Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power by Victor Davis Hanson Read Free Book Online

occasions could nullify Western inherent military superiority.
    Over time, however, the resiliency of the Western system of war prevailed, allowing horrible disasters like Thermopylae (480 B.C.), Lake Trasimene (217 B.C.), la Noche Triste (1520), Isandhlwana (1879), and Little Big Horn (1876) not to affect the larger course of the conflict or to lead to an overall Western collapse. Western armies often owed their prowess to brilliant and savage individuals like Alexander the Great, Scipio Africanus, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, Richard the Lion-Hearted, and Hernán Cortés, as well as to now nameless gallant individuals: the right wing of Spartans at Plataea (479 B.C.), the veterans of Caesar’s Tenth Legion in Gaul (59–51 B.C.), or the heavy knights at Arsouf (1191), whose battlefield conduct, along with chance and enemy blunders, often changed the course of the battle.
    Yet much of what courageous Westerners accomplished must be seen in an overall cultural landscape that afforded them inherent military advantages not usually shared by their adversaries. We must be careful not to judge the record of Western military skill in absolute terms, but always in a relative context vis-à-vis the conditions of the times: scholars can argue over the effectiveness of Western arms, the impressive power of Chinese and Indian armies, the occasional slaughter of European colonial forces, but in all such debate they must keep in mind that non-European forces did not with any frequency and for long duration navigate the globe, borrowed rather than imparted military technology, did not colonize three new continents, and usually fought Europeans at home rather than in Europe. Although important exceptions should always be noted, generalization—so long avoided by academics out of either fear or ignorance—is indispensable in the writing of history.
    As examination of these battles shall show, throughout the long evolution of Western warfare there has existed a more or less common core of practices that reappears generation after generation, sometimes piecemeal, at other times in a nearly holistic fashion, which explains why the history of warfare is so often the brutal history of Western victory—and why today deadly Western armies have little to fear from any force other than themselves.

PART ONE
Creation

TWO
    Freedom—or “To Live as You Please”
    Salamis, September 28, 480 B.C.
    “O sons of Greece, go forward! Free your native soil. Free your children, your wives, the images of your fathers’ gods, and the tombs of your ancestors! Now the fight is for all that.”
    —AESCHYLUS,
The Persians
(401–4)
    THE DROWNED
    IT MUST BE a terrible thing to drown at sea—arms thrashing the waves, lungs filling with brine, the body slowly growing heavy and numb, the brain crackling and sparking as its last molecules of oxygen are exhausted, the final conscious sight of the dim and fading, unreachable sunlight far above the rippling surface. By day’s end in late September 480 B.C., a third of the sailors of the Persian fleet were now precisely in those awful last moments of their existence. A few miles from the burned Athenian acropolis as many as 40,000 of Xerxes’ imperial subjects were bobbing in the depths and on the waves—the dead, the dying, and the desperate amid the wrecks of more than two hundred triremes. All were doomed far from Asia in the warm coastal waters of the Aegean, all destined for the bottom of the Saronic Gulf. Their last sight on earth was a Greek sunset over the mountains of Salamis—or their grim king perched far away on Mount Aigaleos watching them sink beneath the waves. Unlike battle on terra firma, where lethality is so often predicated on the technology of death, and not the landscape of battle itself, war at sea is a primordial killer of men, in which the ocean itself can wipe out thousands without the aid of either man or his weapons. At Salamis most died from water in their lungs, not steel in their