A Christmas Carol

The “Holiday Season” had come to San Francisco, cool gray city of love, bringing with it thundering rains and icy blasts from off the Pacific. I had been working the Yerba Buena Housing Project, known to its residents of the “Pink Palace,” for almost six months, part of a “special detail” put together in an ad-hock sort of way by the San Francisco Housing Police as an excersize in public relations. What in the Army we use to call “eye wash.”

It helps if you think “Police Academy” meets “New Jack City.”

Poorly trained, poorly equipped and barely supported by the city’s thirteen other police departments, our chief goal was to go home alive after our shift each night. Just how little support we could count on was dramatically demonstrated to me the first week I was on the job. I had heard gunfire and called in a report.

The dispatcher seemed more than a little offended at having his time wasted by such a trivial matter and hotly informed me that I was not to bother him again unless I had a dead body on the ground. Come to think of it I don’t think he used the term “body.”

I don’t know why many of my fellow officers were there; some were barely distinguishable from the gang bangers we had to deal with. One guy was a pimp, and proud of it. He would show up for work in a gold colored Cadillac with his “ladies” (again, memory fails me but I don’t think he used the term ladies) and they would set up business in some of the abandoned apartments that riddled the housing project.

After a while I got to understand what was important and what was not. Robbery and assault? Important. Drugs and prostitution? Not so much.

I was there in the hopes of putting together a photo portfolio that would help me break into documentary photography. I always carried a camera slung by a strap under my armpit and hidden by my windbreaker. I had made a point of explaining to the residents why I carried it and that it was not worth a whole lot of money. I would make up 5x7’s or 8x10’s of my better pictures and give them out to the people I had photographed, in part to curry favor and in part so that they would know I wasn’t trying to bust anyone. I got to know a lot of the more prominent citizens of the project on a first name basis and had a nodding acquaintance with many of the rest.

There was one old man who in no way stood out from the others, other than he seemed a little more lonely and a little more friendly than most of the others. He would smile at anyone who would smile at him, and many who would not, and if you weren’t quick on your feet he would corner you and try to strike up a conversation. He was a bit of a bore and to my shame I cannot remember his name.

The upper floors of the Pink Palace were a jungle where most of the apartments had been abandoned and crime was rampant. It wasn’t as though there was any lack of applicants to live in the apartments; the city had long waiting lists of people who were desperate for housing. However, the Housing Department had strict rules that forbade any apartment from being rented until it was up to code. The city’s Public Works Department also had strict rules as to who could do the work to bring those apartments up to code, their people and no one else.

The trouble was that they could only spare enough workers to fix up one or two apartments at a time, and the work would usually take days to complete. However, there was a large constituency for keeping these apartments abandoned, made up of drug dealers, prostitutes, homeless people (who could sneak in at night for a warm place to sleep) and kids who just wanted someplace to play where adults weren’t watching them all the time.

These people saw to it that just before work on an apartment was completed it would be thoroughly vandalized and work would have to start again at square one. The whole thing was a bureaucratic perpetual motion machine

.

However, some people did manage to live in this wilderness of abandoned apartments, crack houses and dens of prostitution, and one of them was that friendly old fellow. One day as I was patrolling the upper floor balconies that served as hallways for the housing project I noticed that he had decorated his window for the holidays.

He had whited out the window and painted “Seasons Greetings” and “Peace” surrounded by crudely drawn bells, stars and other seasonal decorations. What caught my photographer’s eye was not the quality of the decorations but the incongruity of such a message sheltering behind iron security bars, so I pulled my camera from under my jacket and took a few shots. Later I developed the pictures and filed the negatives away.

Christmas and then New Years came and went with only a few drunken brawls and one knifing. After the holidays I was able to get two weeks vacation, which I badly needed by then.

Mrs. Heurea (her I remember) was one of the “movers and shakers” of the Pink Palace world, a perpetual squeaky wheel who was always clamoring for more oil. Like the rest of my fellow officers I avoided her whenever possible but on the day I got back from my time off she cornered me and demanded that I investigate a bad smell in her apartment.

I could smell it as soon as I walked in. It smelled like a rat had crawled into the walls and died. I knocked on a few doors of the surrounding apartments and sure enough everyone could smell it but most of them had not bothered to complain. These were the projects, after all, and bad smells were pretty common.

I went up a floor and went into some of the abandoned apartments thinking that if we were lucky the rat had died in one of them, which would greatly simplify the cleanup process. Finally I came to the door of the friendly fellow and knocked. I knew I was getting close because the smell was getting really bad.

There was no answer. I knocked again. Then I asked some of the residents if they had seen the fellow around lately. They had not. I did not like the suspicion that was beginning to form in my mind.

I called my watch commander on my radio and he told me to kick in the door. I did, and had to stagger back as a wall of stench hit me like a two by four between the eyes. From inside came a roaring buzz from flies and other insects. Holding my breath I stepped in the front door and saw him sprawled on the floor in the middle of the living room. Decaying flesh and puddles of oozing liquids left no doubt he was dead. My partner Violet, walked in, took one look at what was on the floor, walked out to the balcony and threw up over the side.

Well I had met the criteria that had been laid down in my first week and I called for City Police back up. From then on it was out of my hands.

Christmas is often seen as a time for family and friends, for parties, presents and celebrations, but for many it is the loneliest time of the year. Each year, as Christmas approaches, I dig out that old photo of the window, put on that “cheesy song” by Band Aid and read what I find are some of the most moving lines in the Bible, Matthew 25:31-46.

You can read the rest for yourself but I will give you the kernel of the nut:

"Then he will say to those on his left, 'Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.'

"They also will answer, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?'

"He will reply, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.'

And with that I wish “Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night.”

Brainy art hiding inside a Michelangelo classic

Understanding art is often a matter of seeing the symbols that the artist uses to convey their message and perhaps the inside jokes he or she are playing on their audience. Scientists have found the image of the brain in a classic art piece.

Many who have looked at Michelangelo's "creation of Adam" on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel have thought that the drapery behind the image of God bore a suspicious resemblance to a human brain.

Now four respected scientists are claiming that the shape is not just decoration but rather an artistic representation of a cross section of the sagittal section of the brain.

This idea was first suggested by FL Meshberger but he has since been joined in this hypothesis by Antonio Belli, Alessandro Paluzzi, Peter Bain and Laura Viva. They have also suggested that Michelangelo was not the only artist to have played this trick on their audience.

Explaining how he came to this conclusion Alessandro Paluzzi said:

"The idea came to me while looking at Raffaello's Transfiguration. Being a neurosurgeon I could immediately see a brain in the painting"

What the general public sees.


What Paluzzi and his colleagues think that they see. The right hand photo is a cross section of the human brain.

The scientist claim to have found many other examples of the human brain hidden in Renaissance art. It has long been known that Michelangelo, like many other artist of his time, often took part in dissections of human corpses, a practice frowned on by the church.

It is the opinion of the four scientist that many of these artist were enthralled by their scientific discoveries but, given the hostility of the church to science, had to hide their discoveries from the general public. Such discoveries were sometimes even seen as heretical. Galileo was hauled before the Inquisition for his claim that the earth circled the sun and many early scientist were put to death for their intellectual curiosity.

Many, however, could not resist the temptation to smuggle these images into their work as a sort of inside joke for the amusement of those who knew what they were looking at.


The "mind of God?"
If we compare the drapery behind the figure of God in Michelangelo's famous painting to a modern cross section of the brain we can see that there are some undeniable similarities.


This is your brain. Any questions?

Many art aficionados, down through the centuries, have noted the incongruous fact that there is a naked woman, whom most agree is Eve, under the left arm of God. What is she doing there at the time God is creating Adam?

If we accept, for the moment, the theory that the drapery represents a brain then it becomes possible that this is suppose to be the "mind of God" and that Eve is therefore present in God's mind, or plans, even as he is creating Adam.

We will most likely never know what was in the mind of Michelangelo when he painted this work but the idea that he was using his knowledge of human anatomy as a sort of inside joke, while at the same time making a profound statement about his deeply felt religious beliefs, is a useful tool for understanding this famous and intriguing art work.

From The Barrel of a Gun

“Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun
Mao Tse Tung

Noted socialist historian C.L.R. James was correct in observing that armies do not simply fall from the sky but are rather the product of the culture that spawns them. However, being innocent of military history, he was wrong when he insisted that an army is “a miniature of the society that produces it.”^[1] On the contrary, armies are often dramatically different from the societies that produce them. For example, democracies often have armies, but armies are seldom democracies. Although armies are often separate from, and sometimes hostile towards, the society from which they spring, they are nonetheless the product of that culture’s institutions and core values. In times of war or revolution those institutions and values are refracted through the prism of the military. Ultimately, it could be argued, the outcome of a revolution depends more on the nature of the military fighting it than on the ideology articulated by the revolutionary leadership or the inarticulate yearnings of the masses. This effect can be best exemplified by examining four different revolutions: the American; French; Haitian; and Mexican, each of which organized its armed forces differently, and seeing what, if any, effect these differences had on the final outcome of the revolutions.

After the ravages of the Thirty Years War and the series of religious conflicts that had rent Europe in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries, the emerging absolute kings of the Eighteenth Century sought for a less socially, and, more importantly, a less politically disruptive method of settling their disputes. They found it in the concept of “limited warfare,” which became the dominant military paradigm of the age.^[2] Under this model the only people used in war were those who did not contribute to the economic well-being of the state, mainly the landless poor, the criminal, the aristocrat and the foreigner. With this in mind, raids into neighboring countries to “dragoon” men into a nation’s military became a vital source of troops, while another potent store of soldiers was found in literally recruiting them off the gallows, it being discovered that a man’s willingness to join the army increased dramatically when there was a noose around his neck. ^[3]

Such standing armies had great advantages and disadvantages, both for the governing class and for the governed alike. The rulers got small, relatively inexpensive militaries that followed orders and stayed out of politics while the people were more or less freed from the hardships of military service and allowed to get on with the business of their lives. The disadvantage, for the rulers was that such armies were, of necessity, small and rather rigid. They had to be brutally disciplined and constantly watched to prevent desertions which of course precluded such age old military practices as skirmishing or foraging since these operations allowed too many opportunities for soldiers to either escape or turn their weapons on their officers. Since their forces could not forage, commanders were tied to their supply lines and the mere threat to those lines would force a general to order a retreat. This resulted in the rather dance-like quality of 18^th century warfare which saw armies advancing and withdrawing from one another, often without firing a shot.

The disadvantage of such armies for the average member of society was that, since the soldiers took orders without question, they formed the ruler’s chief bulwark against the ruled, thereby strangling political discourse in its crib. Liberal political philosophers were well aware of this, and the pages of the 18^th century philosophes are awash with invective against standing armies. If the pen really were mightier than the sword then the18^th century political intellectuals would have slain standing armies outright, but they found, to their chagrin, that institutions do not melt in vitriol and had to content themselves with epigrams..

There was, however, one group of thinkers whose opinions did have a bearing on the matter -- military intellectuals. While the economic and political philosophers of the 18^th century were building their airy Utopias or their virtuous republics defended by stout yeoman militia, the practical men of war were undergoing their own philosophical revolution. Just as in the better known wrangles of the political and economic thinkers of the day, military thinkers fired salvos of books and pamphlets at one another in an fervent and often rancorous debate. Chief among these military philosophes were the French, whose armies had been rather roughly handled by the other armies of the day and who were itching for payback, and the most successful of this lot was the Comte Jacques de Guibert (1743-1790).^[4] Although trained as a soldier from childhood and proud of his profession, the young nobleman was an ardent disciple of Montesquieu and, understanding full well the linkage between the military system of a country and its civil order, dreamed of making over the military, and through it France, in accordance with the ideals of liberty, equality and “natural” society. Towards this end he wrote his Essai general de tactique in 1772 which laid out the tactics for a nation in arms.^[5] Judged by its impact on the outcome of the French Revolution it was one of the most important books of the era.

In in the finest traditions of the European coffeehouse intellectuals, from whom they drew the bulk of their ideology,^[6] Colonial American rebel ideologues had no use for standing armies and firmly believed that, come the revolution, the American masses would rise up spontaneously and form themselves into effective militias which would easily sweep the hireling slaves of the British before them.^[7] Feeding this fantasy were legions of homespun militia units which every town of any size or pretensions could boast. These units, whose members were often prominent in local politics, would meet sporadically, elect officers occasionally, bicker constantly over uniforms and pay and sometimes even drill.^[8] In the first flush of enthusiasm that accompanied the outbreak of hostilities these Hectors turned out in fairly substantial numbers, but the novelty of the war quickly wore off and most discovered urgent matters that needed their attention elsewhere.^[9] Writing from the perspective of the British Army, who had to face such soldiers, Sir John Fortescue notes that:

…so long as the quarrel with England meant no more for the Americans than town-meetings, demolition of houses, tarring and feathering of defenseless individuals, assaults on soldiers who were forbidden to defend themselves, and even shooting at convoys from behind walls--so long every man was a patriot; but when it came to taking as well as dealing blows the number of patriots was woefully diminished.^[10]

Indeed, so scarce had patriots become that Washington was forced to beg Congress repeatedly for the funds to raise a traditional 18^th century style standing army, the Continentals, recruited from the lower socio-economic strata of colonial society.^[11] While it is true, as Charles Royster argues, that “poverty and revolutionary ideals were not mutually exclusive categories,”^[12] it is equally true that affluence is also no bar to patriotic principles but, on the whole, the well-off seemed to have been better at resisting the temptation to act on those ideals, at least when it came to serving in the army.^[13]

Far from being the miniature replica of society that C.R.L. James would have us believe, the Continental army was composed of America’s outcasts, and lead by its elite, with scarcely any representatives of the great middle. The chief sacrifice that the average yeoman farmer or small town tradesman was called on to make in support of the revolution was coming up with the money to pay someone else to fight it for him.^[14] By 1778 the majority of the Concord militia, one of whose members most likely had fired the famous shot that started the war in the first place, was composed of out of town urban poor and blacks, drawn there by the prospect of pay.^[15] The alienation of most Americans from “their” army is best exemplified by the sorry spectacle of Valley Forge where the unhappy soldiers were forced to starve and freeze in the midst of a countryside brimming over with food and warmth, none of which was offered to them until a timely loan from the Morris brothers of New Jersey allowed them to purchase what most revolutionary peoples throughout the world provide their defenders for free.

Fearful of what they came to call “this armed monster,”^[16] those espousing Whig libertarian theory hoped for a quick victory because they mistrusted a standing army and were eager to disband it.^[17] The soldiers, embittered by what they saw as the common people’s shameful hostility towards, and neglect of, the troops saw themselves as being alone in the struggle and solely responsible for the final victory. When that victory was at last won the soldiers were peremptorily dismissed and sent home, cheated of their pay, leaving their masters, the Colonial elite, to reap the fruits of the victory won with their blood and even robbed of their fair share of the glory that their sacrifices had bought.

Drawing on the rhetoric of the Great Awakening, republican apologists sought to depict the victory as providence’s vindication of America as the new Israel, a land chosen by God for greatness. The true hero, according to this ideology, was the native genius of the Americans, a spirit which enabled the people, ennobled by their civic virtue and natural martial prowess, to triumph over trained professionals. Whig libertarians, drawing inspiration from English Commonwealth political tradition, developed a hatred for the army that was not merely ideological but emotional. Disgusted by the brutality and commonness of army life, most republican idealists preferred to remember, with advantage, the contributions of the militia, whose importance to the war they inflated out of all semblance to reality.^[18]

The practical effect of all this was that the American War of Independence was the most conservative of all the revolutions of the era. Although there was no shortage of populist sentiment among the lower classes and the rural poor, it had no voice since there was no nation in arms to compel the elite to share power, the populace had not been mobilized, and the pathetic and long suffering soldiers, few in numbers, despised by their countrymen and lacking any voice in shaping the country they had built, were quickly absorbed back into the underclass whence they had sprung. Even the attempt by some officers to capitalize on their service by forming the Society of Cincinnatus was quickly quashed. Since then the myth of the Minuteman has become an article of faith for most Americans and, despite the Founding Fathers’ well known antipathy towards standing armies, from Valley Forge to Baghdad, the majority of American wars have been fought by such forces.

American mythology aside, most military historians date the dawn of modern warfare, and modern political ideology, to 1793 and the wars of the French Revolution.^[19] Like the other monarchs of the era, Louis XVI had a typical 18^th century army of long- serving professionals, most of whom had been press-ganged into the service, or foreign mercenaries. Unlike other kings however, his was an army in turmoil. Ignominiously defeated by all and sundry during the various wars of the century, and starved for funds by the straightened circumstances of Louis’ finances, the soldiers were disaffected and the officers were intellectually galvanized. When the crisis arrived many soldiers went over to the revolution, and those officers who did not flee, helped form the core of the new Army of the Republic, using the writings of the Comte de Gilbert as their guide.^[20]

The importance of this last point cannot be overemphasized. There had been popular armies in the past, armed rabble who were contemptuously swept from the battlefield by the discipline and mass firepower of professionals and forced to take to the hills and woods as guerrillas or bandits, but this time things would be different. For the first time the ardor of the masses could be harnessed by simple but effective tactics which made the most of the raw soldier’s strengths while minimizing his weaknesses.

Armed with slow loading, inaccurate, smoothbore flintlock muskets, most armies were forced to rely on precision-drilled troops maneuvering slowly in cumbersome lines to maximize firepower, protect against cavalry charges, and maintain discipline. Skirmishing was out of the question, not only because skirmishers were vulnerable to cavalry but because all but the most trusted soldiers, freed from the supervision of their officers and N.C.O.s, would take the opportunity to desert. Besides, the inaccuracy of the musket made the whole exercise rather pointless and wasteful of manpower.^[21]

The French, on the other hand, with manpower to burn, and a motivated soldiery who could be relied on to return to the ranks when called, advanced in narrow, fast marching columns which required a minimum of drill to learn, behind clouds of skirmishers who, if they did not often hit the enemy, nevertheless obscured the advancing columns from the enemy in billows of gun smoke while making the enemy officers nervous since they were the chief targets. When the advancing columns arrived at the enemy position they would deploy into line, fire a volley, and then close with the bayonet. As often as not the excited troops would forget to fire and simply charged in with cold steel.^[22]

Accustomed as we are to the accuracy of modern rifles it is often hard to appreciate how ineffective the musketry of the day was. Throughout the latter half of the 18^th century the Prussian army conducted a series of tests in which massed units would fire volleys at close range into canvas panels six feet high and a hundred feet long and then count the number of hits anywhere on the panel. Despite the targets being considerable larger than a barn door most units were lucky to hit with 20 percent cent of their shots, which made getting shot a matter of bad luck more than anything else^[23]. Under these circumstances the bayonet, or any other pointed object, was quite as effective as a musket, and many early revolutionary units were equipped largely with pikes. Armed with these, and their enthusiasm and numbers, the armies of the French Revolution swept the professional armies of Europe into the dust bin of history. Since they depended on the support of the people, the one thing absolute kings could not count on, this type of army could not be replicated by other European powers until they made the social reforms necessary to enlist the support of the masses. The only country to realize this, and act upon it in time to have an impact on the wars of the era was Prussia, whose magnificent army had been the envy of 18^th century Europe. Ignominiously chased from the battlefield of Jena, the warrior nobles of Prussia applied themselves to figuring out what had gone wrong and fixing it. From 1806 until 1815 Prussia underwent a revolution as thoroughgoing as any of the era, but unlike the other revolutions this one was from the top down and it was by fiat.^[24]

Whereas America’s war for independence was fought by a small, politically insignificant army of social outcasts, France became a nation in arms, the first one in modern history, and this, more than any ideological wrinkle, explains the radical nature of its revolution. Not only were large masses of the people actually in arms but, given the broad demographic sweep of the army, the bulk of the population not in the military knew someone who was and this sense of a shared struggle helped weld France into the first modern nation-state.^[25]

With the whole population involved, to at least some extent, in the struggle, politics became a participatory sport in which anyone could, and often did, become involved. Revolutionary leaders could lead only for so long as the direction they were going was the one the people wanted to go in. If not, their careers tended to come to a sharp conclusion. While the revolution was busy chopping its head off, the army, in no way a miniature of the society, although indisputably a product of it, was just as busy crushing the armies of the crowned heads of Europe. In common with their American cousins, French intellectuals feared the growing power of the army, but unlike their American counterparts, they were powerless to do anything about it. Not only was the army the shield of the Republic against a hostile Europe, they performed a vital economic function as well by removing large numbers of men from the work force, thereby driving up wages for those who remained, while at the same time their conquests filled France’s coffers with booty. Finally there was the problem of reigning in the passions of a nation in arms. Once the genie was out of the bottle it was very difficult to put him back in.^[26]

Like the American army of the War of Independence, the French revolutionary army saw themselves as being solely responsible for their victories, but unlike their American counterparts, they had the numbers and means to intervene in the political process. With France’s political process collapsing on itself, it was only a matter of time until the army, as the only functioning institution in being, stepped in to sort things out.

Fearing the loss of his power the Abbe Siryes was on the look out for a successful soldier to be his sword in the battle to remain on top. He had chosen and rejected several likely candidates before the luck of the draw fell to Napoleon. While Bonaparte had undeniable talents, it is equally clear that anyone short of a complete incompetent could command French armies of the day to victory and the war had a way of sorting out incompetents and bringing talented men into positions of power. Although the details would no doubt have been different, there would have been the Napoleonic wars, with or without Napoleon and the legacy of the French Revolution would have remained largely the same. If, as Hobsbawn assures us, the 19^th century was largely a struggle for or against the principals of 1789 or the even more incendiary ones of 1793, it was the army, which came into its own in 1793,^[27] and not the philosophes, which by giving voice to the masses, assured the survival of those principals and carried them to every corner of Europe.

When we move to Haiti we find a very different sort of civilization than that of colonial America, or France under the Ancien Régime. A slave society, ostensibly built for the capitalistic purpose of making money, Haiti had, by 1791, metastasized into a pathological society in the grip of a collective psychosis. There have been slave societies since the dawn of recorded history and, while all are based to some extent on violence or the threat of violence, most have not been gratuitously cruel. Slaves, being valuable property, were generally accorded at least some measure of rights and were not generally subject to capricious or unnecessary violence.

In Haiti, however, racism combined with boredom, self indulgence and moral degeneracy to produce a singularly sadistic culture filled, with pointless violence, most of which was economically unjustifiable and seemed to have been more directed towards amusing the masters than chastising the slaves.^[28] No matter how inexpensive slaves were, and they were not all that cheap, shooting apples off their heads during drunken parties, or filling them with gun powder and blowing them up,^[29] could have had very little positive effect on the remaining workforce, and fails capitalism’s chief ideological goal, which is to maximize profits while reducing costs. As Carolyn Fick points out, by 1789 the whole social fabric of the colonial regime was disintegrating, providing fertile ground in which revolutionary movements could take root.^[30]

Although both the American and French revolutions were triggered by acts of popular violence, no doubt in part directed by low-level revolutionary organizers, and to some extent sustained by them, both ultimately had recourse to their countries’ military institutions to defend their insurrections and carry them to fruition. The slaves, however, had no military institutions to fall back on and had to create their own from scratch. Lacking the cultural infrastructure to produce or sustain conventional armies, they raised unconventional ones instead built around the natural leaders of their society, the commandeurs or slave trustee overseers, and the Maroons who were runaway slave desperados whose clandestine societies had existed in the hills and jungles of Haiti for generations. In a sense, as Fick points out, marronage became the movement of the masses.^[31]

Guerrilla wars are a nightmare for conventional armies to fight, since they no sooner smash one revolutionary head than two more rear up somewhere else. But if this hydra-like quality makes this type of revolution difficult to fight, it also makes it difficult to lead since the lack of structure which is its strength in war is the chief impediment to the formation of a united revolutionary ideology upon which to build the peace. As the war rages on, each guerilla band and local commander is actuated by a different image of what victory looks like. In Haiti, some early leaders were willing to barter away the freedom of their followers for the enfranchisement of themselves and a few hundred of their cronies while the Platon insurrectionists would settle for nothing less than their own kingdom.^[32] Many other guerillas started out, and no doubt remained, nothing more nor less than simple bandits motivated by no ideology more lofty than taking what they could grab.

But the guerillas were not the only forces in the field. Various interested parties such as the Spanish, the French Royalists, the British and the mulattos, to name but a few, raised and equipped more conventional uniformed armies with traditional chains of command, which were trained and equipped like other armies of the day and had their ranks filled with paid full-time professionals. While some of these units fought for the revolution and others against it, they all fought, ultimately, for their commanders and would, if ordered to do so, fire on whomever they were told to.^[33]

Politics, no less than nature, abhors a vacuum, and it was only a matter of time before these warlords began seizing the reigns of power. Although the inarticulate cravings of the people for land of their own could, through the medium of the guerilla resistance, shape post revolutionary Haiti’s economic future, it was the Praetorianism of the warlords which dictated its political future.^[34] Toussaint could, with the help of his army, make himself ruler of Haiti, but when he tried to send the former slaves back to the plantations he lost their support and, lacking that, lost his freedom and ultimately his life.

After Toussaint was gone and the French tried to reassert their control of Haiti, there arose one of the greatest “natural” revolutions of modern history. With almost no central command, and lead for the most part by nameless local commanders, Haiti won its independence. While in no way discounting the courage of the Haitian people, who fought heroically, the deciding factor in the war was undoubtly Yellow Fever, which probably accounted for more enemy soldiers than all of the rebel bands combined.^[35] The French had demonstrated in the Vendee^[36] that they knew how to fight guerillas, and on an island the size of Haiti, which, unlike Spain, could be isolated from outside help, they would have eventually won had it not been for the disease.

When the battles were over and the smoke had cleared, most of the revolutionaries happily went home to their newly-won plots of land, and left politics to others. The regular forces of the black generals, being the only military forces still in the field as well as being the only functioning social institutions going, seized power for their leaders and set Haiti on the path of military dictatorship which it has followed more or less, ever since.

The Haitian Revolution had two built-in ideologies to sustain it: ending slavery and providing land for the landless, which needed no revolutionary class to propagate. Mexico was not so lucky. A deeply divided culture, the Mexican revolutionary armies were as fragmented as the society from which they sprang and shared little in the way of a common ideology. In some ways it is fair to ask if Mexico even had a revolution or merely a breakdown of law and order and how one could tell the difference.

Following the disasters of the Seven Years War, Spain decided that its American colonies needed to be better protected and therefore ordered the creation of local armies capable of warding off foreign invaders. In Mexico the plan was to raise militia units composed of all castas, or racial groups, except Negroes and Indians, but local racial attitudes forced the authorities to raise segregated units instead. To add to the recruiting officers’ troubles, most upper-cast men had no wish to serve in any sort of militia, segregated or not, and therefore inducements in the form of exemptions from the civilian justice system, and from paying tribute, were proffered.^[37]

While some Mexicans, usually drawn from the ranks of the petty criminals, trouble makers and nare-do-wells, falsified their race in order to get into militia units and thereby avoided the civil justice system and the payment of tribute many others, usually those with good jobs, used the same racial prejudices to avoid military service by claiming to be members of the pardos, coyotes or other traditionally exempt casts.^[38] In this they were often abetted by their employers. In an effort to impress Madrid with their thrift, most viceroys had, from the outset, kept the military chronically under-funded, even for such necessities as pay and weapons, which led to disaffection among the officers and men. The resulting military was brutal, lawless and corrupt, and quickly collapsed in the face of the Hidalgo Revolt.^[39] Had New Spain had a more efficient military in the first place, it is likely that the revolt could have been nipped in the bud, thereby saving Mexico ten years of pointless warfare and lawlessness.

Although historians can cite the moment the “revolution” began, and the leader who struck the spark that set Mexico ablaze with insurrection, the underlying causes remain obscure. There had been droughts and poor harvests in the years leading up to 1810 as well as social injustice of all sorts, and each social group had long lists of grievances, but these things had been going on for years without causing a revolution and would continue to go on long after the revolution was over. Besides there were no unifying ideologies or shared principles to unite the rebels as there had been in the other revolutions we have examined. Each group seems to have been out solely for what it could get for itself and one is tempted to believe that the uprisings occurred when they did simply because they could.

Just as a power vacuum had been created in Spain by Napoleon’s conquest of the country, which was filled by the guerillas, one was created in Mexico by the attempts of the autonomists to use the imperial crisis to further their own interests.^[40] Into this vacuum stepped Father Hidalgo and his ragtag band of Indians. What ever the good father’s goals might have been it was clear from the first that a good part of his following was there for the looting. According to Christon Archer:

By 9 October 1810, the Marques del Zaral del Berrio, commander of Calleja’s advance guard, sighted an insurgent force of 40,000 to 50,000 against San Luis Potosi. They came by roads and through the barrancas loaded down with booty from robberies like a “swarm of ants” determined to incite the countryside to rebellion.^[41]

Although the bulk of the insurgents were, at first, drawn from the ranks of the peasantry and workers as Virginia Guedea tactfully puts it:

Many of those who for one reason or another had not found a place within the social structure of New Spain--the marginalized of every class and condition--joined the insurgency and made their own imprint on the armed movement. These differences caused important contradictions within the insurgency.^[42]

Although the Watts riots of the 1960’s or the Rodney King riot of 1992 may have had a political spark, once things got going the looting and burning was largely apolitical. While no doubt many Mexicans abhorred Spanish rule, robbing one’s neighbors seems a curious way of expressing that abhorrence. In Mexico City crime increased dramatically during the years of war, and murders, rapes and robberies of all sorts abounded in the climate of social disorder that the insurgency fostered.^[43] In Jalapa, which boasted walled fortifications, the majority of plebeian inhabitants lived outside the protected precincts and fell easy victim to the “freedom fighters.”^[44]

If law and order was ever to be reestablished Mexico was going to need an army, but the Army of New Spain, which had been build in the years leading up to the insurrection, had melted away in the face of the insurgent bands or had gone over to them en mass. The Mexican army, as opposed to the army of New Spain, was created by Viceroy Marques de Branciforte when he implemented a new policy calculated to appeal to the vanity and thirst for office of the wealthy merchants, miners, hacendados and other powerful men by allowing them the privilege of donating large sums of money to raise militia units in exchange for military commissions.^[45]

Ten provincial militia brigades were established whose commanders had full charge of all military units in their districts, the power to mediate conflicts with the civil authorities and the right to appoint officers. This made the brigade commanders a powerful new force in regional politics and administration. With all the difficulties of communication that operating in a land controlled by guerillas entailed, these local commanders became increasingly autonomous and began following their own agendas. While some remained loyal and sought to create strong regional bases in order to suppress insurrection and maintain Spanish rule, others used their offices to grow rich and welded their troops into robber bands by distributing the booty of their raids to their men without reporting it to the civil authorities.^[46]

Lacking any coherent political agenda, the guerilla bands had, by 1819 degenerated into little more than raiding parties dedicated to the theft of cattle and horses.^[47] However the Royalists forces were in decline as well. In 1816 Spain stopped sending European troops to help stiffen the morale of the exhausted and discouraged Mexican units and this, combined with financial troubles which led to the Government failing to pay or equip the troops, further degraded morale.

The end, when it came, came suddenly. Ordered by the Viceroy to crush yet another rebellion in the south, the local commander, Colonel Agustin de Iturbide, a royalist officer, entered into talks with the guerillas instead and persuaded them to declare independence from Spain. Soon rebel cities and towns began flocking to join in the Plan of Iguala, as the Colonel’s independence program came to be called, and before long all major insurgent groups were united behind Iturbide.^[48] Sensing the change in the wind, many royalist commanders quickly joined the new movement in order to protect their positions of power.^[49] Faced with the new consensus the Spanish bowed to the inevitable and in July, 1821 Spain’s representative made things official by signing the Treaty of Cordoba which recognized the independence of the Mexican Empire with Iturbide as the new emperor.^[50] His glorious reign lasted until 1823 when he was forced to abdicate and flee to Italy.

After ten years of fighting Mexico had independence and very little else. None of the social or economic problems which may have prompted the rebellion in the first place had been solved and, to make matters worse, the military system that had grown up to fight the insurgents became the defacto government of the country. Mexico became a culture of violence and instability with the people sunk in poverty and despair. Over the next century governments would come and go in Mexico City with bewildering rapidity leaving the day-to-day administration of the provinces in the hands of the caudillos, or military strongmen, a perfect case of the revolutionary actions of the people being refracted through the prism of the military institutions which in turn colored and transformed the civil culture.

Although a society’s military organization is dictated by its civilian organization and values it is not by any means a miniature version of that society. On the contrary, as we have seen, it is often radically different from the parent culture and has values and goals decidedly different from the society. Each of the revolutions we have examined sprang from dramatically different cultures and were fought by the military that those cultures produced. In turn, those militaries, by their natures, shaped the final outcomes of each revolution.

In America, which relied on a small professional army the results was a revolution, largely in the hands of the elite while in France, which rallied a nation in arms the revolutionary leaders lost control to the masses and eventually to the army. In Haiti the final victory was won by small professional armies backed up by the masses of part time revolutionaries who, once the victory was assured, returned home and left the professionals in possession of power. Mexico’s deeply divided culture produced either a deeply divided revolution or a chaotic period of lawlessness, depending on one’s point of view. With scattered bands of guerrillas in the field, the army had to become a scattered force of semi-autonomous personal armies leading to a culture of chronic decentralization and the rise of Cauldilloismo, the rule of locally powerful warlords. Each different sort of military producing, by their very natures, very different outcomes.

---

^[1] C.R.L. James The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, (New York: Vintage Books, 1938) p. 306

^[2] J.F.C. Fuller The Conduct of War, 1789-1961 (U.S.A.:, Minerva Press 1961) p. 15

^[3] Fuller, p.18

^[4] Robert S. Quimby, The Background of Napoleonic Warfare: The Theory of Military Tactics in Eighteenth Century France, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957) p. 106

^[5] Quimby, p. 108

^[6] Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, (Cambridge Massachusetts, London England: The Belknap Press Harvard University Press, 1992) p. 34

^[7] Bailyn, p. 62

^[8] Robert Gross, The Minutemen and Their World, ( New York: Hill & Wang, 1976) p. 60

^[9] Gross, p.147

^[10] J. W. Fortescue, A History of the British Army (Macmillan and Co., Limited: London, 1911) Vol. III p. 200

^[11] Charles Royster, A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character 1775-1783.(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), p. 34

^[12] Royster, p. 234

^[13] Royster, p. 235

^[14] Gross, p. 151

^[15] Gross, p. 141

^[16] Royster p. vii

^[17] Royster p. 233

^[18] Edward Countryman, The American Revolution, (New York: Hill & Wang, 2003) p.135

^[19] Fuller, p. 30

^[20]Quimby, p. 106

^[21] Quimby, p. 118

^[22] Charles Oman, Studies in the Napoleonic Wars, (London: Methuen & Co. 1929) p.87

^[23] Peter Paret, , York and the Era of Prussian Reform 1806-1815, (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966), 21

^[24] Paret, p. 103

^[25] Fuller, p. 36

^[26] Fuller, p. 37

^[27] E. J. Hobsbawn, The Age of Revolution, 1789-1948, ( New York: Mentor Books, 1962) p. 74

^[28] James, p. 30

^[29] James, p. 13

^[30] Carolyn E. Fick The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution From Below. (Knoxville, University of Tennessee Press, 1990) p, 238

^[31] Fick, p. 242

^[32] Fick, p. 243

^[33] James, 279

^[34] Fick, p.250

^[35] Fortescue, Vol. IV, pt 1 p. 565

^[36] Peter Paret, Internal War and Pacification; The Vendee, 1789-96. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961) p. 78

^[37] Christon I. Archer, “Pardos, Indians, and the Army of New Spain: Inter-Relationships and Conflicts, 1780-1810,” Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 6, n. 2 p. 233

^[38] Archer, “Army of New Spain,” p. 253

^[39] Archer, “Army of New Spain,” p. 255

^[40] Virginia Guedea, “The Process of Mexican Independence” American Historical Review Feb. 2000, p. 117

^[41] Archer, “‘La Causal Buena’: The Counterinsurgency Army of New Spain and the Ten Years’ War” in Rank and Privilege: The Military and Society in Latin America (Wilmington, Del.: SR Books, 1994). p.88

^[42] Guedea, p. 119

^[43] Archer, “La Causa Buena” p. 100

^[44] Archer, “La Causa Buena” p. 99

^[45] Christon I. Archer, “ The Army of New Spain and the Wars of Independence, 1790-1821,” Hispanic American Historical Review, 61(4) 1981 p. 706

^[46] Archer, “La Causa” p. 102

^[47] Archer, , “La Causa” p. 102

^[48] Guedea, p. 129

^[49] Archer, “Wars of Independence” p. 713

^[50] Guedea, p. 130

Military Organization and Social Change: A Study of the Chinese Army From the Rise of the Shang to the Fall of the Han

One of the more perplexing problems confronting the historian is how to find fresh vantage points from which to get a better view of the past. Towards this end such diverse subjects as art, literature, economics and religion, as well as many others, have been employed. Each brings useful and illuminating information to the table. One approach that is often overlooked is military history. Perhaps because it is often seen as the preserve of professional soldiers, or the realm of hobbyists, or perhaps because of the natural aversion that many feel for such a sanguinary topic, the insights that military history have to offer are often ignored. By military history we are not now referring merely to the recounting of battles and campaigns, nor to the study of weapons and uniforms. The most useful sort of military history is that which seeks to understand the ways in which armies were raised, equipped, disciplined and employed and what, if anything, such information tells us about the society at large. Campaigns, battles, weapons and the like are only useful in so far as they help to illuminate the broader topic. There is a belief among many historians pursuing the topic from such an angle that the way that a country organizes itself for war is linked to how it organizes itself for peace, and that changes in one must either cause or be caused by changes in the other.

To test this theory, we will examine the military history of China from the beginnings of recorded history in the Shang Dynasty to the end of the Han Dynasty, at which point the main outlines of the Classic Chinese Imperial system had taken form.

The Shang Dynasty, which stands at the dawn of Chinese history, was a semi-pastoral civilization, which relied almost as much on hunting and herding as it did on farming to survive. Its social structure was theocratic, and the state’s power, and ultimate legitimacy, rested on the relationship between the king and Ti, the high god. The people believed that it was Ti who granted good harvests, successful hunts and victory in war, and that the king’s dead ancestors could intercede with Ti on the king’s behalf, if they were provided with a suitable incentive. This incentive was in the form of sacrifices, both animal and human, and securing a steady stream of suitable victims for these sacrifices was a major part of kingship. A hereditary military nobility aided him in this job.

And an enormous job it was, considering the huge numbers of sacrificial victims needed. For a single ceremony of ancestor worship, more than three hundred people were put to death, while for the construction of a single house, more than six hundred victims were dispatched.# Several times a year the king and his nobles would undertake massive royal hunts to provide meat for the table, horn, bone and hide for the workshops, and humans for the sacrificial altar. These hunts were organized like military expeditions, and indeed it would appear that the distinction between hunting and war was somewhat blurred. Apart from imposing royal suzerainty or reminding recalcitrant subjects of the king’s power, the chief war aims of the Shang were mainly concerned with seizing riches for the king to distribute to his loyal followers and in rounding up captives to serve as slaves or as sacrifices. To insure that there would be future opportunities for plunder and captive taking, the enemies of the Shang were often intentionally left unconquered.

The army for these expeditions generally numbered around three to five thousand men, though it could reach as many as thirty thousand in emergencies. The backbone of the army was the royal guard, a force of about a thousand troops, mainly heavy infantry clad in leather armor and equipped with polearms. To this core was added a feudal levy of chariot-riding nobles, and a loosely organized and poorly equipped infantry conscripted from the class of peasants privileged to live within the walls of the cities, mainly clansmen of the nobility. The country-dwelling agricultural peasants, who were often slaves, or at best, serfs, were not permitted weapons and were conscripted only for manual labor. Kings normally commanded the army in person, assisted by a rudimentary military bureaucracy, although there are records of Kings’ wives commanding troops and of maintaining military forces of their own.

Since one of the major aims of these expeditions was to take prisoners for both sacrifice and for use as slave labor, the lethality of war was thereby greatly, and intentionally, reduced. Nothing demonstrates this factor more clearly than the types of weapons used. The weapon of choice for both nobles and commoners was the ko, or dagger axe, so called because of its dagger like blade which was affixed at a right angle to the top of a long wooden shaft. The weapons of nobles had bronze blades while those of the commoners were of stone or bone. In combat, the ko was swung down or to the side and then pulled forward, hooking the enemy and perhaps inflicting a cut. Wounds would not normally have been fatal. This seems to have been the goal since true axes and spears, while known and used in hunting animals, were apparently not highly favored in combat.

The other weapon of choice for the Shang noble was the light two-horse chariot. This seems to have been introduced to China from Western Asia by way of the Central Asian Steppe Nomads. In common with the Hittites and Central Asian types, the Chinese chariot carried a three-man crew. This consisted of a driver, an archer who stood to the left of the driver, and a third man equipped with a ko, who stood to the driver’s right. The commander of the chariot could be any one of the three, depending on his tastes. All three men wore stiff, inflexible, two-piece armor, made of lacquered leather, either bull or rhinoceros hide, which covered them from shoulder to foot but left their arms unencumbered. This armor would have made dismounting from the chariot very difficult. They also wore bronze helmets and carried large wooden or leather shields.

In battle the opposing armies would line up facing each other with their chariots in front and the infantry to the rear. The chariots would advance in open order, with broad gaps between each vehicle, the archer firing as they went. As the enemy chariots passed one another the warrior with the ko would perform a sort of joust with their opponents, trying to hook them out of the chariot cabs. The infantry, following behind, would gather up the prisoners.

Apart from the royal guard and a few nobles who fought on foot, the majority of infantry were unarmored and equipped only with stone or bone-tipped kos. Since the ko, was swung in combat, and since swinging such a weapon in close formations would have led to the weapons interfering with one another, the infantry must have fought in loose open formations which left them vulnerable to chariot charges. This made the well-equipped chariot riding noble very powerful relative to the peasants.

The theocratic nature of Shang warfare, combined with their limited war aims and intentionally reduced lethality, led to a very formal, ritualistic style of combat that produced a strict code of chivalry between the nobles. This put them at a great disadvantage when they came up against people who didn’t play by the same set of rules. Those people were the Chou, a seinocized group of steppe barbarians originally from north, who were forced to move south into the Wei River valley by more aggressive neighbors. Once there, they found matters scarcely better than they had been in the north since, instead of being harried by northern herder barbarians, they were now harried by western ones. In the struggle to survive, the Chou developed their own unique culture, which combined elements of their nomadic barbarian neighbors with the high culture of the Shang. This culture had a strongly military flavor to it, and unlike the Shang, war was not a game or ritual, but serious business.

One of the first changes the Chou made to war was to increase the horsepower of their chariots by the simple expedient of increasing the number of horses pulling them from two to four. They also improved the chariots themselves, reducing the decoration and improving the quality of construction. The wheels were made bigger, with more spokes and were dished outward from the hub for added strength. They also increased the numbers of chariots used and improved their tactical employment.

The chief advantage that the Chou had over the Shang, however, was their abandonment of the theocratic and ritualistic basis of warfare. Since they were not looking for prisoners to sacrifice they were more than willing to kill. Unable to adapt to the new realities of warfare in time, the Shang were ultimately destroyed.

Faced with the problem of ruling their new domains the Chou rulers developed a formalized type of feudalism. First, they set up four great duchies under native leaders, but gave them Chou titles. To insure their continued loyalty, members of the ruling families, plus thousands of other Shang noble clans, were forced to emigrate to the capital, where they could be more easily watched and controlled. The rest of the land was divided into seventy-one fiefs, with fifty-five going to members of the Chou royal clan.# To keep everything under the king’s control, a standing army of six royal corps, of 12,500 each, was maintained in garrisons throughout the realm. This was augmented by a further eight corps of Shang troops, which were also maintained by the central government. Finally, there were feudal levies which could be called out in times of emergency.

The basis of the army was the chariot-riding nobility. The numbers of chariots increased and tactical employment improved throughout the period. Although the three- man crews still included a man with the ko for close combat, the ritualistic jousts were abandoned and much more emphasis was placed on chariot archery as the decisive factor in winning battles.
Although infantry continued to serve mainly as a support for the chariots throughout the Chou and well into the Warring States period, it did show considerable improvement in its equipment and tactics. Unlike the Shang, whose infantry were for the most part unarmored conscript peasants with makeshift weapons, the Chou’s infantry were drawn from the lesser nobility, known as the Shih, and were well equipped. While they still lacked metal armor, which did not appear in any great quantities until the Ch’in, they did wear a sort of laminar armor made of small rectangles of leather strung together on thongs and arranged in overlapping rows. This provided protection while allowing for mobility. Their weapons improved as well. The ko, while still lacking a point, did develop an improved cutting edge and grew in length to around eighteen feet. The lack of a point is significant since it means that the weapon still had to be swung to be effective, limiting the troops to loose formations.

Since the actual fighting continued to be done by men of rank until the end of the Western Chou there was a certain degree of mutual respect and deference shown by the combatants to one another. There was a reemergence of chivalry and for a while war became again a game played by noblemen with elaborate rules as to how to offer or accept battle. Battlefields were chosen with an eye to the needs of the chariots.

Battles were preceded by a ritualistic series of duels and skirmishes between champions. At one battle a chariot crewed by a group of noblemen was chased by an entire squadron of enemy chariots, both sides exchanging archery fire as they went. Suddenly a stag leaped up in front of the fleeing chariot and without hesitation the archer killed it with his last arrow as though he were on a royal hunt. Halting their chariot the noble crew made a present of their kill to their noble pursuers who, impressed with the panache of the gesture, accepted the gift and ended the pursuit.

But it couldn’t last. As the Chou slid into the Spring and Autumn and then the Warring States period the lethality of combat increased, as did the size of the armies. Nobles could no longer make up the numbers needed and peasants began to be allowed to join the ranks, particularly of the infantry. The habit of mutual respect and deference that had marked the old style war began to fade and those nobles who remained often found little to choose from between the noble gesture and suicide.

After only four generations the central power of the Western Chou began to erode. Plagued by barbarian threats from the West and North the central government had to scramble for support. One time tested method of garnering support, the granting of tax exempt fiefs, only made matters worse by impoverishing the crown and fragmenting the administration. The central government was further weakened about this time as the dynasty suffered a series of weak or incompetent kings. Finally, in 771 B.C.E., the sacking of the capital of Hao by the Jung barbarians forced the Chou to move their capital east to Loyang.

With the central government distracted by barbarian threats and bad kings, the royal vassals gained in power and became more concerned with protecting their lands and less concerned with their national obligations. This led to the rise of regionalism and an a marked increase in the number and ferocity of wars between the various noble families as each sought to increase its holdings at the expense of its neighbors. This almost chronic state of war eventually led to the virtual extinction of the nobility. Not, however, to the wars. They continued as the noble fiefs coalesced into independent states, which vied with one another for supremacy.

As the nobles disappeared, their place in the ranks was taken by the rising class of freehold farmers, and upwardly-mobile professional soldiers. So great were the opportunities for social advancement in the military that by the fifth century C.E., generals of peasant origins were becoming common.

Starting around 650 B.C.E., China experienced a population boom. By the end of the Chou, the population had grown to almost 40 million. Of necessity, army size grew and the need for more soldiers led to the wholesale recruitment of peasants. At the beginning of the dynasty, Chou armies had consisted of several hundred to a thousand chariots supported by about ten thousand infantry, but by its end a strong state would typically field as many as four thousand chariots and more than forty thousand infantry. It was about this time that the venerable ko began to develop a spear-like point in addition to its axe-like one, making it into a slash and thrust weapon with a greatly enhanced killing ability. It also allowed tighter formations, which enhanced the infantry’s effectiveness against chariots, as did the new fashion of marching in step.# New weapons such as the sword and crossbow also began to appear, which further enhanced the effectiveness of infantry.

As the importance of peasant infantry to warfare grew, the social and political institutions began to reflect this fact. The Book of Changes uses the metaphor of hidden water under the earth to emphasize the strength of the peasants. It also stresses the need to deal fairly with them to retain their loyalty. Since the enthusiasm of the common people was now considered important for war, the rulers began consulting popular assemblies before making policy.

As armies increased in size, securing a bigger economic surplus to support them became more and more vital. Rulers who realized this and who did something to increase the surplus, survived, while those who did not, perished. To oversee water projects, land reclamation, and the general running of the state and its economic development, extensive bureaucracies became essential. With survival on the line, and the nobles dying out anyway, the abilities of the bureaucrat was of more importance than his lineage, and the competing states vied with one another to find and develop the best talent available, even going so far as wooing able men from other states. A whole class of itinerate bureaucrats and military officers grew up to support this need, and the training of these men was one of the roots of the Hundred Schools movement from which Legalism, Confucianism and Taoism developed.

But bureaucrats weren’t the only ones whose talents were sought. Agriculture was the engine that ran everything and that engine ran on the work of good farmers. Generations of incessant warfare, however, had taken its toll. The landed aristocracy was gone and the bonds that held the peasant to the land had broken down. Free to go where they wanted, most peasants went where they could own the land for themselves instead of working for a landlord, so the bureaucrats weren’t the only itinerate class roaming China at this time.

All this moving about, seeking for a better life, or merely seeking to avoid losing one’s life to rampaging armies meant that most states had more farmland than farmers to work it. It became necessary to woo peasants from other states and prevent one’s own peasants from being wooed away. Tax reductions, a respect for the rights and needs of the peasants, and above all, land reform, became a matter of survival for the rulers. As a result of such measures a large class of freehold peasants grew up in China for the first time in its history.

One dynasty that failed to grasp this was the state of Ch’i. As a result of heavy taxation, a harsh penal code and an indifference to the plight of the peasants during a famine, the state was on the point of collapse when a ministerial family named Ch’en ousted the old regime and sized power. They were able to get away with this because they had carefully curried favor with the masses through a policy of generosity, fair dealing and famine relief. This story was repeated, with slight variations, many times throughout China in the late Warring States period. The common thread that unites these incidents is that the new rulers came from the rising class of educated administrators known as the shih. The name of the class was descended from the petty nobility, and later, upwardly-mobile commoners who had followed behind the chariots of the early Chou lords.

The change in the nature of war led to a change in its aims. Whereas the Shang had fought primarily for loot and prisoners, and the Chou had fought for family and honor, the Warring States armies fought mainly for land. To protect the land, rulers built long walls and fortifications. Though the Great Wall is the most famous of these, Warring States China was filled with many other long walls on the borders of the various states.

In the early Chou all armies had been professionals of noble birth. Then peasants were admitted to the ranks, but still as professionals. But as the arms race between rival states heated up, the need for bigger and bigger armies finally outstripped the numbers of professionals available to fill the ranks. Besides, if everyone became a soldier who would grow the food? Maintaining large standing armies became impractical for most states. It was necessary for the majority of soldiers to return to their farms when not needed for combat and yet be able to form effective armies when called upon to do so. The result was a system of militia units built around a core of drilled and disciplined professionals and commanded by corps of highly trained officers. To this professional framework drafts of conscripts could be added at need. These were drawn from the freehold farmers.

Under the Shang, most agricultural workers had been slaves or, at best, serfs. It would have been dangerous for the nobles to arm such people for fear that they would turn on them. But when every farmer was a free man who owned his own piece of land, it was in his best interest to defend the state that insured his freedoms and contained his land. Since part time soldiers could never hope to match long-serving professionals in military skills, the quality of the officers who welded the militiamen together with their professional cadres was vital. This led to the rise of a class of professional officers which mirrored the rise of professional bureaucrats in all essential points. Like the bureaucrats, the soldiers developed their own body of professional literature, which, like that of the bureaucrats, would eventually form the core for written examinations leading to promotions. In any event, the turmoil of the Warring States, and the practical needs of national survival, led to that general rise in scholasticism of all sorts that earned itself the name of “The Hundred Schools.”

When the dust of the Warring States era finally settled, one state stood supreme, the Ch’in. Like the Chou before them, the Ch’in came out of the Wei River Valley, and, like the Chou, their culture was a unique amalgam of barbarian and Chinese elements. The dynasty traced its origins to a fief granted to their ancestors in return for their services in providing horses for the royal army. It was also hoped that they would provide a buffer between the Chou and the Jung barbarians. This they did, by absorbing the Jung into their state sometime around 400 B.C.E.
Although most Chinese states regarded the Ch’in as little better than semi-civilized barbarians, it was this very primitiveness that was the source of their power. With less tradition behind them, they were not as averse to trying new things and accepting foreigners into their service. They had also been at the forefront of the social reforms that had resulted in the shift from serfdom to freehold farming which was the necessary precursor to the development of conscript armies.

Starting around 390 B.C.E. with the reforms of Kung-sun Yang, known to the West as Lord Shang, the Ch’in had pursued a systematic policy of state-building that included irrigation projects of unprecedented size and scope, land redistribution and legal reforms allowing peasants to buy and sell land. They also included the suppression of the remaining remnants of feudalism and a system of civil and military promotion based on merit. This produced a highly efficient bureaucracy, able military commanders and a soldiery that quickly became the terror of their neighbors. Like the other states, the core of the Ch’in army was a militia of freehold farmer- soldiers, differing only in that they were more highly motivated than were their opponents. Ch’in was also at the forefront of the move away from chariots and towards horse cavalry.

Much has been made, particularly by Confucian-inspired historians and those who have learned of Chinese history through them, of the draconian laws that governed Ch’in from the time of Lord Shang until the demise of the dynasty. No doubt they played an important role in the discipline and motivation that animated Ch’in armies. From all accounts they were brutal and uncompromising. However, this in no way contravenes the notion that conscript armies must be based on the support of the people. Harsh laws, provided they are administered fairly and equally, are no bar to public support. In the era of the Warring States, Ch’in’s internal stability and national security must have been very attractive to many people. The degree of public support enjoyed by the government is apparent by the high number of peasants, soldiers and bureaucrats who chose to immigrate there.

Even the Grand Historian Ssu-ma Ch’ien, no fan of Legalism, as this policy of harsh laws coupled with merit based rewards is known, admits that within ten years of the onset of Lord Shangs’ reforms: “Nothing lost on the road was picked up and pocketed, the hills were free of bandits, every household prospered, men fought bravely on the battlefield but avoided quarrels at home, and good government existed in both towns and villages.” The era of state building and social engineering inaugurated by Lord Shang continued for another four generations and finally bore fruit when a man of dark genius, King Cheng, came to power in 247 B.C.E.

Though only thirteen when he ascended to the throne, once he reached adulthood the young king swept through China with fire and sword, and by 221 B.C.E. had brought the whole of it under his control. It was the first time that the whole country had been united under one rule, and a new title was devised to acknowledge the fact, huang-ti or emperor, and the young king became Ch’in Shih-haung-ti, the First Emperor of China.

Once in control of the whole of China he set about remaking it in the image of his native Ch’in. All of the old feudal states were abolished, the country was divided into administrative districts called commanderies, and the governance of the whole country was turned over to a nonfeudal, nonhereditary, bureaucratic administration.# From a military point of view his most important reform was to make the policies that had given rise to freehold farmers in Ch’in standard throughout China. Militia units were set up in every district and farmers conscripted to fill them.

This policy proved to be a two-edged sword. On the one hand, it provided China with its first national army, one of such size and effectiveness that it was able to extend the country’s borders into the Liotung Peninsula in Manchuria and to reach the sea near Canton.# On the other hand, it gave China a large population of men with weapons training and the habits of military discipline. This proved disastrous to the dynasty when, following the death of the first emperor, popular discontent boiled over into open revolt.

The small garrisons of professionals that had been scattered throughout the land to enforce the emperor’s will proved no match for the hordes of angry peasants who were able to defeat them in detail and then equip themselves with captured arms and armor. Some rebels went so far as to loot the tomb of the First Emperor and take the weapons that had been in the hands of the famous terracotta figures. The land dissolved into chaos of huge warring armies. The turmoil did not last long, however, and by 202 B.C.E. China had a new dynasty, the Han.

The new dynasty founded by Han Kao’tsu, a man of lowly birth, understood the plight of the peasants, and the new emperor emphasized the doctrine that government exists to serve the people.# Since his reign was short and he was distracted by the necessity of putting down revolts among former allies, Han Kao’tsu was not able to do much changing of the basic political and military machinery that the Ch’in had built. He did, however, moderate the harsh punishments and lower the tax rate with the result that China prospered.

Like its predecessor, the army of the Han was built around a core of long-serving professionals supplemented by a conscripted militia. Under the early Han all males were drafted at age twenty-three and served on active duty for two years. Thereafter they were in the active reserve until the age of fifty-six. In the eighth month of each year, following the harvest, a nation-wide military inspection was held during which all personnel, regardless of rank, were tested. Commanders of units that failed to measure up were subject to severe penalties.
Even convicts were liable for military duty in one of two capacities. Common prisoners serving out their sentences were used as labor brigades digging latrines, building fortifications and the like. The Ch’ih-hsing were a special class of trustees who volunteered for combat in return for avoiding execution for their crimes. They tended to be very fierce fighters since distinction on the battlefield could lead to a pardon.

The ideal in early Imperial China was a prosperous free peasantry governed by a scholar elite, and for a time this system worked very well. The Early Han was marked by a high degree of patriotism and martial spirit, but as time went by the weakness of the militia system began to become apparent. While it worked well for local defense, long campaigns placed a severe strain on militiamen whose farms and businesses suffered by their prolonged absences. Soon, draft-eligible men with the means to do so were being allowed to pay “substitute money” to avoid service. This money was used to pay “volunteers” who quickly became long-serving professionals. The expansive campaigns of Emperor Wu-ti accelerated the process of professionalization, as did the shift of population from north to the south that took place in the late Han. Since the main threat to China lay in the north, the shift of population to the south meant that the militiaman’s term of service was usually up by the time he had marched to the seat of war.

Added to this was the rising importance of cavalry. Although the Ch’in had been at the forefront of the shift from chariots to cavalry, their horsemen had been mainly mercenary barbarians with a sprinkling of peasant conscripts thrown in. When the chief opponents had been Chinese states with little or no cavalry of their own this had been sufficient, but as the empire grew, the main threat shifted to the north where the Hsung-nu, ancestors of the Huns, were all cavalrymen. It was therefore necessary to match them in horsepower, and mercenary barbarians were found to be the best way to do this.

As the role of the militiaman declined in warfare, so to did his political status. For so long as a prosperous, freehold farm population was necessary to the defense of the state, the state saw to it that farmers were fostered and protected. With the rise of mercenaries that protection waned. The usurper Wang Mang tried to reverse the process, but after his fall, the process accelerated. The government began allowing distinguished generals to raise their own armies. Soon, wealthy landowners were doing the same, and with no militia to confront them, quickly had whole districts under control.

Driven to desperation by the excesses of the great families the peasants revolted in 184 C.E., calling themselves the Yellow Turbans. The generals charged with putting down the rebellion and commanding mercenary armies loyal to them, became warlords instead. Their struggles for personal power eventually doomed the dynasty and plunged China into another prolonged period of disintegration and internal strife.

Looking back over the almost two thousand years from the rise of the Shang to the fall of the Han, some patterns become apparent. As each change in the military technology or practice took place, a corresponding one took place in the culture at large. Chariots and bronze weapons combined with theology gave the Shang their unique form of warfare. Although the Shang are often called feudal, their culture retained many elements that were closer to the tribal one of their Neolithic predecessors. Their deliberate use of the ineffective ko when more lethal weapons were at hand demonstrates how military considerations can be trumped by social ones.
The Chou abandoned the theocratic basis of Shang warfare but kept their weapons and, particularly the expensive chariot. The expense of maintaining the chariot combined with the long training necessary for its effective use, caused the rise of a class of warrior nobles, which in turn resulted in a system of feudalism. As the Chou disintegrated into the Warring States, simple survival demanded new approaches to warfare. States that could not raise chariot forces, or whose terrain precluded their use, were forced to develop their infantry. Under the Chou, the power of the state was reckoned by the number of chariots it could field and as a result, the political power of the chariot-driving class was supreme.

When the balance of power shifted to the infantry, the need to raise large armies led to social changes that favored the class from which the common foot soldier was drawn--the peasants. Social and legal changes, coupled with land reform, led to a class of freehold farmers with a major stake in the defense of the realm. For so long as the militia remained the shield of the state, the state shielded the rights of the militiaman, but when mercenaries and the shift to cavalry armies reduced the importance of the militiaman, his political clout waned. The militiaman’s loss was the rich man’s gain. With no effective force to stop them, the wealthy gained power and eventually were able to raise their own armies and set up as “great families” and warlords. As such, they were able to take the peasant’s land and force them into serfdom. The downward spiral eventually ended in the Yellow Turban Rebellion and the collapse of the Dynasty. It is significant that when order was finally restored under the T’ang Dynasty they quickly restored the militia system. For so long as the militia remained strong, the T’ang enjoyed prosperity and stability, but eventually the same forces that had doomed the Han militia destroyed that of the T’ang. Thus, it would appear that the thesis works. As the Chinese changed the way they fought, their society changed. Conversely, changes in the society at large forced changes in the way that wars were fought.