ABSTRACT
“EVERY battle of the warrior”, wrote the prophet Isaiah, “is with confused noise and garments rolled in blood.” Between his age and our own there have been many worthy people, including no small number of historians, who never arrived at any clearer notion of the meaning of military operations than that they involve many loud and discordant sounds, abhorrent to the civilian’s ear, and are attended by a lamentable loss of human life. Thus felt many a cloistered chronicler of the Middle Ages, and thus too many a writer of more modern times, who strove to justify his personal dislike for, or ignorance of, military things by depreciating their importance and significance in world-history. One may dislike war just as one dislikes disease; but to decry the necessity for studying it, and estimating its meaning and effect, is no less absurd than it would be to minimize the need for medical investigation because one disliked cancer or tuberculosis. After all, war has been, throughout the ages, one of the most prominent phenomena in man’s dealing with man. One may hold that it is fundamentally immoral, but that does not excuse one from the necessity of endeavouring to discover its characteristics. Even the most convinced pacifist cannot deny its existence, and he is but deluding himself if he tries to maintain that it is a negligible quantity in the annals of mankind. Yet there was a generation of historians who were blind enough to hold this view. To show their mentality I may quote a paragraph drawn from the History of the English People by J. R. Green, a typical product of the old Liberal optimism, which still 25to-day has its thousands of readers because of its attractive literary style. He wrote:
It is the reproach of historians that they have too often turned history into a mere record of the butchery of men by their fellow-men. But war plays a small part in the real story of European nations, and in that of England its part is smaller than in any. The only war that has profoundly affected English society and English government is the Hundred Years War with France (1336–1451), and of that war the results were simply evil.
