Among the very earliest posts on this humble little blog was one on Washington’s Farewell Address, posted on the occasion of its anniversary. In truth I’d not read it until then, an omission which I now very much regret. The Farewell Address must be one of the most extraordinary documents in American political history, and it is worthy of tremendously more attention than gets paid to it these days. It should, rather, be required reading in just about every level of American education.

For the moment I’d like to return to a part of it, specifically the following passage:

“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity. Let it simply be asked: Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice ? And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.“It is substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government. The rule, indeed, extends with more or less force to every species of free government. Who that is a sincere friend to it can look with indifference upon attempts to shake the foundation of the fabric?”

I’d like more specifically to drill down on the statement, “And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” Let’s just say that modern American public discourse is obliged to discount that thought. Religion, or perhaps better stated religiosity, is thought to be in bad taste at best, oppressive by merely allusion to it at worst.

Some time ago while ruminating, what I am pleased to call my mind began studying on the question of exactly on what basis do I require of my fellow humans that I be treated as anything other than an instrumentality. We’ve all heard of Kant’s categorical imperative, but I mean, really? If you, dear reader, have an objective and I am in the way of its achievement, by what right do I claim that you must, to borrow a line from one of my favorite Abe Lincoln stories, “plow around” me? It can only be that I claim some peculiar status in the world which you inhabit.

You say we are all equals, in some moral sense. How is that? Do we see non-human life exhibiting this same recognition of abstract equality? Or do we see, even among pack animals, behavior which cannot be explained except upon purely utilitarian grounds? The alpha male drives the juvenile male from the herd, to wander alone in a world in which he is not at the top of the food chain, until either he is eaten or finds another herd in which he can with violence establish himself. Males battling each other for the privilege of mating with the females, and the females not observably having any choice in the matter. Males preying on their own off-spring. The sick or the old or the lame abandoned to the predator. It all makes sense if you view those animals’ existence from an amoral perspective. Not so much if you apply Kant’s imperative as among them.

What is it that makes humans different? Why should you extend to me any greater consideration than you would a tree, or a rock in your garden, or raccoon who wants only to feed from your garbage? Turning Lincoln’s critique of the slaveholders’ racialist apologia on its head, it cannot be because I am your equal in intelligence, because as like as not you’re sharper than I am. It cannot be that I have some unique talent for any particular task or form of expression, because again, you probably excel me there and besides, on what basis do I assert that my talent for X is somehow more worthy than yours for Y? Strength? No. Leadership? Not there. Looks? Not even in the park. Am I more useful than you? Highly doubtful. No, the only this-worldly basis that I have to demand your recognition of me as your equal is because I can compel it. But that’s nothing more than a catch-all description of the lone male wandering the brush and forcing himself into a new pack, pride, herd, family group, etc. Or, even more bluntly stated, it is the proposition that Might Makes Right.

Thomas Hobbes famously grounded his conclusion that all men are equal in the fact that every man can kill any other man, for each man must at some point sleep. Very true, and very much of a piece with his characterization of the natural condition of man: solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. But that’s not an identifiably moral basis for asserting equality.

I defy anyone to enunciate a anthropocentric basis upon which you must address me as your equal and which does not on closer examination boil down to expedience or force (which is itself little more than a specific application of the principle of expedience). Expedience of course cannot be reconciled with Kant’s imperative. And what if in fact I am not useful to you, if my existence athwart your path is inexpedient to you? Oops; I’m not sure I like that outcome one bit.

No, if I want you to recognize in me anything more morally compelling than that raccoon knocking over your garbage can, I must refer to a morality that confers that claim on me from outside our shared humanity. That “outside” can come only from a supra-human source, from a source that we by its very nature as supra-human characterize as “divine,” as in partaking of divinity, the attribute we reserve to Him whom we confess to be God. Only by recognition of the divinity of God may you recognize a small portion of that divinity in His creature, in me. Small it assuredly is, but it is enough, it is a basis to which you can point and acknowledge my claim upon you for no other reason than the fact that I am.

I am. Only a confessing believer in a higher being can logically recognize that as being a perfect statement of claim. Without that belief you must necessarily ask, “You are what?” and adjudge that “what” to be or not be sufficient.

Or so I reasoned. Seemed tidy enough, and explained enough to me for my own purposes. I am no mathematician. My D and D- in two semesters of calculus resolved that much if nothing else. So I beg indulgence from those whose abilities in that regard extend beyond those of the great apes. As better explained in a book later on lent to me by one who actually enjoys theoretical mathematics as a hobby (de gustabus non disputandum est, and leave it at that) Kurt Gödel (rendered in English, happily deprived of diacritics, as “Goedel”) demonstrated that you cannot prove a system from within that system. I won’t go further into the particularities of his proof for knowing that I would misstate something, but suffice it to say that he showed that you cannot bootstrap a logical system. I was mighty proud to find out that my stewing wasn’t so wildly off the mark after all: you cannot prove up a logical system of morality from within that system. Kant’s categorical imperative seems to be a “big bang” analogue, but respectfully I’m not having that.

Washington was, in other words, dead-on right when he reminded his fellow citizens that the maintenance of a republic over time could not succeed without virtue, and that virtue cannot exist without religion. For without religion, without the acknowledgement of a mind, purpose, and power above all human comprehension, there can be no morality but only the expedient of the moment.

I’d also observe that the truth of the above can be demonstrated by observing the tragi-comedy of “international law.” In point of fact there is no such animal, because there is no authority to which the nation-states are willing absolutely to concede the right and power of enforcement against themselves. So we get treated from time to time to the spectacle of some professional bloviator allowing that such-and-so is plainly contrary to “international law,” by which is meant that Country A has done something to Country B to the speaker’s vigorous disapproval, but which will go entirely unpunished. The only source of “international law” is the same source which Chairman Mao identified as the source of political power.

I first turned my attentions to the Farewell Address in the fall of 2012, as America was about to go to the polls and re-elect to the presidency a man who is about as close to the antithesis of George Washington as a citizen could imagine. This is a man who, when asked point-blank in an interview to define “sin,” replied that “sin” was when someone did or desired something that was inconsistent with his own thoughts and positions. All the hoo-hah about whether he’s a Muslim or not is really mis-guided, as I saw it observed once: This is a man who does not recognize any being as superior to himself. He can have no religion because he truly believes himself to be a latter-day messiah, but the Good News He brings is solely that of His own advent among us.

Today, in 2016, we get to observe the spectacle of two candidates, one of whom is – barring divine intervention – going to be our next president, neither of whom brings anything to the table other than a firm conviction that he or she, as the case may be, is entitled to the office because. And neither of whom has any known floor below which he or she will not stoop.

Four dead Americans, one of them a serving U.S. ambassador? What difference does it make “at this point” that She lied to the American public, lied to the dead men’s families, about why those men died? They’re dead and her political party won the election; that’s what’s important. The formal representative of his nation to a sovereign country slaughtered like a wild animal and his corpse dragged through the streets? That’s just chaff, at this point.

A man who has bragged, in writing, about buying his way to influence with politicians? Whose entire public persona is built on the practice of saying or doing anything necessary to close the deal on his own terms? This is the same thinking that got us the Tonkin Gulf Resolutions. Those were built on fraudulent representations of an attack that simply never happened (don’t believe me? read In Love and War, the book by Vice Admiral Stockdale, who was in the air over the Maddux and Turner Joy when they were supposedly attacked, and who point-blank states it never happened).

Back in the day, when it first became undeniable that Wm. Clinton had shamelessly perjured himself in deposition about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, I had a conversation in which my interlocutor repeated the New York Times-approved talking points that it just didn’t matter because it was purely and private matter and besides shut up. I very vividly remember telling him that it very much mattered when a president perjures himself because the only thing that stands between us and – well, at the time the most prominent failed state was the former Soviet Union, but now you’ve pretty much got your pick – was the notion that when someone raises his right hand and swears to tell the truth, that he will do so. Without that presumption the court system is meaningless. And when the court system is meaningless, people will implement their own justice and seek redress on their own.

I refer Gentle Reader to President Washington’s observations, all those years ago.

As the anniversaries of Washington’s Farewell Address succeed each other, we the posterity to whom he addressed himself blunder on, heedless of his wisdom. Re-learning lessons tends to be more difficult than learning them the first time around.

 

One hundred years ago this past Sunday, in the early morning hours, hundreds of German artillery pieces, ranging in size from field guns to enormous siege guns, cut loose on the forts protecting the French town of Verdun.

The objective of the German army was, in the words of the chief of the General Staff, to “bleed France white.” In other words, as originally conceived, it wasn’t really so much designed to capture the town of Verdun – the Germans really had no pressing need for it – as to draw as many French soldiers as possible into a massive killing zone. Because Verdun was much more important to the French not to lose than it was to the Germans to take, it introduced a fundamental asymmetry into each side’s calculations. At least that was Falkenhayn’s plan originally.

Without boring Gentle Reader with a recitation of all the back-and-forth which reduced the landscape around Verdun to a pock-marked wasteland where the very soil itself was poisoned by the chemical residue of all the explosives, to say nothing of being an enormous bone yard, let us just say that Falkenhayn lost sight of his initial strategic insight, which was to break one of two Western Front opponents, by inflicting on it casualties it was unable to bear, enabling him then to defeat the other. Had he stuck to his original concept of the battle he might well have accomplished just that. The French were willing to squander any amount of their soldiers’ lives to hold that place, and had the Germans sat back and shelled them into oblivion while keeping just enough ground pressure to bear to make sure the French remained engaged, they might well have inflicted the kind of grossly disproportionate casualties necessary to make it all work. Recall that while Germany outnumbered the British or the French separately, they never between fall 1914 and March 1918 had overall numeric superiority over both together. Hence the idea of crushing one and then the other (this wasn’t especially original; Napoleon tried the same gambit in the Waterloo campaign, Jackson illustrated it masterfully in the Valley Campaign in 1862, and Ludendorff tried it in the spring, 1918 offensives).

But Falkenhayn, encouraged by the amount of ground and the number of forts his troops in fact did capture in the battle’s early phases, changed his objective. Instead of contenting himself with slaughtering Frenchmen at a highly disproportionate rate, he decided he’d grasp the territory. He of course managed to kill enough Frenchmen that, by the time the battle was over in late 1916, the French army had only one offensive left in it (the Nivelle offensive of 1917), after which time it mutinied and was more or less finished as an offensive force. But he also managed to slaughter a vast number of his own troops trying to take a place he’d initially had enough sense to realize he didn’t need to take. And in doing so he finished the German army in the west as an offensive weapon until it was reinforced with the troops from the Eastern front released by the Soviet surrender in 1918. The difference, as we now know, was that the horrific French losses, and the terrible British losses on the Somme in 1916 (which offensive was launched in no small measure precisely to take the pressure off of Verdun) were to be made good by hordes of American doughboys. Germany’s every loss was a soldier who wasn’t going to get replaced.

Put a bit metaphorically, Falkenhayn originally conceived the notion of tossing a hand grenade between his enemy’s legs from a distance, but then decided he’d just as well hand-carry the same to its target. With predictable results.  The battle blunted the offensive power of the western Germany armies and cost Falkenhayn his job.  As his replacement the kaiser ushered in the team of Ludendorff and Hindenburg to the top of the German command structure.  Once there they dug themselves in, so to speak, and so consolidated their control over Germany and its war effort that by the end of the war the kaiser was no more than a cipher, rubber-stamping decisions handed to him, passing out medals to the survivors, and going for rides in the countryside around headquarters.

With Hindenburg and Ludendorff in place, the last chance for a conclusion of the war other than one through collapse (by one side or the other) vanished.  Those two were true believers in ultimate victory; they believed their army could do anything.  It was the army which assured the kaiser that it could win the war before American troops arrived in large enough numbers to make a difference, leading directly to the approval for resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare in February, 1917.  It was the army which propped up Austria-Hungary as that nation collapsed in on itself after the Brusilov offensive in summer 1916. And in the end it was Hindenburg’s statement that he could no longer guarantee the loyalty of the army which induced the kaiser to slip across the border to the Netherlands on November 9, 1918.

On the French side, the “victory” at Verdun became one of the — I’m tempted to say “founding myths,” but really it wasn’t a myth — loci of inter-war French politics and society.  It’s no accident that it was the victor of Verdun, Marshall Petain, who was dragged out of retirement to head the Vichy government.  For a good treatment of the battle and what it meant to the France of 1916 and the France that survived the war, you can do much worse than this.

So the failure of Germany at Verdun has a claim to be among the most momentous results of the Great War, not so much for the tactical decision obtained (the French kept the town and what was left of the surrounding forts) as for the changes it wrought in the overall complexion of the war.

Verdun is now firmly established as part of that infamous group of battles in which the commanders blindly fed men into a meat grinder on the supposition that if they stuffed enough in, fast enough, eventually they’d jam the works and bring it to a stop. Loos, the Somme, Passchendaele, Verdun, Gallipoli, the Nivelle offensive: Their very names have become bywords for callous disregard of the human lives entrusted to one. The commanders who kept those offensives going for weeks and months after it was abundantly clear that there was no prospect of victory on any basis justifying the slaughter have rightly been damned by posterity.

And this gets me to a quibble about what I suggest is the historical revisionism of General Grant’s talents as a strategist and/or a tactician. Once upon a time Grant was viewed as a plodding butcher, a Douglas Haig with a cigar sticking out of his face. That view arose chiefly as a result of his campaign in Virginia from 1864 through the end of the war. That’s not the fashionable view of him, these days. More recent books tend towards a much more hagiographical approach to his conduct of the war in the East. I freely concede his resolution of the Vicksburg campaign was every bit as audaciously brilliant as it has ever been made out to be. But of his signal victories other than Vicksburg – Ft. Donelson, Shiloh, and Chattanooga – the first was a siege where he was ferried to within a few miles of his objective by the navy; the second was a “victory” only in the sense that he didn’t get his ass run backwards into the Tennessee River by the end of the first day, and then when he was reinforced overnight outnumbered the Confederates by a sufficient margin that they weren’t able to remain on the field; the third wasn’t really his doing anyway (or any other general’s, for that matter), but rather that of the private soldiers in the Army of the Cumberland (which hadn’t been Grant’s army in any event) who, at Missionary Ridge, decided they’d had enough of looking at the Rebels on that damned ridge and took matters into their own hands, driving them from the field in disarray. [N.b. The only two times in the entire war that a Confederate army was driven from the field in disorder – Chattanooga and Nashville – it was the Army of the Cumberland both times, under the command of General George Thomas, whose talents Grant apparently went out of his way to disparage, unfairly in the opinion of at least one biographer of Thomas.]

I will also give Grant full credit for understanding that the war was not so much about conquering territory as it was about destroying the South’s ability to continue resistance. This was an insight which seems largely to have escaped the powers running the war in the East. I won’t excoriate the commanding generals alone, because they were working under the intrusive gaze of the entire Washington power establishment. It might well be that, although any one or the other of them had it figured out, the geo-political reality of the relative situations of Richmond and Washington effectively prevented any such general from transforming that strategic insight into operational plans. Or maybe not. Sherman in the West also understood the war in that sense, but he then took that comprehension to the next level after Atlanta. Neutralizing Atlanta as a transportation, supply, and communications hub effectively destroyed the Confederacy as a going concern west of the mountains. Sherman’s sequel, the March to the Sea, was nothing else than a conclusive demonstration to the people of the South, in the most immediate manner possible, that their country had lost the ability to keep a massive army from strolling across an entire state, taking its sweet time to do so, and burning and plundering everything in its path. Any Southerner who did not, by the time Sherman reached Savannah at Christmas 1864, understand the war was lost had to have been singularly obtuse.

So how did Grant go about realizing his strategic insight on the battlefield? Well, at some point during the year, more or less, that Grant was in the East, someone pointed out to him that his army and Lee’s were like the Kilkenny Cats, who fought so viciously that each ate the other up. Grant famously observed, “My cat has the longer tail,” meaning, of course, that he could consume Lee’s army and still have some of his at the end of the day. And that is exactly what he set out to do. He was entirely willing to accept horrendous casualties (by spring, 1865 the Army of the Potomac had suffered over a 100% casualty rate) on the only condition that his soldiers in dying kept killing Confederates. Which they did.

And in the end, the longer tail of Grant’s army won out.

Were there other ways to have accomplished the destruction of Lee’s army without grinding his own into a bloody pulp? There must have been; there almost always is. Grant’s preferred method to keep Lee too busy hemorrhaging soldiers to get up to mischief was to keep him engaged, day after day, week after week. Sure, that works. But you can tear an army to pieces by keeping it on the move and denying it any opportunity of rest and re-supply.

Much of Lee’s strategic maneuvering in 1862 and 1863 had been a direct response to his inability to supply his army without continual fresh territory to plunder. He couldn’t stay in one place more than a brief spell because his men would strip the countryside bare, and the Confederate government had no way to provide him the supplies which would have permitted him to live other than off the immediate vicinity. By 1864 nearly all Virginia was stripped bare. Grant had the men to move on sufficiently broad and widely dispersed fronts that there is no way Lee could have responded to all of them and protected his supply base at Richmond (which was, in addition to being the capital, a major center of what little industrial capacity the South enjoyed). Grant also had the massive transport and supply systems of the North at his back. Is it so unthinkable that by launching offensives on enough different fronts he could have leveraged Lee out, away from the Richmond-Petersburg line, and forced him so to divide his forces that, even with Lee’s famous defensive capacities, his army would have collapsed by division, and all the while trying to live off land that had repeatedly been plucked clean during the war up until then?

Such a strategy of maneuver would have taken a great deal of shoe-leather, and not a few trains and wagons. But by that time the North was cranking out such things in quantities never before seen in human history. No. Grant chose the simple method of making Lee out-bleed him. In contrast, after Kennesaw Mountain (for a good working description of what that fight was like, read Ambrose Bierce’s description), Sherman never again launched his men in a frontal assault.

All of which is to say that I don’t buy the recent praise for Grant’s abilities as a field commander. As a strategist, yes. As an organizer of the movement of some of the largest field forces in history (I think Napoleon’s Grand Army that invaded Russia in 1812 may have been larger than the U.S. Army in the East, but not by much), certainly. But as a commander who understood how to accomplish his purposes by other means than drowning his opponent in his own men’s blood, not so much.

A good friend of mine went, a number of years ago, to the battlefield at Verdun. Large areas of the countryside are still pock-marked by interlocking shell craters. It’s grown up now, but there are still places where the soil is too contaminated to till. My friend went to the ossuary they built. As you might imagine in a battle in which so much of the action consisted of massive artillery bombardment, huge numbers of the dead were so blow to shreds that there is no way ever to sort them out. In many case of course there wouldn’t even have been enough for a burial. So they brought all the miscellaneous bones together and built a large hall over them. There are windows, through which you can peer at the remains of some 130,000 unidentified French and German soldiers.  As more bones are discovered each year, they are added to the pile.

My friend described the ossuary at Verdun as being the most eery place he’d ever been. I can image; it is not in many places in the world, or at many times, that such massive collective evidence in presented of the horrors of which mankind is capable. The liberated Nazi concentration camps would have been such places. The killing fields in Cambodia might have been. Verdun is another.

And so we pass another grim anniversary date.