Book Review: Mr. Lincoln’s Army

[osprey_archer]

I’ve been meaning to read Bruce Catton’s Mr. Lincoln’s Army almost since I started work on Sleeping Beauty, as I figured it would kill two birds with one stone: it would be Civil War research for Russell’s life, and it would give insight into mid-twentieth-century America, as Catton was one of the most famous Civil War researcher at the time and probably the author Andrew would most likely read when trying to gain insight into Russell.

It’s also a cracking good read. Catton portrays historical figures in lively strokes, so you feel like you know them, which I realize is a quality that can be misleading - but I nonetheless prefer it to reading a history book and going, “Which interchangeable general is leading this charge, again?”

He’s also got a wonderful eye for the human touch in any situation. For instance, after three Union soldiers find Lee’s complete order of battle wrapped around three cigars, he notes, “It is irritating, in a mild sort of way, that none of the accounts of his affair mention what finally happened to the cigars.”

I also found his battle descriptions clear - well, clear is maybe not the right word, because part of his point is that it’s actually very hard for anyone to tell what is going on during a battle (especially a Civil War battle, when the gunpowder created an oily dark smoke that made it almost impossible to see what was happening). But he’s very good at explaining what the generals meant to achieve, where that plan went wrong (my favorite is the guys who range up and down a creek looking for a ford… when the whole creek is so shallow that you can cross it wherever you like), and what they actually ended up achieving instead.

A couple of passages struck me as particularly useful for my fell purposes. Here’s this one, which perfectly illustrates the different views of war popular in the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries: “Men would sing [“When This Cruel War Is Over”] and cry. More than any other possession of the army, it expressed the deep inner feeling of the boys who had gone to war so blithely in an age when no one would speak the truth about the reality of war: war is tragedy, it is better to live than to die, young men who go down to dusty death in battle have been horribly tricked.”

So you have Russell politely trying to spare Andrew’s innocence by only describing the fun, non-battle parts of war, like mock-battle snowball fights and stealing Rebel chickens for chicken stew, and meanwhile Andrew is already at “It was probably too awful for him to talk about, like my uncle who fought on Iwo Jima.”

The other is Catton’s discussion of the transition from smoothbore to rifled muskets, which happened swiftly over the first year of the Civil War, and began to march of advances in gun technology that ended in the slaughter on the battlefields of World War I.

“It was these ineffective old smoothbores on which all established combat tactics and theories were based. That is why the virtues of the bayonet figured so largely in the talk of professional soldiers of that era. Up until then the foot soldier was actually a spear carrier in disguise, the bayonet was the decisive weapon, and an infantry charge was just the old Macedonian phalanx in modern dress - a compact mass of men projecting steel points ahead of them, striving to get to close quarters where they could either impale their opponents or force them to run away… But with the rifled musket it just didn’t work that way anymore. The compact mass could be torn to shreds before it got in close.”

I’ve been chewing over the question of why World War I was the war that killed the whole dulce et decorum est ideal, when, after all, wars have always been bloody and lice-ridden and generally gross, and it strikes me that this passage suggests one possible explanation: dulce et decorum est survived as long as the kind of classical infantry tactics (that Macedonian phalanx) that originally spawned it survived, and died when those tactics met their definitive end in the machine gun.

(Why World War I rather than the Civil War? Civil War technology could mow down a bayonet charge… if the defenders were well-trained, and armed with functional rifled muskets, and had plenty of ammunition. If any of those conditions were not met, and they often were not, bayonet charges still worked. You needed a whole company of well-trained men firing at the top speed of two shots a minute to approximate the later effect of a machine gun.)

It’s also super interesting to consider the differences between Catton’s take on the war and the trends in more recent historiography. Catton only glances at questions of race and slavery (although he may become more interested in the next book, when the Army of the Potomac begins recruiting Black soldiers), but he’s VERY interested in the question of the relationship between a democratic government and its army in a time of total war - a topical question when the book was published in 1951, just after World War I, early in the Korean War, when it was feared the Cold War might turn hot.

Comments

[lauradi7dw]

Really interesting insight about the weapons, which brought to mind Harry Turtledove's SF book "Guns of the South," in which white supremacists from the future delivered AK47s to the Army of Northern Virginia, changing the outcome of the war.

[osprey_archer]

Yes, I've read that! Yeah, repeating rifles really change everything about warfare.

[passingbuzzards]

Arguably it wasn't WWI itself that killed that ideal so much as the aftermath, though! Adrian Gregory’s The Last Great War has some excellent chapters concerning the central place of sacrifice in contemporary (British) rhetoric and thinking about the war, as well as about the prevalence of volunteerism and widespread demand for more stringent measures to deal with people who were perceived to be shirking their duty. It’s a great read if you're interested in social history of the British home front, the focus on contemporary sources rather than memoir/oral histories is really good, much more indicative of the moment than works that rely heavily on retrospective

(That aside, surely it would be more fair to blame not the absence of classical infantry tactics but the overall absence of mobile warfare* + the existence of the stalemate condition in WWI? Which had so much to do with WWI being the only period in history where military commanders didn't have some degree of direct vocal communication with their troops! Prior to WWI commanders could still expect to be out on the field giving orders by voice, and afterward there was portable radio, whereas in WWI you had the nightmarish situation of the front being connected to high command only by telephone lines (which had to be lain out on open ground during an offensive advance and were inevitably broken by artillery etc.) or runners (who tended to get killed), resulting organization constantly breaking down to the range a junior officer could shout . . . Even notwithstanding the stalemate, it’s probably difficult to maintain that ideal in a context where higher-up officers can’t do anything to influence the battle and advancing troops regularly risk getting blown to bits by their own artillery.)

* with some exceptions ofc

[kore]

Ohh yeah the Battle of Loos, which the returning men told Robert Graves was a "bloody balls-up."

[osprey_archer]

Yes, there's been discussion in other entries about when exactly the ideal perished, and whether it would have perished if the aftermath of the war had been handled in a way that created a lasting peace, although as always with a counterfactual it's really impossible to say. Clearly for some people the war itself did kill it: Wilfred Owen wrote his poem decrying "The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est/Pro patria mori" during the war, after all. But on the other hand you've got things like Pat Beauchamp Washington's postwar memoir about how working as an ambulance driver was a jolly lark, including funny stories about learning how to walk again after she lost her leg.

I think that the collapse of classical infantry tactics and the absence of mobile warfare and the stalemate are all parts of the same phenomenon: war had suddenly stopped working the way it had worked for a long time, and it wasn't so much the dirt and danger of it changed the view of war (war had always been dirty and dangerous) but the fact that the infantry (and the high command) were comparatively helpless, which does not feel grand or romantic at all.

[kore]

dulce et decorum est survived as long as the kind of classical infantry tactics (that Macedonian phalanx) that originally spawned it survived, and died when those tactics met their definitive end in the machine gun.

Yeah, that sounds horribly accurate -- you can't rip a great number of men to shreds from a distance without a machine gun. ....that, and the gas -- after all dulce et decorum est is called "the great lie" in a poem about gas attacks.

[osprey_archer]

Yes, I think it's the comparative helplessness of men against machine guns/gas/various other bits of modern weaponry. When the army could fix bayonets and overrun the enemy in a death-or-glory charge, that was one thing, but once the charges became straight up death charges where you never overrun the enemy, then it was like, now hold on one fucking minute. IS is sweet and fitting to die for your country like this? IS IT?

[oracne]

The Crimean War also fits in there before WWI - sort of a bridge. Like, battlefield photography in the Civil War bringing images of the war to the homefront, and then in Crimea, there were reporters, who could telegraph their stories home to England. Crimea had early machine guns, and British rifles versus Russian smoothbores.

I hesitate to add to your no-doubt extensive wishlist, but Death Or Glory: The Legacy Of The Crimean War by Robert Edgerton is great.

[osprey_archer]

I will keep it in mind in case I ever feel a burning interest in the Crimean War!

I've heard pretty much every war between the Crimean War and World War I described as "the first modern war." The Civil War! The Boer War! The Spanish-American War! Someone has probably said this about the Franco-Prussian war, and I just haven't run into it yet. Clearly the weaponry/tactics were developing in that direction.

[oracne]

I have a whole Boer War wishlist...which I have not once delved into. One of these days. Maybe.

[osprey_archer]

Don't we all have topics that we keep meaning to delve into... one of these days? "I should learn more about French history and also learn French," I think to myself, and then read yet another memoir about the Soviet Union.

[lokifan]

In UK school history there's a lot of emphasis on the weapon tech changing, for sure. And that basically trenches + guns made attacking SO much harder than defending that attackers could be mown down. And as you say here, the helplessness of "wait" or "get mown down" is so deeply unromantic.

[osprey_archer]

John Milton may be right when he says "They also serve who only stand and wait," but let's face it, it's MUCH easier to make a grand and glorious painting out of an officer leading a charge, saber flashing in the sun, to take down the enemy position.