User:Nobs01

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...With malice toward none, with charity toward all...
Abraham Lincoln

It's a fine line between necromancy and the historians' art, making spirits of the dead talk.
nobs

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From Arnold Toynbee, 'A Study of History'

Contents 1 The Besieged Civilization's Inability to Redress the Balance by Recourse of Organization and Technique (ed. note: or, "inability to 'stay the course' with a 'troop surge') 2 The Cataclysm and its Consequences (aka "cut and run") 2.1 A Reversal of Roles 2.2 The Bankruptcy of a Fallen Civilized Empire's Barbarian Successor-states

[edit] The Besieged Civilization's Inability to Redress the Balance
by Recourse of Organization and Technique (ed. note:
or, "inability to 'stay the course' with a 'troop surge')

{VIII.A.p.26) Thus, if the chronic warfare between the defenders and assailants of a limes is waged in terms of competitive staying power, the defence is bound to collapse sooner or later, since, so far as it is able to hold its own, it can achieve this only by exerting an effort which becomes more and more disproportionate to the effort exacted from its increasingly efficient barbarian adversaries.¹ In this situation there are two obvious courses to which the defence may resort in the hope of arresting, by one means or other, the progressive deterioration of its own capacity for organization and technique, in which a civilization is superior to its barbarian neighbours almost ex hypothesi or its barbarian adversaries' capacity for taking military advantage of the local terrain through which the limes runs. These two policies of elaborating its own organization and armaments and of recruiting barbarian man-power are not, of course, mutually exclusive, and a harassed Power behind a limes had usually resorted to both in its desperate search for some means of reversing the accelerating inclination of the scales of war in its barbarian opponents' favour which is the inexorable effect of the passage of Time on a frontier where the civilized party is content to remain passive.

¹ The difference in the degree of the effort required from a civilized army and from a barbarian war-band in order to produce an equal quantum of military effect was once expressed in quaintly concrete financial terms by a correspondent of the present writer's in a comparison between the respective performances of the British Army and the Hijīzā Army against the Turkish Army in the General War of A.D. 1914-18. 'From first to last, the military operations of the Hijīzā Army accounted for 65,000 Turkish troops at the cost of less than £100 per head of subsidy, whereas in the British Army's operations against the Turks, each Turkish casualty or prisoner cost from £1500 to £2000' (Toynbee, A.J.: Survey of International Affairs, 1925, vol. i (London 1927, Milford), p. 283, n. 2).

{p.28} This attempt to solve the problem of defence by an improvements in organization, which was such a brilliant failure in the military history of the Diocletianic Roman Empire, had brought in better returns to Powers burdened with anti-barbarian frontiers in a Modern Western World. General Sir C.C. Monro's lightning victory over the Afghans in A.D. 1919 was a triumph of organization in a sudden emergency; Marchal Lyautey's gradual pacification of the Atlas highlands between A.D. 1907 and A.D. 1934³ was a still more signal triumph of organization applied to the deliberate execution of a long-term plan; and these are merely two illustrations out of a multitude lying ready to the historian's hand. In the policy of Modern Western imperial governments, however, the resort to organization as a means of redressing an unfavourable inclining balance in the defence of a limes was overshadowed by the resort to technique in an age when Western technology was advancing at an unprecedented pace in to a previously undreamed-of wonderland of scientific discovery and practical 'know-how'.

In such circumstance the Western parties to the conflict between Civilization and barbarism might well feel confident of being able to set so hot a pace in the progressive application of technology to border warfare that their barbarian competitors would find themselves run off their
{p.29} feet. If the barbarian had shown himself able to procure from abroad and even passably imitate at home a relatively simple product of the Modern Western technique, such as an up-to-date breach-loading rifle, was it not the obvious retort for his Western adversary to raise the technological level of competition in armaments from small-arms to artillery, from fire-arms to the aeroplane, and—in terms of the release of atomic energy—from the non-fissile to the fissile type of explosive for the manufacture of bombs? For, even if the barbarians could procure aeroplanes from abroad and could learn to become as skillful an air-pilot as he had already become a marksman, it was hardly conceivable that he could provide for the servicing of aeroplanes, not to speak of installing the plant for manufacturing them, and it was virtually out of the question for him to procure atom bombs from abroad, and quite out of the question for him to acquire and apply the 'know-how' of manufacturing them and detonating them. When Western Man had crowned a century of scientific achievement by discovering how to harness atomic energy to the service of War, it looked indeed as if it now lay in his power (if he could reconcile this with his conscience) literally to annihilate the last unsubdued territory of Barbarism in their last remaining pockets of unsubdued territory—always supposing that these condemned barbarian prisoners of a ubiquitous industrial Western Civilization were not reprieved, after all, by seeing the Western masters of the World destroy one another first in an atomic fratricidal warfare.

This thesis that technique is a winning card in Civilization's hand is forcefull presented in a passage from the pen of a brilliant observer of a campaign in which a Modern Western Power overthrew a barbarian opponent on his own ground by bringing into action against him the Western technique of the Pre-Atomic Age.[1]

'Halfa is nearly four hundred miles from Atbara; yet it was the decisive point of the campaign; for in Halfa was being forged the deadliest weapon that Britain has ever used against Mahdism—the Sudan Military Railway. In the existence of the railway lay all the difference between the extempore, amateur scrambles of Wolseley's campaign and the machine-like precision of Kitchener's. When Civilization fights with Barbarism it must fight with civilized weapons; for with his own arts on his own ground the barbarian is almost certain to be the better man. To go into the Sudan without complete transport and certain communications is as near madness as to go with spears and shields. Time has been on the Sirdar's side, whereas it was dead against Lord Wolseley; and of that, as of every point in his game, the Sidar has known to ensure the full advantage. There was fine marching and fine fighting in the campaign of the Atbara; the campaign would have failed without them; but without the railway there could never have been any campaign at all. The battle of the Atbare was won in the workshops of the Wady Halfa.'¹

¹ Stevens, G.W.: With Kitchener to Khartum (Edinburgh and London 1898, Blackwood) chap. 3, ad imit., pp. 22-23.

{p.30} A generation later, when this Western feat of harnessing steam-power had been eclipsed by the more extraordinary feat of harnessing atomic energy, it was a temptation for Western minds to assume that the problem of anti-barbarian frontiers had now been solved decisively by the progress of Western technology up to date. At the time of writing, however, atomic energy had not yet been used for the destruction of either Barbarism or Civilization; and the recent experience of Western Powers in trying to offset their barbarian opponents' skill in adapting the use of Modern Western weapons and tactics to the local terrain by bringing into action, on their own side, additional Modern Western weapons of ever more elaborate kinds, had demonstrated that the elaborations of technique, like the elaboration of organization, carried with it certain inherent drawbacks in addition to the untoward social effect of its crushingly heavy cost to the tax-payer and the untoward educational effect of its initiation of the barbarian into the ever more formidable tricks of his civilized adversary's trade.² these inherent drawbacks to an elaboration of technique might go far towards neutralizing even the military effect of this expedient for redressing the balance of power between Civilization and Barbarism along a static limes.

² 'The development of an strategic perception or of a more far-seeing or reasoned leading among the frontier tribes is perhaps improbable. On the other hand, should any such tendencies creep into their conduct of war, and should the tribesman ever, by any chance, be supported by skilled advice, or find themselves in the possession of efficient artillery, numerous machine guns or stocks of grenades and analogous adjuncts of war, the prospect of entering on a campaign of this nature without highly trained troops is not alluring' (de Watteville, op. cit., p. 210).

[edit] The Cataclysm and its Consequences
(aka "cut and run")

[edit] A Reversal of Roles

{VIII.D.p.45}...This episode in Man's contest with Physical Nature is an apt simile of what happens in Man's struggle with Human Nature, in his neighbours and in himself, upon the collapse of the military barrage of a limes. The resulting social cataclysm is a calamity for all concerned; but in the human, as in the physical, disaster the incidence of the devastation is unequal, and in this case likewise the distribution of the damage is the reverse of what might have been expected a priori. There is, in fact, here a paradoxical reversal of roles.² So long as the representatives of a disintegrating civilization were successful in saving a tottering limes from collapse, the tribulation which it cost them to perform this tour de force was progressively aggravated, as we have seen, ³ out of all proportion to the progressive increase in the pressure exerted by the transfrontier barbarians. On the other hand, now that the disaster, so long dreaded and so long averted by the Power behind the limes, has at last duly descended upon the doomed civilization's devoted head, the principal sufferers are no longer the ex-subjects of the defunct universal state, over whose fields and cities the deluge of barbarian invasion now rolls unchecked, but the ostensibly triumphant barbarians themselves. The hour of their triumph, for which they have thirsted so long, proves to be
{p.46} the occasion of a discomfiture which they nor their defeated adversaries had foreseen.

The Demoralization of the Barbarian Conquerors

What is the explanation of this apparent paradox? The answer is that the limes, whose resistance the transfrontier barbarian has been seeking all the time to overcome, has served, not only as the bulwark of the Civilization that its builders and defenders had intended it to provide against an outer Barbarism, but also as a providential safeguard for the aggressive barbarian himself against demonically self-destructive psychological forces within his own bosom.

...provided by the existence of the very limes which the barbarian is bent on destroying for the limes, so long as it holds, supplies a substitute, in some measure, for the indispensable discipline of which Primitive Man is deprived when the breaking of his cake of primitive custom³ converts him into a transfrontier barbarian. This discipline is partly imposed on him externally; for, so long as the perennial border warfare continues, the barbarian belligerent, whether his role be that of raider, hostage, or mercenary, is being trained continually perforce in a stern yet at the same time instructive military school; but the limes disciplines him most effectively in the psychological sense of giving him tasks to perform, objectives to reach, and difficulties to contend with that call forth his highest powers and constantly keep his efforts up to mark.

With the sudden collapse of the limes sweeps this safeguard away, the nascent creative powers that have been evoked in the transfrontier barbarian by the challenge of the limes are daunted and defeated by being called upon, suddenly and prematurely, to perform new tasks that are altogether too great and too difficult for them to cope with; and in this hour of bewilderment, when there is no more spirit in them,⁴ these frail

³ See the phrase quoted from Bagehot in II.i.192.
⁴ 2 Chron. ix. 4.

{p.47} shoots of tender wheat are quickly stifled by the tares in the spiritual field of the barbarian's soul―his abandon¹ and his ferocity―which find boundless opportunities for luxuriant growth now that the former raider and mercenary has entered into his long-coveted kingdom. If the transfrontier barbarian is more brutal, as well as a more sophisticated, being than his ancestor the primitive tribesman, the latter-day barbarian who has broken through the limes and carved a successor-state out of the derelict domain of a defunct universal state becomes differentiated from his already barbarian predecessor beyond the pale in the same two senses in still a higher degree. As soon as the barbarian has left no-man's-land behind him and set foot in a ruined world which is for him an earthly paradise, his malaise rankles into demoralization...

{p.48}...the barbarians in patribus civilium cast themselves, as we have observed by anticipation,⁴ for the sordid role of vultures feeding on carrion or maggots crawling in a carcass; and it has been noticed by Ibn Khaldūn that they are apt to display a most unheroic prudence in keeping at a safe distance from their dying victims body until the life has gone out of him that there is no danger any longer of his being able to offer any resistance.

'[The future founders of a successor-state] give way to baseless fears whenever they hear talk of the [flourishing] state of the existing empire and of the vast resources that it has at its command. This is enough to deter them from attacking it, and so their chief is obliged to have patience and to bide his time. But, when the empire has fallen into complete decadence, as invariably happens, and when its military and financial strength has suffered mortal injuries, this chief is rewarded for having waited so long by now finding himself able to take advantage of the opportunity of conquering the empire....When the will of God has made itself manifest, and the old empire is on the point of collapse, after having reached the term of its existence, and has become disorganised in all its parts, its feebleness and exhaustion attract its adversary's notice....Encouraged by this open discovery, the people of the new empire prepare with one accord to open the attack; the imaginary dangers that had shaken their resolution up to that moment now disappear, the period of waiting comes to an end, and the conquest is accomplished by force of arms.'⁵

⁵ Ibn Khaldūn: Muqaddamāt, translated by de Slane, Baron McG. (Paris 1863-8, Imprimerie Impériale, 3 vols.) vol. ii, p. 134-5.

[edit] The Bankruptcy of a Fallen Civilized Empire's Barbarian Successor-states

{VIII.D.p.52} A barbarian successor-state blindly goes into business on the strength of the dishonoured credits of a universal state that has already gone into bankruptcy; and these boors in office hasten the advent of their inevitable doom by a self-betrayal through the outbreak, under stress of a moral ordeal, of something fatally false within;¹ for a polity based solely on a gang of armed desperados' fickle loyalty to an irresponsible military leader,² while it may be adequate for the organization of a raid or, at a pinch, for the administration and defence of a march, is morally unfit for the government of a community that has made even an unsuccessful attempt at civilization.³ It is far more unfit than would have been the unsophisticated yet respectable primitive rule of custom interpreted by the living leaders of the tribe⁴ into whose swept and gar-

² 'Irresponsible power, uncontrolled by any traditions of ordered freedom, will often assert itself of defend itself by savage cruelty. The catalogue of such enormities is too long and monotonous to be told in detail' (Dill, S. Roman Society in Gaul in the Merovingian Age (London 1926, Macmillan), p. 133, introducing an anthology of Merovingian atrocities).

{p.53} nished house¹ this gangster-constitution has forced its entry since the radiation of a disintegrating civilization has perverted that decadent society's once primitive neighbours into bands of adolescent barbarians.²