indeed Greek political theory held the 'state of war' to be the normal relationship between neighbours. 'They stood,' says Arrian, 'rather rooted to the spot by the unexpected catastrophe than from serious resolution.' The Sedan crossing was to lead, of course, to the Blitzkrieg of France. This was the nearest approach to a "council of war" that I ever held.' Alexander was a king, Wellington a gentleman, perhaps the mosl perfect embodiment of the gentlemanly ideal England has ever produced. .His technique, though characterized above all by violent, impetuous and apparently unreflecting action, was by no means entirely impulsive. The position was immensely strong and Darius may be excused for believing it impregnable. all Frenchmen shall be soldiers; all shall be trained in the handling of arms.' Gordon was dying in the Duke's bed, de Lancey not far away. . He slept, for example, hardly at all. He remained there for the next two hours, watching the course of the fighting from the buildings and sending forward reinforcements as he judged he must. It was even better sense to keep his speech before battle short. 'Alexander fulfilled it to the letter. A ieminoroents^'^ r^^ ''^'{i resolution at Gaugamela might have spared him all the indignity and / suttering that lay ahead. That, in essence, was 'taking trouble'. Others farther away, particularly the formidable Illyrians of the north-west, living in and near what is today Albania, seem to have been provoked by the news of Alexander's repressions to challenge his right to impose the Macedonian peace. Wellington's Army 'There,' said Wellington, sitting in the park at Brussels two weeks before Waterloo, and answering Creevey's question about how well he hoped the coming campaign would go, 'it all depends upon that article whether we do the business or not.' And its available military force, of which European troops formed but a fraction, was a far weaker instrument than the homogeneous Macedonian-Greek army at Alexander's disposal. They must have streamed off to the flanks leaving their Greek mercenary comrades on the ridge behind to fend for themselves. The first shots he heard that day, however, were 'friendly', fired by some of his allied troops, Nassauers, who did not relish being disturbed at breakfast and chivvied into the line. Fuller, who had served with cavalry on the dusty plains of India, argues that Alexander often commanded inside a haze impenetrable at a few yards, the dust upthrown by horses' hooves cannot limit vision to the same extent as gunpowder smoke, which 6ften hid combatants from each other as if in a London pea-souper. . While making his refusal, he was brought the news that La Haye Sainte had fallen. They were equally ignored by Alexander. The Macedonians had followed en masse and were pressing the Persians back by weight of numbers and frantic determination. Surgeon James, of the Household Cavalry, also thought they looked as if they were 'riding for pleasure'. And that dislike was heightened, in the military context, by the extra dimension of danger that their skills added to the risks infantrymen and cavalrymen had always run on the battlefield. They went about officering themselves in a uniquely American way. This to Lord Mahon in 1831: to his confidant Lord Stanhope he reflected in 1840 that his army at Waterloo was 'an WELLINGTON: THE ANTI-HERO 127 infamously b a ^ n e - and the enemy knew it. Wellington really did not seem to love his soldiers, or perhaps even to know them. There were, of course, routine matters that he left to subordinates: finance and officers' appointments (though he made the choice) to the military secretary, supply (though he was adamant about requirements) to the commissary-general, personnel to the adjutant-general and so on. 0000001132 00000 n Clausewitz also belongs in context, though he is rarely put there. 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