Investigations of a Dog

Recently I linked to The Wapenshaw, a new early-modern military history blog. This is an exciting addition to an area which is under-represented in the history blogosphere (how I hate that word, but I cant think of anything better). There was a noticeable gap here in the first Military History Carnival. Although I found a reasonable number of early-modern posts, most of them focused on America, and only one covered Europe. Another reason why I’m pleased to see this blog is that Rich is paying a lot of attention to me (every blogger is a narcissist!). His first two posts comment on my posts from last year about cavalry charges and drill books. This is a useful coincidence, as I need to write a proposal for a conference paper on this topic by the end of this week, so in this post I’ll trying to get my thoughts into some kind of coherent order. Trying: the post itself is quite incoherent and probably contains some total nonsense, but that’s part of the value of a blog.

The paper will probably be called something like “Shock, Firepower, and Text: Imagining the cavalry charge in early Stuart England”, and is likely to combine bits of my posts on Which War Horse and Cavalry Charges: Theory along with some new material. I’m going to concentrate on the four drill books that I looked at before, by Gervase Markham, John Cruso, Robert Ward, and John Vernon. These were the major (and perhaps only, but I’ll have to investigate more carefully) authors who wrote on cavalry tactics in English in the first half of the 17th century. The genre is so small that it won’t be possible to identify any trends (it wouldn’t even show up on Franco Moretti’s graphs!). What seems like a significant change could be down to the idiosyncrasies of an individual author rather than a change in culture.

Unfortunately, authorial intent is quite a tricky area to get into. I’m not quite sure what position to take here. I’m too theoretically aware to assume that intentions are obvious and that meaning is fixed by the author, but on the other hand I don’t think I’m quite sophisticated or experienced enough to be able to confidently defend a structuralist or post-structuralist position (and my worst case post-structuralist scenario - communication is impossible! - would mean there’s no point writing a paper anyway!). I’m going to have to skirt around the problem of meaning, but that’s acceptable because nobody has a solution to it yet. I think I’m going to try to show that if you take the meaning of the text at face value then it doesn’t necessarily agree with itself. I don’t think that any of these books presents a coherent system. For example, Ward seems to advocate firepower in some places and charges/close combat in other places. So my position will probably be that even if you’re not a post-structuralist and approach these texts in a traditional way, you’ll still find some problems with them which raise difficult questions. (I see a vague parallel with quantum physics here: the strange behaviour of waves and particles has been consistently proven by empirical experiments but can’t be explained by traditional science.)

The relationship between text and reality is another big issue which I’m probably going to leave out. There are many questions here which need to be answered and which I might tackle in the future, but I don’t think I’ll be able to fit them into a short conference paper. Were these books based on practical experience? We need to know far more about the authors before we can answer that. I’m going to touch on this issue by examining the influence of other texts - I’ve found a particularly unrealistic manoeuvre which keeps recurring in different texts - but even if the books I’m looking at were all copied from other books, we still need to know whether those books were based on experience, which just makes the research more difficult. Were the books widely read? Barbara Donagan (’Halcyon Days and the Literature of War’, Past and Present, 147, pp. 65-100) says they were, but I need to look into that in more detail. Did they influence how things were done in practice? Again Donagan thinks so, but I’m not entirely convinced. The lack of detailed empirical evidence of what actually happened on the battlefield is a big problem here. I think too many historians have dipped into these books and selectively quoted the bits that fit their own prejudices, or which happen to match descriptions of battles. There’s a lot more work to be done here, but it’s impractical to try and fit it into a 20 minute paper.

So I’ll be leaving out questions of whether the texts influenced or were influenced by practice, and just focusing on the texts themselves. This won’t quite be a “close reading”. I hate the way that phrase is routinely misused by historians (but maybe I’m just naively trying to fix meaning when it can’t be fixed!). I have absolutely no interest in the New (ie very old!) Criticism, and I doubt that any of the theoretically aware historians who are praised by reviewers for their “close readings” are very favourably inclined towards it either. Elizabeth Clark (History, Text, Theory; ISBN: 0674015843) takes Derrida’s famous (notorious?) “there is no outside the text” to mean that “text” and “context” are meaningless categories because they are always inseparable: you can’t draw a boundary between inside the text and outside the text. Therefore Derridean deconstruction is arguably the antithesis of the New Critics’ close reading. For the purposes of this paper I’m going to have to arbitrarily reject both approaches. For the sake of convenience (I’m being honest about it here; be suspicious of anyone who doesn’t admit that it’s convenient) I’m going to draw an arbitrary line between text and context and only focus on the former. However, within each text I’ll be looking for disunity rather than unity, which is more Derrida than New Criticism. I’ll also be looking for common phrases and ideas which occur in more than one text, and which might have been copied directly or indirectly (is that what they call intertextuality?).

Even excluding context and just looking at the texts should give me more than enough material for 20 minutes. I’ll be concentrating on combat, particularly the difference between shock and firepower. “Shock” is a big issue, and is complicated by different meanings of the word. While Rich and I seem to agree on what actually happened in cavalry combat, we also disagreed on meanings of the word shock. My position was “shock usually means horses crashing into each other and that couldn’t have happened therefore there was no shock”, whereas Rich took the view that “shock is close combat and we know that did happen therefore there was shock”. I hadn’t paid much attention to that definition of shock before, but I can now see that it is valid as some people do mean close combat when they refer to “shock troops”. Rich cites Charles Oman, who divided soldiers into two categories: shock and missile. In this schema, shock troops are all those who rely on close combat rather than ranged weapons.

This is a useful distinction to make, but I’m always suspicious of binary oppositions. Could psychological effects be put in a third category? In many cases that’s a doubtful proposition. For example, the psychological effects of suppressive fire or a bayonet charge are subsidiary to the real physical impact of the weapons: it’s all about fear of what the weapons will actually do, and the real physical effects of the weapons fall into the shock and missile categories. But what about cavalry charges? It seems to me that although a physical collision between walls of horses was impossible, it often happened that one side ran away before close combat could occur, presumably as a result of the fear of that collision. If that’s true, we’re dealing with a fear of something which couldn’t actually happen, and neither the fear nor the phantom collision quite fits into the close combat or missile categories (Wanklyn and Jones, in A Military History of the English Civil War, explicitly refer to the horses as missiles, but even supposing the collision could happen, using a horse as a battering ram is not really the same as firing missiles from a distance).

This just shows how problematic the meanings of words can be (I also mentioned lots of problems with the word “charge” in Cavalry Charges: Theory). It might be more useful to dispense with the word “shock” and use some more specific terms eg “physical collision”, “close combat”, “psychological impact”. I think in future I’ll try to avoid the word shock except where it’s used in the sources I’m quoting. I seem to remember that when I read the drill books last year, I didn’t find the word used very often, and that it was usually associated with lancers, where there would have been a physical collision between the point of the lance and the enemy. I’ll have to look again in more detail as this is an important point. My hypothesis is that the concept of “shock” as a physical collision was not very strongly developed or widely believed in during the 17th century and that it only became dominant in the 18th and 19th centuries. The etymology and semantics of the word “shock” in military history could easily form the basis of a PhD thesis, and possibly a lifetime’s work, but for now I’ll be concentrating on 17th century England.

Whether shock is taken to mean collision or close combat, it’s clearly different from ranged missile combat, so a binary opposition between shock and firepower is still valid in a way. Military historians have tended to construct a narrative in which the “caracole” (defined as firing pistols by ranks and falling back to reload, but as with shock, the drill books I’m looking at aren’t quite consistent with this usage) was outdated and ineffective until Gustavus Adolphus reintroduced the “shock charge”. I suspect that this is more of a narrative device than many empirical historians would care to admit - Gustavus is the genius who is ahead of his time, and triumphs over his blinkered adversaries (except that Geoffrey Parker pointed out that the Swedish army wasn’t invincible and was sometimes beaten by the “old” tactics). Wanklyn and Jones take the cliché of the genius and his moment of inspiration even further, imagining the scene when the “penny seems to have dropped” for Cromwell (pp. 271-2). I’m trying to turn this on its head. I’ve already pointed out that in Markham, Cruso, and Ward, firepower is seen as something new and innovative, and the shock charge is seen as old fashioned. I would compare these books to the knockout blow theories of airpower in the 1930s: they look forward to a future which never arrived.

I also want to make it clear that Whiggish metanarratives of progress have given us a distorted view of past and future, old and new. I’ve previously suggested that Ward and Cruso are full of renaissance ideology: the idea that “modern” civilisation is getting back to a purer classical past, and consciously rejecting the “medieval”, which is seen as corrupt and barbaric. Cruso seems to take this to ridiculous extremes with his obsession with doing as the Romans (I’m making an assumption about the author here, but this aspect of his character does seem to me to come through very strongly in the text - I could be wrong). I’m not sure how much of this I’ll be able to fit in, but I’d like to mention it, not least because I can get some good jokes out of it!

These rambling thoughts are more than half as long as the paper itself will be, and I need to come up with a coherent proposal in less than 500 words. Any comments and criticisms would be appreciated as they might help me to think more clearly (I find peer review useful, because even if the reviewer is totally wrong, it at least shows where you need to make your argument clearer and more forceful). Rich’s posts at The Wapenshaw have already pointed out some things that I hadn’t considered before. Disagreement makes you stronger!

1. Elizabeth A. Clark, History, Theory, Text (Harvard UP: Cambridge, MA, 2004).
2. Barbara Donagan, ‘Halcyon days and the literature of war’, Past and Present, 147 (1995), pp. 65-100.
3. Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1988).
4. Maclolm D. G. Wanklyn and Frank Jones, A Military History of the English Civil War (Pearson: Harlow, 2005).