World War Two
Published 3 May, 20205Indy and Sparty tackle some more of your interesting questions in another live Out of the Foxholes. Today they look at loss rates of B-17 crews, the myth of the clean Wehrmacht, and ask why the West was apparently so unprepared for Japan’s attack.
(more…)
May 4, 2025
The Clean German Myth, Doomed B-17 Pilots, and Japan’s Rapid Victories – Out of the Foxholes Live
Comments Off on The Clean German Myth, Doomed B-17 Pilots, and Japan’s Rapid Victories – Out of the Foxholes Live
One Fine Day in the British Empire 100 years ago
Nigel Biggar discusses One Fine Day by Matthew Parker, which looks at the state of the British Empire in the mid-1920s with a moderately jaundiced eye (as you’d expect for a modern popular history about the empire):
The approach is imaginative: to present a snapshot of the British Empire a century ago, five years after its victory in the First World War, when its territory was most extensive and at what must have seemed its zenith. The result is a display of the Empire in all its ad hoc variety, from the white-majority settler “dominion” of Australia to the non-settler “protectorate” of Uganda. The reader meets colonial officials who were sympathetic and conscientious in their dealings with those they ruled, as well as some who were brutally arrogant and dismissive. He also hears from native people who appreciated the benefits of imperial rule, as well as those who felt humiliated by Western dominance. And he learns that, if the British were late in introducing democracy to India, they were the very first to do so, for its like had never been seen before. To its great credit, no one can read this book and conclude that the British Empire was a morally simple thing.
However, it seems that our snap-shooter was fascinated mainly by the Empire in the east and grew tired as he travelled westward. Of the thirty-seven chapters, he devotes twenty-two to Australasia, the Pacific, South-East Asia, and India. There is very little mention of the Empire in South Africa, almost nothing on the Middle East (Egypt, Palestine, and Iraq) and hardly a reference to Canada. In addition, the publisher appears to have become alarmed at the length, since readers wanting to consult the notes or bibliography are directed to the author’s website.
What is more, the synchronic approach suffers from myopia, relegating major imperial achievements to walk-on parts. We do hear about the Empire’s humanitarian suppression of slavery, but only incidentally. The reader is not told that Britain (along with France and Denmark) was among the first states in the history of the world to repudiate slave-trading and slavery in the early 1800s and that it used its imperial power throughout the second half of its life to abolish slavery from Brazil across Africa to India and New Zealand. And in ending his book by reporting the 1923 cession of Rwanda to Belgium and Jubaland to Italy as tokens of imminent imperial dissolution — “Very soon, of course, the trickle became a flood” is the very last sentence — the author allows the reader to overlook the extraordinary, heroic contribution that the British Empire went on to make in the Second World War, when, between the Fall of France in May 1940 and the German invasion of Russia in June 1941, it offered the only military resistance to the massively murderous, racist regime in Nazi Berlin, with the sole exception of Greece.
While our imperial tourist is a generally an honest reporter, presenting the good as well as the bad elements of the Empire, his account is not innocent of unfairly negative bias.
The problem first manifests itself in the decision to open his account with the story of the mining ruination of a tiny Pacific territory by the British Phosphate Company. He then returns to this in the book’s closing pages, where describes it as a tale of “extractive colonialism at its most literal”. While an attentive reader of the pages in between will notice that the Empire sometimes brought native people economic opportunities and benefits, the lasting impression given by this bookending is that it was — as neo-Marxists have always claimed — basically exploitative. And yet Rudolf von Albertini, whose work was based “on exhaustive examination of the literature on most parts of the colonial world to 1940” (according to the eminent imperial economic historian, David Fieldhouse) judged “that colonial economics cannot be understood through concepts such as plunder economics and exploitation”.1
Parker’s negative bias appears most strongly in his crude, unreflective understanding of the racial attitudes of the imperial British. While he does bring onto the stage colonial Britons who express a range of views of other peoples, including sympathy and benevolence (albeit usually “paternalistic”), he nevertheless tells us that “ideas of white supremacy remained a guiding structural principle of the empire. This racist ideology was a coping stone of empire” (p. 8). What he has in mind is specifically the idea of a fixed “hierarchy of races”, with whites permanently established at the top — “what we would now call white supremacism” (p. 65). Such a view could claim the authority of natural science, since at the turn of the twentieth century “European scientists all still agreed that human beings were naturally unequal … and that there was a hierarchy of races” (p. 138).
1. D.K. Fieldhouse, The West and the Third World (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), p. 168; R. von Albertini with Albert Wirz, European Colonial Rule, 1880–1940: The Impact of the West on India, Southeast Asia, and Africa, trans. John G. Williamson (Oxford: Clio, 1982), p. 507.
Comments Off on One Fine Day in the British Empire 100 years ago
Everyday Life in the Roman Empire – Culture and Literacy in the Roman Empire
seangabb
Published 28 Dec 2024This is the eighth video in my series on Everyday Life in the Roman Empire. In this, I wander about at the beginning, with talk of poetry and philosophy, before realising that the real theme is the extent of ancient literacy. The whole of the remainder is given over to this, and how it enabled a literary civilisation wholly different from our own.
Introduction – 00:00:00
Our perceptions of culture in the Ancient world – 00:01:40
Virgil – 00:03:45
Catullus – 00:05:17
Philosophy in Rome – 00:06:23
The Romans and Stoicism – 00:08:40
The Romans and Epicureanism – 00:10:27
Pretty silver things from Roman Britain – 00:16:25
Broad-based cultural participation in the Ancient World? – 00:19:26
The Ancient World: a largely illiterate civilisation (no spectacles) – 00:28:27
The Ancient World: a largely illiterate civilisation (expensive education, expensive books) – 00:35:40
The Ancient World: a largely illiterate civilisation (economic imperatives) – 00:42:35
The Ancient World: a largely illiterate civilisation (expensive writing materials) – 00:44:44
The Ancient World: a largely illiterate civilisation (difficulties of reading) – 00:49:16
The Ancient memory – 00:53:14
The primacy of oral communication – 00:55:23
The Ancient World: a largely illiterate civilisation (the Second Sophistic and linguistic change) – 00:59:53
Bibliography – 01:08:10
(more…)
Comments Off on Everyday Life in the Roman Empire – Culture and Literacy in the Roman Empire
May 3, 2025
German democracy under threat from extremely extreme extreme right AfD
That, at least is the judgement of the German domestic intelligence agency assigned responsibility for sniffing out threats to German democracy:
This morning, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) officially reclassified Alternative für Deutschland as a “confirmed right-wing extremist” organisation. The BfV is Germany’s primary domestic intelligence agency; it is subject to the Ministry of the Interior and tasked, among other things, with policing the democratic respectability of ordinary Germans and their political parties. The upgraded AfD classification is supported by an extensive and totally secret 1,100-page assessment of AfD activities and beliefs, which BfV analysts have been preparing since last year.
Everybody expected the BfV to do this. Leading Social Democrats in particular have been urging the BfV to release their new assessment for months. They see it as a political justification for initiating ban proceedings against the party. As I wrote last week, it is now likely that the new CDU/SPD government, or the new Bundestag, or both, will ask the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe to weigh an AfD prohibition. This new assessment matters mostly because it is the first concrete move in that direction.
The only thing that is really surprising about this news, is the timing: I and everybody else expected the BfV to wait until the CDU and the SPD form a new government and appoint a new Interior Minister. Instead, the sitting Interior Minister Nancy Faeser appears to have forced this assessment through in the final four days of her tenure. This, and not AfD poll numbers (as some have speculated), is the reason this is happening now.
[…]
Among other things, the assessment allegedly cites these extremely right-wing remarks from an 11 August 2024 speech by Hannes Gnauck, who sits on the AfD federal executive committee:
We must also be allowed to decide once again who belongs to this nation and who does not. There is more to being German than simply holding citizenship papers. All of us here in this market square are connected by much more than just a common language. We are connected by an invisible and simply inexplicable bond. Each and every one of you has more in common with me than any Syrian or Afghan, and I don’t have to explain that – it’s simply a law of nature.
The assessment also includes this absolutely extremist 25 August 2024 statement by Dennis Hohloch, an AfD staffer in the Brandenburg state parliament:
Diversity means multiculturalism. And what does multiculturalism mean? Multiculturalism means a loss of tradition, a loss of identity, a loss of homeland, murder, manslaughter, robbery and gang rape.
Finally, the BfV would like us to know that their assessment includes this insanely extreme (and since-deleted) tweet from Martin Reichardt, a Bundestag staffer:
Failed migration policy and asylum abuse have led to the importation of 100,000 people from deeply backward and misogynistic cultures.
Obviously the BfV are leaking their choicest, least arguable, and juiciest bits of evidence – the stuff they think will really turn ordinary Germans against those evil AfD Nazis. I invite you re-read these three passages with that in mind, and then try to imagine for yourself what an absurd cultural and ideological bubble these people must inhabit, to find these remarks scandalous.
Comments Off on German democracy under threat from extremely extreme extreme right AfD
QotD: When the Cursus Honorum failed, so did the Roman Republic
Public men in the Roman Republic had always been ambitious — it went with the territory; they built large parts of their culture around it — but by Caesar’s day the vetting process had been completely inverted.
The Old Republic was full of men like Caesar, because people are what they are; there are always potential Caesars running around. But the names of the Old Republic’s Caesars don’t appear in the history books, because back then they still maintained the distinction between process and outcome. If there’s a conflict between them, process must yield, and so even though a potential Caesar did a competent job as quaestor and was ready to stand for curule aedile, he’d be taken aside by an old man (“senate” comes from senex, “old man”) for a stern talking-to … or more than a stern talking-to, if it came to that.
By Julius Caesar‘s day, though, process had completely eclipsed outcome. Again, the “real” Caesar is much debated by historians, but what’s not in dispute is his naked ambition. Everybody knew what Caesar was about, right from the get-go. But since there was no way to stop his climb up the cursus honorum spelled out in the Policies and Procedures Manual, nobody did.
Indeed, by Caesar’s time, the rot was so deep that most (I’d argue all, but I’m not a Classicist) of the offices on the CH were eyewash, just lines on a CV. The curule aediles weren’t managing the grain supply; they had battalions of freedmen running that. They were still putting on games, of course, but they weren’t personally putting them on; again, battalions of clever freedmen did that. The only thing the aedile did for “his” games was pay for them … on credit, and only in order to take the next step up the ladder.
And the rot was, of course, recursive. Caesar at least had clarity: He wanted to be quaestor so he could be aedile; to be aedile so he could be praetor; to be praetor so he could be governor; to be governor so he could be general; to be general so he could be … well, whatever, that’s part of the great debate surrounding Caesar, but it doesn’t matter for our purposes. For us, what matters is that everyone else was doing the same thing, and because all the real work was being done by those battalions of clever freedmen, the quality of Republican leadership dropped off dramatically. How can a praetor-in-name-only accurately judge the competence of an aedile-in-name-only? Yeah, he technically held the office for a year, but he left it as ignorant of its duties as when he entered.
Severian, “Cursus Honorum”, Founding Questions, 2021-12-27.
[NR: Links to the Roman Glossary added.]
Comments Off on QotD: When the Cursus Honorum failed, so did the Roman Republic
May 2, 2025
Monkey Rockets, beavers with Parachutes, and the Fall of Empires – 1948 Newscast – W2W 26
TimeGhost History
Published 1 May 2025In 1948, the Cold War intensifies as Stalin blockades Berlin, triggering a dramatic US-led Airlift to save West Berlin. Meanwhile, the British Empire continues to crumble as Burma, Ceylon, and Palestine gain independence — with Israel’s declaration igniting immediate war. America launches the Marshall Plan, the Soviets tighten their grip in Eastern Europe, and televised anticommunist hearings captivate the US public. The year ends with humanity pushing new frontiers — from launching monkeys into space to relocating beavers by parachute — showing just how rapidly the world is changing.
(more…)
Comments Off on Monkey Rockets, beavers with Parachutes, and the Fall of Empires – 1948 Newscast – W2W 26
HBO’s Rome – Ep 6 “Egeria” – History and Story
Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 30 Oct 2024This time we come to Episode 6 of Season 1 of ROME. This one is very much based around the City of Rome itself and places Antony centre stage. In the video we look at the actual history and how well the show reflects this. For more detail on the history, have a look at the videos in the Conquered and the Proud playlist.
Comments Off on HBO’s Rome – Ep 6 “Egeria” – History and Story
QotD: The Victorian attitude toward illegitimacy
I am still shocked by the recollection that, as late as the early 1990s, there were still a few women in psychiatric hospitals in Britain who were there principally because they had been admitted seventy years earlier after having given birth to an illegitimate child. No doubt they had quickly become institutionalised and could scarcely have coped with life outside; but to think of a long human life passed in this impoverished way (the wards for “chronics” had beds so close together that they allowed for no privacy whatever) as a kind of punishment for what is now no longer regarded even as an indiscretion, reminds one of La Rochefoucauld’s dictum that neither the sun nor death can be stared at for long. One cannot fix one’s mind on such a horrible injustice for long.
Of course, it was stigma like this that gave stigma itself a bad name — stigmatised so to speak, in fact, to such a degree or effect that the very name of stigma has a completely negative valency. No one has a good word to say for it, though whether there ever was, or could be, a society completely without it, I am unsure.
Theodore Dalrymple, “The Situational Nature of Scorn and Stigma”, New English Review, 2020-04-28.
Comments Off on QotD: The Victorian attitude toward illegitimacy
May 1, 2025
The economics of migration
Lorenzo Warby wonders if an entire discipline can commit suicide:
Can an academic discipline seriously decline? Yes. Disciplines which were once mainstays of universities have either vanished or shrunk to pale shadows of their former selves.
What about a social science? One can envisage a social science disappearing. The most obvious way is it gets utterly discredited and replaced. A less obvious way is its institutional bases could disappear. A final way is its entire social basis disappears.
The West is currently marked by two entirely different discourses on migration that seem unable to interact. One is migration-as-economic-boon. This is the outlook of mainstream Economics. Migrants add to the economic activity of societies and potentially retard the effect of an ageing population by replacing absent local children with foreign migrants. This discourse invokes the authority of Economic Theory and its statistical methods.
This outlook typically treats criticism of migration as economically illiterate, socially retrograde, or morally bankrupt; or some combination of thereof. It is protected by the Self-Righteous, Knowing scoff which is such a feature of the modern professional-managerial class. They are the Masters of Knowledge, and of Moral Concern, who the plebs should defer to.
The other discourse talks in terms of social and democratic decay, increased crime, threats of violence, increased fiscal stress, even the possibility of civil war.
This is the world where, in Sweden — due to the stress on social and fiscal order from migration — it has become policy to pay migrants to go away. This is the world where highly intelligent and informed folk quietly discuss how the performance of economists on migration has been so catastrophically bad, it may bring down the entire discipline.
The adherents of the second, problems-with-migration, discourse are well aware of what mainstream Economics has to say on migration, and judge it to be obviously and demonstrably — even catastrophically — false. That it is much harder for migrants to contribute positively to a society than mainstream Economics admits, and this gets worse the higher the rate of migration. A recent Dutch study (Jan van de Beek, Joop Hartog, Gerrit Kreffer, Hans Roodenburg, The Long-Term Fiscal Impact of Immigrants in the Netherlands, Differentiated by Motive, Source Region and Generation, IZA DP No. 17569, December 2024. https://docs.iza.org/dp17569) found that:
Only 20% of all immigrants [to the Netherlands] make a positive lifetime net contribution to the public budget. Groups with large contributions come from Scandinavia, the Anglo-Saxon world and a few other countries like France and Japan.
The adherents of the first discourse seem either utterly unaware of the second discourse, or protected from even considering it by the Self-Righteous Knowing scoff. Their mastery of Theory is such, they cannot possibly be so catastrophically wrong.
The notion that migration could break a society along its existing fracture lines to the point of civil war would absolutely be treated with the Self-Righteous Knowing scoff, despite there being — as is discussed below — at least three historical examples of precisely that happening.
Comments Off on The economics of migration
Military Tactics In The Falklands
Pegasus Tests
Published 27 Dec 2024A discussion with Ian McCollum of Forgotten Weapons about Argentine and British tactics during the Falklands War.
#forgottenweapons
Comments Off on Military Tactics In The Falklands
QotD: The Eurovision Song Contest
The Eurovision Song Contest has never quite recovered, but oh, you should have seen it in its glory days, when the rich national cultures that gave the world Bach, Mozart, Vivaldi, Purcell, Debussy, and Grieg bandied together to bring us “La-La-La” (winner, 1968), “Boom-Bang-A-Bang” (1969), “Ding-Dinge-Dong” (1975), “A Ba Ni Bi” (1978), “Diggy Loo Diggi Ley” (1984), and my personal favorite, “Lat Det Swinge,” the 1985 winner by the Norwegian group Bobbysocks. The above songs are nominally sung in Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, and even English, but in fact it’s the universal language of Eurogroovy: “Ja, ja, boogie, baby, mit der rock ‘n’ roll”.
Mark Steyn, “Waterloo”, Steyn Online, 2020-05-17.
Comments Off on QotD: The Eurovision Song Contest
April 30, 2025
Low-energy Europe
Depending on who you read, it appears that the massive power outage in southwestern Europe nearly expanded across the continent, as Spain and Portugal went dark taking parts of other neighbouring countries’ networks down as well. James Price explains that this sort of thing is likely to be a recurring phenomenon as Europe leans ever more heavily on unreliable sources of electricity:
In his 2017 book The Strange Death of Europe, Douglas Murray accused Western European nations of Geschichtsmüde, being weary of history. President Trump might translate this by recycling a sobriquet he used against Jeb Bush — being low-energy.
This is now literally the case in both the United Kingdom and Germany, who have the most expensive energy costs in the developed world. The consequences have been catastrophic, in economic, political, environmental, and even geostrategic terms.
The true tragedy is that so much of the pain is self-inflicted, the result of bad, rushed policy designed to make people feel warm and fuzzy inside, rather than actually keeping people warm.
Net Zero
The commitment in Britain to “net zero emissions by 2050” was signed into law in the dying days of Theresa May’s premiership, as an attempt to give her a “legacy” after three painful years as Prime Minister. That legacy is likely to be lost, like the works of Ozymandias, as the world comes crashing back to economic reality.
The debate over the introduction of net zero was conducted during the Conservative Party’s leadership contest to succeed May, and therefore all attention was away from what would prove to be the most impactful economic decision of the year. The debate lasted all of 90 minutes.
The results have been completely devastating for Britain’s economy in all sorts of corrosive ways. For one, 169 years after Henry Bessemer worked out how to mass-produce steel in Sheffield, Yorkshire, Britain almost lost its ability to make the stuff here in Britain. Global factors like Chinese dumping play a part, but the extent of environmental regulation on British industry is making it impossible to sustain any kind of heavy industry. And now, British Steel has been nationalized once more, lumping the taxpayer with the losses and liabilities, but without doing anything to address the root causes.
But the government meddling does not stop there. In agriculture, a cruel, ideological attack on farmers (over whether farms can be charged inheritance tax) is going to spur more prime farmland to be turned into solar panel fields in a country where the sun often doesn’t shine.
There are now many statutory requirements to push environmental policies in all sorts of areas, to the complete detriment of other requirements, namely economic prosperity, that would otherwise be carefully balanced. So new homes in Britain have to have small windows, to increase insulation efficiency.
HS2, a much delayed and hideously over-budget high speed rail line between London and Birmingham, is building a one-kilometer-long tunnel to prevent bats being harmed by high-speed trains. The tunnel will cost over £100 million to build. Not only is there no evidence that the trains would interfere with bats, but there is also some evidence that the bat tunnel may actually be a bat-killing tunnel.
Hinkley Point C, the only nuclear power station being constructed at the moment in Britain, is having to construct a “fish disco” at huge costs to push fish away from being sucked into the cooling system.
This kind of environmental “everythingism” is not just holding back progress, not just costing huge amounts; it is corrosive of every attempt by people who just want to get on with building and growing — even “green” enterprises. Orsted, an offshore wind company, had to fill in forms five times longer than Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and had to wait nearly three years for a decision to build one farm.
And specifically about the Spanish situation that nearly triggered a Europe-wide blackout, from the social media network formerly known as Twitter:
SPAIN BLACKOUTS: AN ANONYMOUS EXPERT VIEW
From a deep groupchat, last night, translated from Spanish, written by an expert in transmission and distribution of power. Not my words.
“What has happened on April 28 has a well-located origin: the Aragón-Catalonia corridor, which is one of the most important electric highways in Spain. There is not only the electricity produced by our solar and wind farms in the northeast, but also the electricity that we import from France. This international interconnection, although weak (it can only contribute 3% of our demand, well below the minimum of 10% that marks the EU), in times of stress is essential to balance the network.
“At 12:32 p.m., in that Aragón-Catalonia corridor there was an electric [shake]. What exactly does “shake” mean? It means that suddenly and abnormally, the power that flowed through those lines began to vary violently, rising and falling in a very short time. Such abrupt variability can be due to three main causes:
“1. That a relay or transformer on that electric highway detects an abnormal flow of current or voltage (higher or lower than expected) and automatically disconnected to avoid burning or [being] destroyed. This is called that “opens” a relay or switch: it jumps and cuts the passage of electricity to protect itself.
“2. That the enormous concentration of renewable energy in that area (mainly solar and wind) has created an electrical resonance: electronic inverters, which synchronize current, can sometimes be amplified between them if a small voltage alteration (for example, due to clouds, strong wind or a slight failure) extends like an echo to all devices, causing widespread oscillations.
“3. That a wrong control order has been sent (by mistake or attack) from the SCADA systems, disconnecting or reducing the generation of multiple hit plants. There is no confirmation of this possibility yet, but it is being investigated.
“What is known is that as a consequence of that shake, the interconnection with France jumped: we were isolated just at the worst time, when the peninsula needed external support to stabilize.
“Without that French help, the frequency of the peninsular network (which should always be 50 Hz exact) began to drop quickly. The frequency is like the heartbeat of the network: if it falls too much, the systems understand that the patient (the network) is collapsing and automatically disconnected so as not to self-destruct. Thus, in just five seconds, the solar and wind farms were turned off — [they are] very sensitive to frequency variations — 15 GW of power was lost suddenly (60% of all the electricity generated at that time), and the network could not take it anymore: it collapsed completely, showing the Redeia Platform (REE) a “0 MW” nationwide. That does not mean that all the turbines were physically turned off, but there was no generator synchronized at the common frequency of 50 Hz. It was, for practical purposes, a country [turned] off.
“To [restart] a completely dead network, one essential thing is needed: plants that can start in black, that is, without receiving energy from anywhere else. Spain has identified five large hydroelectric jumps capable of doing this. However, and here is one of the great negligences that are coming to light, three of those five groups were stopped in scheduled maintenance, by business decision supervised by the administration. Only two were operational. That made the recovery much slower and weaker than it should be in a normal contingency plan.
“The result is that, after almost 10 hours, only 35% to 40% of the national supply has been recovered, and there are still large areas in the dark or under scheduled cuts.
“The situation reveals a very serious underlying problem:
“Spain is still an energy island: it only has 3% foreign exchange capacity compared to its total demand.”
Part 2:
“The network depends a lot on variable renewables, which are disconnected quickly in the face of any instability.
“The lack of physical inertia reserves (i.e. large rotating masses such as thermal power plants or classic hydraulics) prevents the disturbances from damping.
“And poor maintenance planning left without enough hydraulic muscle to respond to a crisis.
“The most likely causes, with current data, are:
“A combination of technical failure in protection or in synchronization, added to a serious lack of operational forecast and maintenance (probability ≈ 40%).
“The possibility of an intentional cyber-physical attack remains in analysis (≈ 25% estimated probability).
“Other factors such as human error, punctual atmospheric phenomenon or mixed causes complete the rest.
“In short: an initial shake at the most sensitive point of the Spanish network — the Aragón-Catalonia corridor, door to Europe — left the peninsula isolated and vulnerable. The network could not sustain its own demand because it did not have sufficient assistance, nor stable physical reserve, nor enough bootable plants in black. Three of five hydroelectric jumps were out of service when they were most needed.
“For this reason, Spain went out in five seconds, and that is why it still continues to light little by little, fragile, slow and exposed.”
Comments Off on Low-energy Europe
QotD: The experience of the infantryman through the ages
Well, here is where we come back to the note I made earlier about how “warring” and “soldiering” were different verbs with different meanings. After all, while soldiering implies these difficulties, warring doesn’t, necessarily. And it isn’t hard to see why – the warrior classes in these societies, often being aristocrats, generally didn’t do a lot of these things. It is, for instance, noted in the Roman sources when a general chose to eat the same food as his soldiers, because most Roman aristocrats didn’t when they served as generals or military tribunes. The privileges of rank and class applied.
And that’s something we see with medieval aristocrats too. On the one hand, Jean de Bueil talks about the “difficulties and travail” of war, but at the same time, Clifford Rogers notes one (fictional and lavish, but not outrageous) war party “suitable for a baron or banneret” included a chaplain, three heralds, four trumpeters, two drummers, four pages, two varlets (that is, servants for the pages), two cooks, a forager, a farrier, an armorer, twelve more serving men (with horses, presumably both as combatants and as servants), and a majordomo to manage them all – in addition to the one lord, three knights and nine esquires (C. Rogers, Soldiers’ Lives through History: the Middle Ages (2007), 28-9).
Jean le Bel (quoted in Rogers, op. cit.) contrasts the situation of the nobles in Edward III’s army (1327), where “one could see great nobility well served with a great plenty of dishes and sweets – such strange ones that I wouldn’t know to name or describe them. There one could see ladies richly adorned and nobly ornamented” while in the camp proper an open brawl between the regular soldiers from England and Hainault broke out and eventually turned into an open battle in which 316 died, but so segregated was the camp that, “most of the knights and of their masters were then at court, and knew nothing of this” (Rogers, 66-7). Likewise, except in fairly extreme positions, most of the ditch-digging, camp-building duties would fall to the common soldiers (and, as Roel Konijnendijk can quite accurately tell you, ditches are important! When in doubt, dig some ditches – or make others dig ditches for you).
That said, these differences are not merely confined to the high aristocrats. Marching under a heavy load is often given as one example of the quintessential “soldier experience”, but it seems that many Greek hoplites went to war with a personal slave or servant to carry their equipment for them, despite being infantrymen. The Romans carried equipment and supplies something closer to what a modern soldier might (both in terms of weight and also, apart from ammunition, in terms of what was carried), but then non-Roman sources like the Greek writer Polybius (18.18.1-7) or the Jewish writer Josephus (BJ 3.95) appear quite stunned with the amount of tools and equipment the Romans carry (and Polybius, by the by, is writing before Marius’ mules). Evidently the Roman impedementia was quite a bit heavier, though even the Macedonians carried much more than a Greek hoplite army (Note Engels, Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army, 1978 on this).
Meanwhile, Jonathan Roth is quick to note (in The Logistics of the Roman Army at War (264 B.C. – A.D. 235) (1999)) that despite either bad or insufficient rations being a common complaint of soldiers, such complaints appear absent from Roman sources, even in the context of legionary mutinies. Indeed, the evidence suggests that Roman soldiers ate quite well, with fairly ample rations. In camp the Roman soldier’s diet was not so different from what he might eat in peacetime (especially once we get into the imperial period with legions stationed in semi-permanent bases); on the march they had to make do with bucellatum, a hard biscuit something like hardtack. But for many Italian peasants, the diet doesn’t seem to have been much worse – or much different – from what they ate in peacetime.
By way of sharp contrast to the plodding, heavily loaded but surely very lethal Roman legionary, the impis of the Zulu traveled fast, light and sometimes somewhat hungry. Zulu warriors generally carried only their equipment on the march, while supplies were carried by udibi, boys serving as porters. Even then, such supplies were minimal – the Zulu force that arrived at Rorke’s Drift (1879) had only been out six days, but none of the warriors in it had eaten in two. Such minimally supplied flying columns, moving fast and with considerable stealth (one cannot read anything on the Anglo-Zulu war without noticing how, even with cavalry scouts, Zulu impis seem so often just to appear next to British forces) were the norm for Zulu warfare. And to be clear, this wasn’t some “primitive” or underdeveloped form of war – the light and fast operational movements of the Zulu were intentional (much of it was a product of Shaka’s reforms) and very effective – albeit not so effective as to offset the massive advantages the British possessed in population, economic capacity or military technology. Nevertheless, not even every sort of common soldier was the heavily loaded, slow moving, well-fed ditch-digging sort like the Romans. The “soldier experience” needs to cover the lightly loaded and armed, fast moving, hungry, non-ditch-digging Zulu experience too.
And then of course when we consider nomadic peoples, we find that in many cases their lives on campaign were not that much different from their lives at peacetime, involving many of the same skills and activities.
In short, the experience of the drudgery of war – the bad food, long toil, heavy encumbrance and so on was all still quite contingent (or we might say “dependent”) on the society going to war. Social divisions mattered. Expectations about masculine behavior mattered. Military systems mattered. Yes, modern armies in the European tradition expect their soldiers to do a lot of labor and drudgery, but remember where that military system came from: it was the system of the common soldiers serving under the aristocrats who most certainly did not do those things but who did impose sharp, corporal discipline. Which, to be clear, doesn’t make this system ineffective – it was clearly effective. The point here is that it was socially contingent – a different society would have come up with a different system. And they did! The Early Modern European system is only one way to organize an army and historically speaking not even the most common.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Universal Warrior, Part IIb: A Soldier’s Lot”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-02-05.
Comments Off on QotD: The experience of the infantryman through the ages
April 29, 2025
The US Cancels Tariffs and Saves the World – W2W 025
TimeGhost History
Published 28 Apr 2025After seeing the devastating effects of the trade war that ravaged the global economy between the world wars, in 1948 the US is determined to usher in an age of free trade and global cooperation that will last until the spring of 2025.
(more…)
Comments Off on The US Cancels Tariffs and Saves the World – W2W 025
