Category Archives: History

At Least They’ve Got the “Einigkeit” Part Back, Mostly

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Today is the Day of German Unity, the Tag der deutschen Einheit.  Effective October 3, 1990, the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, the DDR, or the GDR in its English rendering (but also known among a certain generation of Germans as the “Sowjetische Besatzungszone,” the Soviet Occupation Zone, or sometimes simply “die Zone”) merged with and into the Bundesrepublik Deutschland, the Federal Republic of Germany.  Once again, for better or worse, Europe had a single, compact (much more compact than used to be the case) mass of German united into one social and economic unit.

It would be idle to pretend that this development was welcomed universally outside Germany.  I still recall a college professor of mine, who as an infantry grunt had fought his way into Germany during the war, sort of wistfully (and not without an unmistakable note of satisfaction in his voice) observe that, “When I think about a divided Germany I get a very peaceful feeling.”  Even before 1990 West Germany was the economic powerhouse of the continent; what, one could be excused from asking, would be the effect of adding to them the further human and economic resources of a crew that had been conveniently sealed off behind barbed wire (literally) for 45 years?  Still today the notion of Germany as the 400-pound gorilla in the room makes some nervous.  The Italian prime minister as recently as this past week was actually suggesting Germany’s departure from the Euro zone would be desirable.  Too hegemonic.  Too prone to throw its weight about.  Pay attention to the Greeks and you’ll hear much the same thing.  Those dastardly Germans!  You ask them to foot the bill and the next thing they’re telling you that you can’t retire with full pay at age 55!  How dare they!!  And so forth.

What West Germany actually got was the headache of dealing with socialism’s corrosive effects on an entire chunk of their country.  The Ostzone has been at best slightly better than an economic wash for the west for 22 years now; at worst it’s been a sump hole.  For starts the public infrastructure was in a disastrous condition.  In February, 1986 I spent a week or so being herded around East Germany.  We visited Eisenach (home of the Trabant, a two-stroke powered (if that’s the right word to use) econobox piece of crap that was the best the east could do for a “car,” and you still had to get in line for several years for the privilege of hating your very own), Leipzig, Dresden, and finally East Berlin.  I paid attention to things.  Paint peeling, rust icicles hanging down, busted rivets, patchwork everything:  it was obvious that no one had been keeping the joint up since 1945.  Even the places they shepherded us (and you must remember that the commies spared no effort to impress western visitors; they very, very much put their best foot forward, shod as best they were able) were, with the exception of re-built historical structures, distinctly seedy.

You can sand-blast bridge girders (which I paid particular attention to) and paint them.  You can drill out rusted rivets and bolts and replace them.  You can wash the windows.  Etc.  What has proven harder, I will suggest, is undoing the effects of two full generations grown up under socialism, almost three.  The children born in, say, 1938 or later have no practical recollection of anything other than Nazi or Soviet rule.  They would have reached adulthood in 1958; their children would have reached adulthood in 1978; that generation’s children could have been as old as 12 by the time of reunification.  Twelve isn’t too late, but it’s deep into the third quarter of forming a person’s character.

Last year I went back to the former Ostzone for the first time since 1986; specifically, I wanted to visit the re-built Frauenkirche in Dresden (teaser: future blog post coming).  So I grabbed me a train and headed thither.  Ended up staying in a hotel just a couple of blocks from the train station, in a building that was one of the very few in that entire part of the city to survive the bombing intact.  But that’s not germane to this post.

Part of the attraction for me of riding trains is that you get to see folks’ back yards.  Drive down the road and you get to see the fronts of their houses.  There’s something inherently Potemkin village about the fronts of properties.  Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing; it prompts people to cut their grass, after all.  But if you want to see a better reflection of how people actually live, peek around the corner.  And no one who can avoid it builds his house or his business to face out onto the train tracks.

For those who’ve never visited Germany, at least the western part of it, one of the strongest impressions is how well taken care of the place is.  You don’t see broken windows, or boarded up windows, or obviously broken things just left as they are, or stuff left out to rust or rot in the weather.  The overgrown fence line or the barn thirty degrees out of square is a sight you don’t see in Germany (or, by the way, in parts of the U.S. that were settled largely by Germans . . . cultural DNA lasts, folks).  Even in the backs of farm houses you won’t see piles of miscellaneous Stuff lying about.  If they can’t move it indoors they’ll stack it neatly and lash a tarpaulin over it.  If it’s a vehicle or large equipment that can’t be put up they’ll park it, neatly and out of the way.  If something breaks they’ll either jump on it and fix it as good as or better than it was, or if they can’t they’ll tear it down and do something else.

The former border facilities (auf deutsch:  Grenzanlagen) — the watch towers, barbed wire and electric fences, tank traps, mine fields, and so forth — are long gone of course.  But it was still possible to note when one was in the old Ostzone.  Gaping windows with broken glass still in them.  Sheets of metal tacked over holes in roofs.  Roof lines as sway-backed as any broken-down nag.  Obviously vacant buildings surrounded by over-grown weeds.  Stuff and Junk left to lie wherever it fell out of the hands of the last person to drop it.  Things, in other words, that just screamed no one’s taking care of this.  Well, you can write some of that off, surely, to economic depression (but seriously, for 21 years it’s been there?) and the sheer cost of trying to fix things that were built pre-1945 and scarcely modernized since (just ask some university facilities manager what it’s like dealing with that wonderful august building that Joe Alumnus built for the school in 1915).

What you can’t write off is people’s behavior.  There are two market squares in downtown Dresden.  The Neumarkt, or New Market, is where the Frauenkirche towers over everything, and that’s a hustling, bustling, over-run with tourist activity venue.  They’re still building back the streets and buildings destroyed in February, 1945 and so a good portion of it is construction site, fenced off appropriately.  The Altmarkt, or Old Market, is several blocks away (the site of the Frauenkirche was originally outside the city’s walls, and of course the original market square would have been within them; hence the two markets so close together).  It’s much larger than the newer square, probably close to 100 yards on a side; among its features is a rectangular outline in red-colored stones, maybe forty or fifty feet by twenty or so (I didn’t measure it, so don’t hold me to that).  Between some of the pavement stones within the rectangle they poured molten metal, with an inscription: 

“After the attacks of 13 to 14 February 1945 on Dresden the corpses of 6,865 people were burned at this location.”

That location was one of dozens where they burned the corpses, but that’s also not really relevant to the post.  What’s really relevant is that at 7:45 a.m. on a Tuesday morning, on the entire Altmarkt there were a total of six vendors, hawking cooked sausage and similar things.  At that same hour in any sizeable city in western Germany you can’t swing a cat without knocking over someone’s stall of fresh produce, typically from all over Europe, fresh meats, flowers, local crafts, etc.  I mean, even in a city of starveling students like Freiburg you can’t take more than a few steps in a given direction for all the people buying and selling stuff.

Twenty-one years after reunification, in the capital city of Saxony, six measly guys flogging over-cooked sausages is the best they can do?  That can only be attributed to a lack of entrepreneurial spirit, and that lack can only be attributed to 45 years of ruthlessly crushing anyone who dared to climb out of the place where the central planners had shackled him.  Folks, the existence of two Germanies for 45 years is as close to a perfect experiment as you’ll get (the Koreas aren’t even as good because North Korea is a hermit state, sealing itself off even from its fellow commie states, and East Germany was the Warsaw Pact showplace).  Same society, same culture, same history, similar levels of destruction. Two different economic systems for a prolonged period.  How’d it work out?  How is it still working out?

So yes, Virginia, Germany has achieved once more the “Einigkeit” (unity) of the Deutschlandlied that remains their national anthem (one does not sing the first verse any more, of course); however picayunish some of their laws may appear to Americans (particularly the laws relating to freedom of expression and affiliation, which are aftergrowths of the Nazi era), they’ve got their Recht (justice) and their Freiheit (freedom).  But 80 years on they’re still working through the consequences of their embrace of state-controlled collectivism and tyranny.  Cultural DNA lasts, and so does social trauma.  It took America almost exactly 100 years to begin lurching past the living impact of the Civil War and slavery.  A good bit of Germany’s history in the 20th Century has strands tracing back to the Napoleonic conquest and subsequent liberation, and in some cases even further back, to the Thirty Years’ War.

Ideas have consequences.  We should be very careful about which ones we embrace and how quickly we let ourselves be tempted by someone’s promise to “re-forge” us, to “transform” us, to guide (and it’s always guiding us, as if we’re not capable of finding our own way into our future) us to the sunny uplands of some utopian vision.  We should be profoundly skeptical of such as promise those things, lest they mean them, lest our remote descendants spend their lives suffering their effects.

Sea Power and the Influence of Mahan, 1890-2012

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27 September 1840: Alfred Thayer Mahan is born. Graduates from the Naval Academy and becomes a career officer, but never is truly enamored of the sea. Eventually gets orders for the U.S. Naval War College, in preparation for which duty station he begins to contemplate Sea Power. And a pattern emerges in his head, which he then begins to pursue in a systematic, academic fashion. He digs deeper and begins to write.

The pattern Mahan noticed is one that the British semi-intuitively, semi-institutionally understood, although in typical British fashion no one had ever actually sat down and demonstrated its truth. What the British understood and Mahan laid out on paper is the fact that throughout history, when nations have got cross-ways and one had control of the seas and the other not, the outcome always seemed to favor that power which controlled the seas. Why? 

In 1890 he begins to publish the results of his research, beginning with a book with a rather bulky but self-explanatory title: The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660 – 1783. A little over a century, a long, miserable century later, we might add to its title (in the style Mahan himself would have recognized), “; or, American Sea Captain Lays Powder Trail to Magazine and Blows up World”. But wait, the gentle reader murmurs, I’ve never heard of this sea dog or his book. Sort of like the newspaper reporter who couldn’t believe Nixon won in 1972 because, “No one I know voted for him.” But most people have never heard of the benzene ring, either. 

What made Mahan so influential was not what he wrote – the British, as mentioned, had been practicing his precepts as part of their military-cultural DNA for generations. What made Mahan influential was who read him. More to the point, which one specific person read him: a gentleman who, except for his garish moustache and withered left arm, would not have stood out in a crowd . . . well, apart from the Pickelhaube. Wilhelm II of Germany bit down hard on Mahan’s argument and in a case of confirmation bias if ever there was such, found in it a theoretical justification for what he admitted (to the shame of his ministers) he’d wanted ever since he was a child: a nice big shiny battle fleet, just like his grandmother Victoria’s. 

The problem was that Wilhelm was in a position to do something about it, and in a textbook illustration of what happens when the wrong two people get put in a room together, Wilhelm and Alfred Tirpitz (the “von” was added only later), who rose to the top of the Kaiserliche Marine in 1897, brought out the worst in each other and Mahan’s ideas were the glue that held them together. Wilhelm wanted a battle fleet to steam over to visit the relatives. Tirpitz wanted a battle fleet because . . . ummmm, because in building a battle fleet he will cement his position in the hierarchy of the German navy, and transform it from the bastard idiot step-sister of the Army into something that was . . . well, in point of fact, that was both a strategic and a tactical problem that Tirpitz never really successfully addressed. A recent biography of him paints a fairly unflattering picture of a bureaucrat’s bureaucrat, maneuvering, back-biting, side-stepping, and intriguing his way around in the circular logic that is the species’s hallmark: I must be master of the Kaiserliche Marine because Germany needs a battle fleet (Mahan hath said) and I must build it; the battle fleet must be built and continually expanded because without building the battle fleet I will have no navy to master. 

Why, you ask, is all this relevant? It is relevant because of what it did to British foreign policy during the not-quite 25 years from 1890 to 1914. As late as 1895 and the start of the third and last Salisbury government, Britain still proudly pursued her Splendid Isolation. In a famous formulation, she had no friends or enemies, but only interests, which she pursued at her discretion. “Fog in Channel; Continent Cut Off” read a much-quote headline in The Times. To the extent that Britain looked favorably on anyone, Germany would be it. Their ruling houses were closely connected, their commercial interests in friendly competition, their overseas merchants respectable. And the Germans had kicked the ever-loving snot out of England’s hereditary enemy, France, as recently as 1871. 

Wilhelm’s Kruger Telegram of 1896 was a belch in chapel that rattled the windows all the way up in the clerestory. Wilhelm sent congratulations to the Boers for having fended off the Jamison Raid by themselves, “without the assistance of friendly powers,” thus implying that Germany would have felt herself such a power. Although Britain was profoundly embarrassed by the raid, and in fact had no direct hand in its planning or execution – it was one of the last great and pure filibustering expeditions – it was launched from British territory, British citizens put it together, and it caused a ruckus in what was, after all, part of the British Empire. Wilhelm’s gratuitously intermeddling, and in a manner which strongly implied less than hearty goodwill towards Blighty, introduced an element into relations theretofore missing. 

Tirpitz’s Navy Law of 1898, providing for the construction of a German blue-water battle fleet, changed the direction of relations between the two countries. Even more importantly, the Second Navy Law of 1900, cobbled together by Tirpitz more or less in direct response to the frictions the Boer War generated, was pretty much a direct and explicit challenge to British naval supremacy. For quite a few years Britain had maintained an official policy that her fleet should be superior to the world’s next two most-powerful navies combined. Wilhelm and Tirpitz and their political allies changed all that. 

“All that” changed because naval supremacy was to the British not just a matter of keeping up with the Joneses (or the Hohenzollerns, or the Habsburgs, or the Romanovs, or the Meiji). It really, honestly, no kidding was an issue of life or death to their empire. You can ignore a puffing and strutting Kaiser, especially when doesn’t have a combat fleet to speak of. As was famously said of the fleet (I think it was in connection with the 1897 Diamond Jubilee naval review), all one need do was open the sea-cocks on those capital ships and within a few hours the British Empire would dissolve. Challenge her at sea, in other words, and all other bets were off. 

All bets were suddenly off. By 1904 Britain had squared matters with France, in Africa and in the Mediterranean. Later things went so far that Britain denuded her Mediterranean fleet of its most powerful units to bring them home, and France shifted her major naval power to the inland sea. In other words, each put vital sea lines of communication and supply in the effective guardianship of the other. To put some historical perspective on this, England and France had been at each other’s throats since at least the 1340s (the Crimean War was a brief and, as one looking back from 1895 would have thought, transitory exception). The Kaiserliche Marine was the proximate cause of an about-face in nearly seven centuries of mutual hostility. When HMS Dreadnought hit the water in 1906, the race was well and truly on. Britain and Germany just came right on out and admitted that each was building against the other. 

Britain and France sought out each other, each to assist in their respective protection against Germany. Britain even snuggled up with the Tsar, much to the outrage of the ruling Liberals’ constituents who wanted no truck with tyranny. The financial stresses of the naval arms race brought about the “People’s Budget” crisis of 1909 in Britain, and the following constitutional crisis of 1910-11, which resulted in the emasculation of the House of Lords as an active participant in British government. 

By 1910 Germany was encircled in fact and not just in the Kaiser’s periodic fulminations. 

In point of fact it was the building of the German battle fleet (which a few hours’ contemplation of a chart of the North Sea could – and did – reveal to the thoughtful examiner to be without strategic use or even function, Mahan’s “fleet in being” concept notwithstanding) which prompted the creation of one side of those alliances which ensured that a major blow-up in Eastern Europe would not be contained within the Balkans or wherever else; that it would spread to Western Europe; and, that – critically, from the perspective of the war’s duration and strategic development – it would involve Britain and her fleet. 

In September, 1914 the Germans were stopped at the Marne, and they were stopped, just barely, because the left flank of the French army was not in the air, but was tethered, however imperfectly, to the British Expeditionary Force and the remnants of its six decimated, dog-tired divisions of “Old Contemptibles” (itself an expression playing on what the Germans had intended a slur on Britain’s “contemptible” little army; the Germans just never did get what Americans of that generation knew as moxy).

 The war was not to be won on the six-week timetable envisioned by Count von Schlieffen. It was not, in fact, to be won by the Germans at all. Long wars produce results “fundamental and astounding” (to borrow Lincoln’s description from his Second Inaugural) that short wars do not. The Great War ushered in the most calamitous century of human history thus far. Our present century may yet make up the difference; we’re not even 14 years into it, after all. But the fact of strategic stalemate on the Western Front, a fact created by Britain’s belligerence, was the cauldron from which spilled revolution, fratricide, genocide, famines on untold scales, and glimpses into the wickedness of human nature which really I think we’d have been better off not being vouchsafed. Some things it’s better not to know are there, however much you may suspect them. 

Irony of ironies, it was the British fleet which starved Germany into submission in the end. Her armies were falling back, true, in part because of American manpower pouring into France at the rate of a quarter-million untrained Doughboys a month (that sealift itself a product of mastery of the oceans). But they were not broken by any means, and it was only the infection of defeatism permeating the army, as well as simple human hunger for something other than turnips (part of what stopped Ludendorff’s spring, 1918 offensives was the ordinary soldiers’ stopping to eat, just to get a damned bite of real food in the captured Allied positions after months of ersatz this-that-and-the-other, all with a good dollop of turnip and sawdust mixed in), that lead the generals to tell the Kaiser in early November, 1918 that they could no longer guarantee the army’s loyalty. In addition to their own suffering, lack of supplies, lack of food, that defeatism was in no small measure a function of the soldiers’ knowing what was going on at home. Their families were starving, literally starving to death by the tens of thousands a year. 

They starved because Britain had command of the seas. Just like Alfred Thayer Mahan, born on this date in 1840, would have predicted. 

All of which has to make Mahan one of the most influential single individuals in modern human history, easily on par with Marx, Einstein, or Darwin. Were it not for the turmoils unleashed by Mahan’s most unfortunate fan-boy, Marx’s ideas would likely never have got a trial run. Einstein’s insights into the nature of matter would have likely remained the stuff of laboratory technicians (no Manhattan Project without a target for the bomb, eh wot?). Darwin’s insight into the biological aspects of the human species would compete with a commonly accepted understanding of human moral nature not forever poisoned by the knowledge of what we humans did to each other over the course of a century that by rights should have seen material and moral progress limited only by the 24 hours in each day. 

For a tremendously good read on Mahan’s legacy, I can’t recommend any better than Robert K. Massie’s Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War.

 

26 September 1918

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The Meuse-Argonne offensive begins.  In which the American high command singularly fails to distinguish itself.  Not apparently having learned much at all from the doings at Belleau Wood, the Army feeds men in, and feeds men in, and feeds men in, to assault carefully prepared positions, with inadequate fire support, poor communications, and scandalously poor staff work.  The result is America’s bloodiest battle, in terms of total dead and wounded over the weeks that it lasted. 

The French on the American right offered essentially no help.  They’d been ground down by the four years’ fighting and were just content to let someone else do the dying for a while.  In fact the whole offensive really didn’t accomplish much.  The German lines were not irretrievably broken until very nearly the end of the war, and they fed next to no reinforcements into the battle.  The troops on the ground just kept killing Americans, and dying in their turn, as long as they could.  Those same troops would not have been  sent elsewhere because that would have opened the German front at that location, so the offensive can’t even make that claim to relevance.  No:  What happened there was a helluva lot of American soldiers got killed for pretty much nothing at all.

We did get Alvin York’s story out of it, however, but that doesn’t seem like much to brag about.  On the less-edifying end of the scale is the story of the Black troops who were fed, poorly armed and nearly untrained, into the fight on the American left.  This was the segregated Army at its worst, and as usual it was the grunt on the ground who took the hit.

The story of the battle is extremely well-told here.

Friends of Free Speech, Bustin’ Out All Over

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Brought to you by the same folks who brought to the world the concept of Gleichschaltung as government policy, this observation by the German interior minister:  freedom of opinion is not without boundaries.  And because Beschimpfung of religions is prohibited there (understandably, given the particulars of their history), the government’s just going to have to examine very carefully whether this hack-assed film about Mohammed is going to be permitted to be shown in Germany, either on a nation-wide basis or locally on a case-by-case basis.  For the moment at least they’re not thinking in terms of a blanket prohibition.  But locally, where “Sicherheit” (security) and “Ordnung” (jeez; talk about dog whistle words) may be endangered by permitting the film’s showing, there may be implications from the perspective of German law on freedom of assembly.

Well, that’s a comfort.  Got that?  We’re not going to restrict your speech; we’re just going to prohibit you from speaking publicly to more than a person or three at a time.  Gotta have our Sicherheit and Ordnung, after all.

And here’s where the word Beschimpfung (the noun) and its definition become rather important.  Duden, Germany’s analogue of the OED, a copy of which I happen to have in arm’s reach, gives two definitions for beschimpfen, the verb.  The first is to denigrate “mit groben Worten” — “with coarse words”; the second is simply “beleidigen” — “to insult.”  But the latter is not, in practice, synonymous with the former.  To illustrate, if one publicly observed that the present occupant of the White House is with the arguable exception of Warren G. Harding the least qualified — experientially, mentally, and morally — person to hold that office ever, that he only holds it by result of a very concerted effort to blot from the public sphere all hard information on his personal actions, associations, and background, and that in office he’s run an administration that is every bit as personally corrupt as Harding’s, that’s an insult.  Happens to be true, but it’s still defamatory (remember that untruth is not an element of defamation; truth is an affirmative to defense to what’s unquestionably defamatory).  But if one were to go all amended to read: Sen. Byrd on our present Dear Leader, using every epithet that 300 years of racial animosity have cooked up, that’s to denigrate with coarse words.

It is easily understandable why Germany would prohibit the Beschimpfung of particular religions.  We did, after all, hang the editor-in-chief of Der Stürmer at Nuremberg, and that little rag was about little other than Beschimpfung of Judaism and Jews.  But it is simply logically indefensible to equate a film showing in an unfavorable light a specific historical personage who’s been dead for nearly 1,300 years with Der Stürmer or the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.  If that were true then every book, film, play, or speech denigrating Jesus (and those are enormously popular, in Germany as here) would likewise need to be suppressed.

Oh, but there’s a difference, you see.  Piss Christ can stay on public display until it rots, and the Christians of any country will not slice off anyone’s head, nor burn anyone’s embassy, nor torch any quarter of a city.  The difference is that the adherents of one particular religion, and only one, will do all those things and more.  When they annihilate Ordnung, it’s not they who ought to be rinsed off the streets with water cannon, it’s we who should shut up, stay at home, and mind our p’s and q’s.

What this sort of reaction from the forces of public decency does is teach a lesson:  The lesson it teaches is not “respect for all peoples and cultures.”  It teaches the much simpler lesson that Violence Works.  Two words, very easy to absorb and utterly destructive of civil society.  Violence Works.  If you teach it long enough, and provide full-color, live-on-your-television-screen tutorials in it often enough, you get entire slices of your population who internalize it, for whom a nice riot in the streets is precisely the way to get what you wish from someone who’s not legally or morally obliged to give it to you.  When the slices of the population carrying that lesson in their souls get big enough, you get 1933.  You get the Sicherheitsdienst (the SD, which was the SS’s foreign-service counterpart to the Gestapo) and the Ordnungspolizei, a key player in the domestic surveillance culture.

You get Gleichschaltung.

Pyotr Stolypin’s No Good, Awful, Very Bad Day

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18 September 1911:  Pyotr Stolypin, Tsar Nicholas II’s most only capable minister, dies the day after he’s shot at the opera.  With him dies the last faint glimmer of hope to reform Tsarist Russia. 

He’d made his bones, so to speak, in putting down the Revolution of 1905 and its offshoots.  He’d also made significant progress in getting the monarchy’s fiscal house in order, but his biggest gambit, and the one that might well have got him killed, was his land reform scheme, just getting underway when he was shot.  The problem went back to Alexander II’s emancipation of the serfs, and in fact to some degree even before.  Well, in fact way before, all the way back to the medieval land-ownership and cultivation practices.  Very simply described, land ownership in the village was in exactly that — the village, the commune.  In that sense the peasants were communists well before the communists.  And they demonstrated, once more for the slow-witted, the everybody/nobody conundrum.  When everyone owns something, no one takes care of it.  Russian peasant farming practices were notoriously wasteful of their land, and unproductive (hence the invitation to what became the Volga Germans).  Russian land ownership actively hindered any motivation to progress.

Stolypin’s insight — almost assuredly correct, although it never got a fair chance — was that what Russia needed was a class of independent, land-owning peasants who owned economically viable farms.  This required restructuring how land at the village level was owned.  The cultivated strips had to give way to contiguous tracts of arable land that could actually support a peasant family at something above a subsistence level.  True, he had to contend with the pig-headedness innate conservatism of the peasants themselves, but where his reforms were adopted the proof of the pudding was in the tax receipts, which began a noticeable rise, and kept on rising in those areas where the land reforms had been taken, all the way up until the war in 1914.  By the way it was decades after the revolution before Soviet agricultural output re-attained its 1913 levels.

To fast-forward a bit, the peasantry’s motto in the revolutionary years of 1917-18 was to be “land, bread, and peace” (can’t recall off the top of my head whether exactly in that order).  Pyotr Stolypin had started on the land; as the only really competent minister in Nicholas II’s entourage, is it too starry-eyed to think he might have been voice of reason, counselling that mobilising against Austria-Hungary for the sake of what we would recognize now as terrorists was Just Not a Good Idea?

The chap who shot Stolypin was not only a revolutionary; he was also an agent of the Okhrana, the secret police.  It’s long been mooted as a hypothetical that it was the reactionaries within the government who put the hit on Stolypin, because his reforms would have altered the ancient structure of Russian society: a tiny crowd of fabulously wealthy hereditary nobles standing perched, whip in hand, atop a ground-down mass of ignorant, starveling peasantry.  Never been proven, though.  What is known is that the investigation into the circumstances of Stolypin’s assassination was intentionally truncated after a few weeks.

It wouldn’t necessarily have been the very first time something sinister on that line had happened, either.  A recent biography of Alexander II, who was assassinated literally hours before he was going to promulgate a broadly reformist constitution, makes a very convincing argument that he was taken out by those forces of reaction.  Why, the author asks, was the Okhrana able to roll up the People’s Will (and other revolutionary organizations) with such ease immediately after Alexander’s death, when it had proven so incapable of doing so before he was killed, notwithstanding several attempts on his life, some of which came closer than others?  Russia has always been a land where nothing is quite what it seems, and it can’t be ruled out that Stolypin was marked for death precisely because he represented Change to a dying caste for whom Change spelt ruin.

Stolypin doesn’t seem to have been very widely mourned, which if true is sad, because however cordially despised he was, without his calming, mature judgment to rein in the monarch who really has to be one of the most priceless asses ever to end up on a throne, Russia had no anchor to stop her drift into madness and blood-soaked turmoil.  Had Stolypin been alive in 1914, it’s not all that crazy to think that there might not have been a Great War, or if there was, that he could have exercised some restraining influence on the bizarre fashion Nicholas chose to fight it.  With Stolypin’s organizational ability, he might have been able to organize a war economy just enough that the monarchy might have survived.

Ironically, in the “Stolypin car,” the prisoner transport train wagon of the Soviet Union (pretty much every Gulag survivor’s stories I’ve come across treats of them; they were hell-journeys) the communists paid tribute to the man whose death went a good way towards clearing their path to power.

And in a curious parallel, the man whose assassination — also by a cock-eyed revolutionary — was to light the fuse to the powder keg that exploded the world in 1914 was also the best hope of those who killed him.  Franz Ferdinand grokked that the Austo-Hungarian monarchy had to change to accommodate the legitimate aspirations of its Slavic and other minorities.  Stolypin’s reforms were the peasant’s best shot at climbing from the muck; Franz Ferdinand’s accession would have meant a massive sea change in the power relationships within the empire.  Both were shot by men claiming to represent precisely those whose interests were most devastated by their actions.

The man who waves your flag isn’t necessarily your friend.

The Timorous May Stay at Home

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The above is a Judge Cardozo quotation, but it applies with equal force to what happened at a creek called Antietam on 17 September 1862.

Geo. McClellan, through one of history’s truly great turns of fortune, is supplied with Robt Lee’s plan of campaign, and runs him to ground outside Sharpsburg.  As was almost always the case on all fields in the war, the federals outnumbered the confederates by a significant margin, and as was also always the case when the chief federal was McClellan, he thought exactly the opposite.  So McClellan holds roughly a full quarter of his force in reserve that day.  Lee is cut off from his base of supply, with his only avenues of retreat over a deep-water river (the Potomac), and McClellan can’t bring himself to throw the Big Punch.  Even if Lee had badly whipped him, Lee’s army would have been as disrupted by the victory as McClellan’s by the defeat (a dynamic that Ludendorff found was still true in March-April, 1918), and an army in hostile territory with no reliable re-supply does one thing in those circumstances:  it falls back on its bases and reorganizes.  All of which is to say that whatever the tactical outcome of the battle (barring a battle of annihilation, which seldom occurs on land other than a complete encirclement as in Cannae, Tannenberg, or Stalingrad), the strategic outcome would have been the same.  Lee’s invasion would have been at an end.  One can’t help feeling that Grant or Sherman would have recognized the strategic implications and fought the battle accordingly.

Even within the setting of the battle, there shines one blundering commander, from whom more was — unfortunately — to be heard later.  Ambrose Burnside on the federal left, with over 12,000 men and several dozen guns, was given the task of crossing Antietam Creek on the confederate right, punching through the confederates atop the bluff overlooking the creek, and swinging in behind the main body.  This was later in the day, after Lee had denuded his right to reinforce his center and left during the day’s earlier action, and so there were scarcely 3,000 confederates and a handful of guns to oppose the crossing.  Burnside sees a bridge, and everyone knows you cross creeks over bridges, right?  So he spends three hours sending units to cross that bridge and get cut to pieces in the attempt by the confederates, notwithstanding the creek was waist-to-chest high for significant lengths along his front.  Granted, getting the artillery across would have required the bridge, but (to quote Adm. Halsey) Jesus Christ and General Jackson! you throw your infantry across the creek, clear the confederates from the bluff and its crest, and then you can drag whatever you jolly well want across the bridge without having your men and horses shot to ribbons.

Burnsides’s delay allowed to play out one of those Hollywood-wouldn’t-have-dared-to-script-this-because-no-one-would-believe-it moments.  A. P. Hill’s division, fresh from securing Harper’s Ferry — well, “fresh” isn’t really the right word, because they had more or less jogged 17 miles to the battlefield, losing almost as many men to fatigue as they did to the federals when they got there — arrives on the field literally at a run and opens up a big ol’ can of Southern whup-ass on Burnside’s men, rolling them back off the ridge and down to the creek.  After which point McClellan, with a quarter of his army still in reserve, calls it a day.

So what, other than some priceless quotations (e.g., Thos. Jackson looking out over the remnants of his troops and observing, “God was very merciful to us this day,” which, if you take it to mean arranging affairs so that the opposing commander was McClellan with Burnside on his wing, instead of Grant with Sherman ditto, was strictly the truth), does Antietam have to say to us civvies today?  I’ll suggest a few thoughts as applying across all human endeavor: (i) opponents outside prepared positions, and especially if they’re on your turf, generally do not have prepared positions, ambuscades, etc. in their hip-pockets; (ii) fully-engaged opponents can be forced to neutralize or at least severely weaken such trickery as they have set up; (iii) even a tactical defeat can produce a strategic victory; (iv) no one ever won a fight who didn’t throw a punch; (vi) you may lose as much piecemeal fighting on a small front as you would have with a Big Swing on a wider front, but the former will seldom force a decision, and certainly not in your favor; (vii) know your own strategic resources, and exploit them. 

McClellan husbanded his troops as if they were all that the federals had between themselves and ruin.  They weren’t, not by a long shot.  Had Lee’s army been destroyed on the Antietam, however, Richmond and the south’s remaining war effort would have been doomed.  The stakes, in other words, were entirely different for the two sides.  McClellan commanded as if he were (as Churchill later said of Jellicoe of the Grand Fleet) the only man who could lose the war in an afternoon.  He wasn’t.  Whether McClellan’s self-perception was an outgrowth of his well-documented megalomania and self-importance is hard to know at this remove, but it’s perhaps no accident that Grant, famously at the opposite end of that particular spectrum, fought like the war was his to win, not his to lose.

All of which is to say that once again we see played out something that I’ve seen time and again, in both personal observation and from reading, from school-kids’ games to business to politics to military history, that what separates the winners and losers has every bit as much to do with character as it does with talent, money, advantage, or smarts.  In America at least, it is in fact hard to keep a good man down.

And maybe that reminder is what Antietam has to say to us, 150 years to the day later.