When Trumpets Fade

Columnist Capt (Retd) A A JILANI discusses the different requirements of war on the national morale.

The fog of war obscures not only the language but also the battlefield. High-flown rhetoric is required to rouse the tribe for the necessary sacrifice entailed by this most terrible of human activities. So from ancient epic to television soundbite, martial vocabulary has been exaggerated and over-the-top. Last year we heard anachronistic demands for heads on platters “Wanted Dead or Alive”. Now we are hearing allegations about “cross-border terrorism” and “indigenous uprising”, sabre-rattling about “decisive war” and “retaliation with full might”, veiled threats about the mutual devastation of nuclear warfare and flowery proclamations of the desire for “peaceful settlement” while the hostile Armies are massed eyeball to eyeball.

Henry V urges us into the breach in the walls of Harfleur once more. The war-horses cry out among the trumpets — “Ha ha. He smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the Captains and the fierce shouting”. The miracle of the first war poem is when it ascends from the thunder of battle to the still small voice of humanity: “There lies great Ajax, there Achilles. There lies Patroclus the superman warrior. And there lies my own dear son doing his service for the bloody Generals”.

That old Hollywood movie star Ronald Reagan was really good at war Rhetoric — “Terrorists can run but they can’t hide. They are misfits and loony-tunes. No one can kill Americans and brag about it. No one”. The orators of war used to quote the Holy Bible and tribal literature as their references — “The angel of death has been abroad throughout the land; you may almost hear the beating of his wings”. Today the rhetoric of war comes from Hollywood which has become the virtual establishment for the young nation which looks forward, not back.

Winston Churchill was most brilliant at the lion’s roar and he boasted that he was proud of having given the roar which mobilised the entire British population to face the enemy. But he needed Alanbrooke (Chief of Imperial Defence Staff) to keep him away from the kitchen. Adolf Hitler was a demonic rhetorician but he had no Alanbrooke who dared tell him that he was no Frederick the Great, whose portrait adorned the crumbling walls of the Fuehrer’s bunker right upto the pathetic end of his life. He could no more break away from his pre-conceived strategy than Joan of Arc could abandon her angelic voice.

For when the blast of war blows in our ears, we need two voices. We need the rousing rhetoric of war in order to rally the troops, stir the tribe and comfort the timorous. But on the battlefield what is needed is not emotion but precision, speed and clarity. In 1940 when France was collapsing under the Nazi blitzkrieg, the senile 72-year-old C-in-C of the French Armies Maxime Weygand wept openly to the French War cabinet that — “We have no reserves”. There was nobody to give the lion’s roar as the entire French Armies were infected with a spirit of surrender and capitulation. The impetuous Colonel-General Heinz Guderian was competing with the flamboyant Field-Marshal Rommel for glamour and publicity, in fact it seemed that both were aspiring for the title of “Showboy-in-Chief” while the more sound and solid professionals such as Douglas MacArthur and Sir William Slim were slogging it out with magnificent performances in comparative obscurity.

So new recruits in basic training are now taught how to identify targets and read map references so as to leave no room for misunderstanding. They refer to “bushy-top trees” and “minarets of Mosques”, use the clock-dial to orient their directions and estimate distances by reckoning in terms of acres. In the Army Schools and Colleges the O-Group training insists on plain language without any possibility of ambiguity.

From Senlac to Jutland to Belgrade, cock-ups occur because of misunderstood orders in the Bedlam of Battle. Imprecise language leads to disaster. The most notorious and well-known was the Charge of the Light Brigade — “Lord Raglan wishes the cavalry to advance rapidly to the front, follow the enemy and try to prevent him carrying away the guns. Troop Horse Artillery may accompany, French cavalry is on your left. Immediate. (Sgd) R. Airey”. But down on the plain a thousand feet below, Cardigan could not see the Russians hauling away the guns in dead ground to his right. So 272 out of the 673 of the bravest of the brave who charged straight down the Valley of Death perished. And General Bosquet quipped — “Magnificent, but this is not war”. Hitler’s stirring rhetoric and last-minute order for promotion to the rank of Field-Marshal could not deter the faltering Friedrich Paulus from surrendering his entire 6th Army at the gates of Stalingrad. Generalship should be made of sterner stuff. While pondering over the fate of 32 Generals who went into captivity at Stalingrad, one wonders how Pakistan could afford the luxury of having a Field Marshal during the 1965 war?

Very few Commanders can do both the thunder and the nuts and bolts of war. These are quite different languages. Napoleon was much better at “la gloire” rather than boring staff generalship. Wellington was better at getting his Armies in the right place at the right time and ensuring that they had food rather than fire in their bellies. Nelson managed both, so perhaps did Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar although it is not easy to read their performance from this distance. Monty of El Alamein could do both the exhortation and the planning although he was a stickler for the “text-book DS solutions”. Erich von Manstein was probably the greatest strategic genius of the twentieth century who devised such brilliant deviation of the classic Von Schiefflen plan for the 1940 blitzkrieg campaign, but he lacked the thunder and “blood and guts” of George Patton Jr.

Great Generals must be both grasshoppers for inspiration and ants for diligence, but very few combine these opposing talents. President George Bush is good at the emotional rhetoric of war in his own folksy idiom that suits the present day American public, although he has miserably failed to win the hearts of middle-America as did FDR with his “fireside chats” during World War II. But when it comes to the battlefield we need the meticulous, dry language of the professional soldiers rather than the trumpet tongues of the politicians.