• If you’d rather hear a discussion of this book, listen to our latest episode at the Modern War Institute Book Club, a podcast I co-host with MWI’s John Amble.

• Those interested in institutions and civic life might enjoy a long essay of mine, run in this fall’s print issue of Liberties. It considers the U.S. Army’s role in the American experiment. Let me know if you need a copy.

Now, some notes on intelligence, artificial and other, in war.

Good morning,

Last week I read Project Maven: A Marine Colonel, His Team, and the Dawn of AI Warfare by Katrina Manson for the Modern War Institute Book Club Podcast. The book tells the story of a Pentagon effort to integrate artificial intelligence into U.S. military operations called Project Maven. The story impressed me for reasons I’ve named below.

But one matter dogged me the entire book: are there not important truths which don’t show in training data, and isn’t this particularly true in war? And if the answer to these questions is “yes,” what are the limits of AI’s use in warfare?

Below I sort through these questions. I proceed in three parts: first I recall some useful thoughts on Hayek, then I consider the story of data in Project Maven, then I connect the two.

The writing below picks up where I left off in a piece last year for the Modern War Institute called “Tolstoy’s Complaint” - you can read that here. These thoughts also relate to some Garrison Notes on tacit knowledge and epistemology in war, as seen at the Army’s big wilderness training centers and in the Napoleonic wars.

The Knowledge Problem

In 1945 the American Economic Review ran an essay entitled “The Use of Knowledge in Society” by the economist Friedrich Hayek. The essay made a case against central economic planning. It expressed the thoughts Hayek had been developing for at least a decade, thoughts that arose from his study first of human psychology and then of economics.1 The essay would become one of the most influential of the 20th century.2

Hayek argues in the essay that the trouble with economic central planning is this:3 the knowledge needed to devise good plans is local and fleeting. No aspiring planner can aggregate knowledge completely in time to conceive of, let alone direct, a good plan. The best available method for coordination is thus a decentralized one, reconciled to knowledge’s dispersed and particular nature. Free-market pricing is that method.

Here is the somewhat famous passage from the essay wherein Hayek describes local knowledge and those who hold it (emphasis added):

…the shipper who earns his living from using otherwise empty or half-filled journeys of tramp-steamers, or the estate agent whose whole knowledge is almost exclusively one of temporary opportunities, or the
arbitrageur who gains from local differences of commodity prices, are all performing eminently useful functions based on special knowledge of circumstances of the fleeting moment not known to others.4

And the problem (emphasis added):

the economic problem of society is mainly one of rapid adaptation to changes in the particular circumstances of time and place, it would seem to follow that the ultimate decisions must be left to the people who are familiar with these circumstances, who know directly of the relevant changes and of the resources immediately available to meet them. We cannot expect that this problem will be solved by first communicating all this knowledge to a central board which, after integrating all knowledge, issues its orders.5

These old passages, describing what has since been termed “the knowledge problem,” call to our mind today the present promise of artificial intelligence. The possible use of Hayek for thinking through the implications of an artificial intelligence has not escaped notice. Many smart people have in so many ways asked: might frontier artificial intelligence be the “central board” that Hayek thought an impossibility?

Consider the scale of the data used in training frontier models. Though we don’t know for certain on what each model was trained, they likely all trained on scraped versions of the internet like FineWeb. They’ve long been known to use sources of training data like the Pile, comprising huge tranches of accumulated knowledge from books and journals. They’ve also trained on hundreds of thousands of YouTube video transcripts. That’s to say nothing of bespoke data humans have made specifically for training models.

Other smart people are not convinced that massive compute and vast training data will solve Hayek’s knowledge problem. That’s in part, they say, because of the elusiveness of what Karl Polanyi termed “tacit knowledge,” an idea to which Hayek often alluded himself. But before I consider this debate further, some notes on Project Maven.

Finding data in war (or, the “toughest job”)

So what was Project Maven, and what does it have to do with the above? In her new book, Bloomberg reporter Katrina Manson chooses to answer these questions by following a Marine intelligence officer named Drew Cukor. The book opens with images of Cukor as a young captain, not two months after 9/11, riding in the back of a Blackhawk helicopter en route to Kandahar Airport. In the seat next to him sat a computer. It would provide him with the equipment he needed for his work: Excel, Word, Google Earth and PowerPoint.

As one might imagine, these systems and the computer in which they were stored routinely failed Cukor throughout the ensuing wars. Early efforts by Cukor to change them met with stiff resistance. Through some bureaucratic bushwhacking, Cukor in 2011 found the money and authority to explore new battle tracking software that promised to improve the military’s ham-handed processes for managing what we call in the military their “common operating picture.”6

By 2017, Cukor’s imagination had expanded beyond mere data integration. A documentary on DeepMind’s AlphaGo victory over Go world champion Lee Sedol had alerted him to the potential of artificial intelligence for creative strategic thought. Then, a long-time friend (who’d been his fellow passenger in the back of that Blackhawk on their ride to Kandahar Airport in 2001) and colleague showed him a computer vision startup called IDenTV.

IDenTV demonstrated for Cukor that computer vision might be used for military surveillance and he connected the dots to what he’d seen of AlphaGo. At Cukor’s direction, IDenTV threw together a demonstration of computer vision using unclassified drone video. The tech today seems simple, but then was remarkable: an algorithm could consume drone feeds and automatically, with decent accuracy, detect and name objects as they appeared - work long relegated to tired humans.7

Cukor and his colleague took the results to then Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work, and a memorandum later, Project Maven was born. The rest of the book tells the story of the many-faceted effort to develop an artificial intelligence that could help the U.S. military fight wars. Along the way, Manson explores the many concerns with such efforts, both those held by the employees of the tech companies that threw in with Maven and those of the service members charged with developing the tech.

The book is in many ways a story of Maven’s search for the data needed to train the computer vision it sought to develop. This search was, in Manson’s account, “the toughest job” the team ever faced.8 The data “was bundled away on old slide decks and hard drives in computers and cupboards that sat as good as discarded. No one was bringing together original raw data to share, sort, and understand it.”9

Anyone who has spent a day in a large bureaucracy knows how hard it can be to get the data the bureaucracy generates. This isn’t always or even primarily a question of policy. It is more so a matter of poor “knowledge management.” Often, the most useful stuff is stored locally, irregularly, or not at all, for lack of a standard or for lack of a perceived need for the data.10

Sometimes, the difficulty one has accessing data is a matter of policy - or at least of structure. Obstructionist policies preventing access to data within an organization accrue particularly in peacetime militaries. The reason for this I think is best explained by James Q. Wilson in his seminal book Bureaucracy. In its ninth chapter he distinguishes between four types of public bureaucracies, organized by whether their outputs (their work) and their outcomes (their results) are observable:

Procedural organizations are those wherein the work is observable but the results are not. Peacetime militaries are Wilson’s canonical example (his service in the Navy no doubt informed this chapter, if not the whole book). Procedural organizations see policies pile up for lack of observable outcomes to disprove any given policy’s utility. Policies like the many information assurance policies that stopped Project Maven employees from getting the data they needed.

The book is full of such anecdotes - Project Maven team members diving into closets or boxes full of hard drives on bases near and far, looking for data to train their models. The SEALs allegedly didn’t want to share their data. The submarine-hunting P-8 Poseidons would’ve had thousands of flight hours of sonar data but allegedly didn’t save it. The hundreds of thousands of hours of MQ-9 wide area moving imagery (WAMI, a particularly data intensive video format) - more than any human could ever process - sat collecting dust in places like Patuxent River.11

Eventually, however, the Project Maven team gets ahold of much of this data. The team does so in part by deploying its software to operational environments where actual combat is occurring. Put another way, the team gets data by exiting the procedural organization (the peacetime bureaucratic environment one finds in the Pentagon wherein one can observe outputs but not outcomes) and moving to the “craft” organization that is a wartime unit (wherein it’s harder to observe outputs but easier to observe outcomes).

This decision by Drew Cukor to send Maven out to combat operations in order to train it (rather than waiting until the artificial intelligence was fully trained) was at once fraught with all sorts of risk and also good for the algorithms it trained. Manson’s book tells of some close calls (one wonders if Maven-informed targeting gone wrong would ever make it into a book like this) but also some early gutsy successes. By deploying the artificial intelligence to the site of action, the models encountered the local, fleeting data (the sort of data of which truth is made) at the point of its creation.

Project Maven and tacit knowledge

It’s with this image - of artificial intelligence gathering data during actual operations for its own future training - that I want to close. The image calls to mind Hayek’s conception from “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” quoted earlier, on the nature of most useful data: “special knowledge of circumstances of the fleeting moment not known to others.” This is the sort of knowledge that, embodied by buyers and sellers across a vast market, creates price. It is also the sort of knowledge that one might find in battle.

After all, isn’t the problem of war not unlike the economic problem as defined by Hayek? “Mainly one of rapid adaptation to changes in the particular circumstances of time and place”? And if so, does something like Project Maven, taken to its logical conclusion, theoretically solve the war problem like some AI leaders suppose superintelligence can solve the economic problem?

Count me for the time being a cautious skeptic. I’m developing these thoughts for publication elsewhere, but my basic instinct is that the sort of contextual knowledge, derived from action, that defies ready articulation - what Karl Polanyi called “tacit knowledge”12 - is crucial to understanding war and will elude sensing by artificial intelligence for a long time. Hayek presses the case further in his 1952 work, The Counterrevolution of Science, by arguing that not only does such tacit knowledge go unarticulated, it loses value when we try to articulate it:

Indeed any social processes which deserve to be called ‘social’ in distinction to the action of individuals are almost ex definitione not conscious. In so far as such processes are capable of producing a useful order which could not have been produced by conscious direction, any attempt to make them subject to such direction would necessarily mean that we restrict what social activity can achieve to the inferior of the individual.13

This presents a challenge particularly for artificial intelligence trying to process complex, non-discrete phenomena. So argues Craig Wright in a paper, just published, entitled “Data is not knowledge: Hayek’s epistemological challenge to artificial intelligence.” I’m still thinking through the paper, which saw publication while I was reading Project Maven, but it has an admirably straightforward closing. That closing includes passages such as this:

The knowledge that matters most for coordination is not scientific knowledge in Hayek’s sense but knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place. It is generated in exchange, constituted through appraisement, and bound to a configuration that does not repeat. What AI processes are the residues of such acts: prices, texts, transactions, and other representations left behind by agents who have already judged.14

If Wright is right, the uses of artificial intelligence in war are particularly troubled. I do not mean to suggest that artificial intelligence has no use in war - it has use in all human affairs, and if employed with discipline will save lives - but those uses remain largely at the tactical level. The returns it will yield at the operational and strategic level will diminish, as iterations grow fewer, complexity increases, and tacit knowledge grows more important.

Two closing thoughts. First, I’m struck by how much Hayek’s description of tacit knowledge matches that of phronesis in Plato’s Meno and in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (the subject of a Garrison Note two weeks ago). Both speak of a wisdom that moves the wise to do the right thing even when they cannot explain - they cannot articulate - why they are doing it. Such knowledge is mute and irreducible and is seen only in the action (and less so in the “residue.”)

The second thought is that we might see the confusion of tacit knowledge for explicit knowledge in the deployment of military artificial intelligence now. Towards Project Maven’s end the reader learns of how Maven struggled to adapt when employed in Ukraine, for having been trained on the particular data of Somalia and Afghanistan, places and wars far different from the one which reignited in 2022. Of course, thanks to a massive data-labeling effort (of non-tacit data), the algorithm adjusts.

Such mismatches reveal that in certain ways local knowledge continues to matter. Such mismatches matter all the more the more one looks past computer vision and drone feeds. Recently I spoke with a former Mavenite who boasted of the acceleration in targeting that Maven has achieved of late. The trouble is targets are but a residue of the tacit knowledge that will make a difference. And present events suggest that the knowledge problem abides in military affairs, too.

• Those interested in institutions and civic life might enjoy a long essay of mine, run in this fall’s print issue of Liberties. It considers the U.S. Army’s role in the American experiment. Let me know if you need a copy.

• I co-host a book club podcast for West Point’s Modern War Institute. Our next episode comes on Sunday. We’ll discuss Katrina Mason’s book Project Maven and consider the prospect of artificial intelligence in war. Search “MWI Book Club” wherever you get your podcasts.

Now, some notes on the brain.

Good morning,

Neuroscience appeals to the curious mind. It promises to explain us to ourselves. If we could only take the right images of our brains and rightly understand what they show, the thinking goes, we might know for sure what is (just) in our head. And for delineating what is in our head, neuroscience might also imply what is outside of our head - that is to say, what’s in the world. Viewed so, neuroscience seems to glimmer with limitless explanatory power. Viewed so, there’s nothing in human affairs on which neuroscience cannot shed great light.1

Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World takes this proposition seriously. The book argues that in fact the entire trajectory of Western culture and the present state of human affairs are best explained as artifacts of the human brain’s two hemispheres. Like the brain, his book has two parts. The first sketches the neurological facts of those hemispheres. The second sketches Western history in hemispheric terms. By the latter’s end, the reader is breathless, at once convinced of McGilchrist’s erudition and flabbergasted by his ambition.

Some notes follow. Claude will provide you a better summary of the book than I can. These notes serve my brain primarily but may interest you if only for the connections to other Garrison Note themes which regular readers will recognize.

The Brain’s Two Hemispheres

Though he is careful to note that the hemispheres’ operations are overlapping, such that people can do many things normally even if one hemisphere is degraded, McGilchrist’s book is about the brain hemispheres’ consequential differences. And the best way of charting how the brain’s hemispheres differ, as McGilchrist sees it, is to track the way each hemisphere attends to the world. The left hemisphere directs our narrow attention to the world “for the purpose of getting and feeding.” The right hemisphere in turn attends to the world in “broad, vigilant” fashion.2

These differences in the way each hemisphere attends to the world give rise to McGilchrist’s titular metaphor, borrowed from Nietzsche. In his view, the right hemisphere of the brain is the Master. The left hemisphere of the brain is the Emissary. The left hemisphere perceives the world in highly focused fashion, fixing and retrieving phenomena for the right hemisphere to cohere, serving that right hemisphere on a good day like a loyal agent - or emissary. On a bad day, as we’ll see in a moment, the emissary subverts his master.

But before going further, it’s worth asking how McGilchrist arrives at any of these ideas. The question is made all the more salient given the way he writes of the brain’s hemispheres - that is to say, in highly personalized terms (this makes some sense, given that brains are inside persons). In McGilchrist’s telling, hemispheres have “inclinations” towards things, are “congenial” with various ideas. Aeschylus is said to have debts to one part of the brain. Kazimir Malevich is said to gesture towards another. Mental illnesses are said to be characteristic of different centuries. Hemispheres are said to “believe” things wrongly, fatally, like characters in a Shakespearean tragedy.3 One might be forgiven for wondering just how precise McGilchrist is being.

He provides a substantial answer to this question in his second chapter. In it he maps the hemisphere’s structural and neurochemical differences. He ascertains the facts and consequence of these hemispheric differences by surveying all sorts of studies, including those of:

• brain lesions concentrated in one or another hemisphere

• experimental hemisphere inactivation

• forms of localized stimulus delivered visually and by audio

• patients of brain-splitting interventions called callisotomies

• functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)

• single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT, obviously)

• other methods4

To understand how McGilchrist and the field of neurology more generally uses these methods, it’s useful to return to the form of difference between the hemispheres most fundamental to him: attention. Neuropsychologists, McGilchrist reports, speak of five types of attention: vigilance, sustained attention, divided attention, alertness, and focussed attention. Neurologists conclude that the first four forms of attention are the sort the right hemisphere pays. “Focussed attention” on the other hand is the sort that the left hemisphere pays. See how localized lesions lead the field to these conclusions:

vigilance and sustained attention are grossly impaired in subjects with right-hemisphere lesions, especially right frontal lobe lesions; by contrast, in patients with left-hemisphere lesions (therefore relying on their intact right hemisphere) vigilance is preserved…Deficits in focussed attention are more severe with left-hemisphere injury. Although selective attention may be bilateral, it is more typically associated with activity in the left caudate or left anterior cingulate.5

I’ve excluded from the excerpted language here the roughly five footnotes appended to these claims, footnotes that cover nearly a full literature review - see notes 34-40 below, taken from the book’s long endnotes. Perhaps these references obscure sloppiness, but I wouldn’t know and haven’t the time or skill to audit his claims. I outsource my judgment to reviewers in his field, and it seems the book’s reputation has held up, so I figure it’s safe to say these citations substantiate his assertions.

But what does it mean for the left hemisphere to only give “focussed attention” while the right is vigilant and sustained and alert and so on? In those who’ve received callisotomies, right hemispheres see the whole visual field while left hemispheres see specific parts of the visual field.6 The right hemisphere responds to peripheral objects first. Right hemisphere stroke victims are said to get stuck observing random small objects in their field of vision rather than the complete scene before them. McGilchrist concludes all this “implies a grounding and an ultimately integrating role for the right hemisphere.”

Many more pages of such analysis later, two hemispheric syndromes emerge - left hemisphere and right hemisphere syndromes. They consist of these basic distinctions:

Left Hemisphere / Right Hemisphere

• The known / the new

• Predictability / probability

• Division / integration

• The part / the whole (right-hemisphere damaged patients cannot draw objects that capture what McGilchrist calls the “Gestalt” of an object)

• Abstraction / context (patients with left-hemisphere damage are said to struggle with the simple creation of abstract models)

• Categories / individual

• The impersonal / personal (right hemisphere lesions lead to prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize faces)

• Reason / rationality

The book goes on like this for another 200 pages, concluding with the assertion that human history up to this point is a story of the slow but inexorable triumph of the left hemisphere over the right. McGilchrist has license to speak in terms of contest because neurologists have found that in some instances the hemispheres seem to be in physical competition, one suppressing the other - more often the left suppressing the right (.7 Such left-hemisphere dominance is despite the fact that the right hemisphere is more comprehensive in its perception: “the Master makes himself vulnerable to the emissary, and the emissary can choose to take advantage of the situation, to ignore the Master.”

If you’re confused as to whether McGilchrist believes that each hemisphere really has a distinct will, the answer is: yes. He spends several pages explaining that though humans do not more than one consciousness,8, they may have different wills, if we consider will a “disposition towards the world.” The right hemisphere longs for the world beyond itself, the left hemisphere seeks to use the world beyond itself.9 These dispositions come into contest with each other sometimes, and as mentioned above, the result is left hemisphere dominance. But what does that look like?

How the Hemispheric Brain has Shaped Our World

In short, it looks like our long slide towards modernism and postmodernism. McGilchrist doesn’t mean that a physical change in our brains has led to these -isms, but he does suggest that patterns of brain function might have changed over time to create them.10 These changes in brain functions are reflected in synaptic connections formed, pruned then epigenetically transmitted from generation to generation, “culture and the brain shaping one another over relatively short time spans.” We see this process mirrored culturally in the transmission of Richard Dawkins’s memes.11

Because I’ve neither the hemispheres nor the time, I’m not going to try to replicate his panoramic survey of Western culture in miniature here, but I’m going to selectively summarize it for my own records here:

The Greeks culturally innovated by creating drama. Drama replicated as a social artifact the distance from ourselves that originated in our front lobes and allowed us to study our thoughts and feelings as objects. This separation “sowed the seeds of left-hemisphere isolationism” but it took a while for the wheels to come off. Many of these early dramas exhibit right hemisphere tendencies - particularly Homer, for its long, coherent, unified narrative.

Quoting Michael Clarke, McGilchrist says ‘The life of Homeric man is defined in terms of processes more precisely than of things.’ Then he goes on to himself point out:

"This profound embodiment of thought and emotion, this emphasis on processes that are always in flux, rather than on a single, static entities, this refusal of the either/or distinction between mind and body, all perhaps again suggest a right-hemisphere-dependent version of the world.12

Heraclitus is similarly right-hemispheric. Heraclitus’s evasive style is not a dodge but a more truthful way of rendering the whole of existence: “the point is not that the nature of things is contradictory, but that the attempt to render them in language,” a typical left-brain move, “leads inevitably to what we call paradox, and the attempt to avoid paradox therefore distorts.”13 Not long after we hear of Aeschylus, another non-articulate wise type, who per Sophocles “does what is right without knowing it” (I’ll observe here that this description is uncannily similar to those of phronesis found in Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics and Plato’s Meno - the latter speaking of those who “utter many truths, but have no knowledge of what they’re saying” - something I wrote about in last week’s Garrison Note and in a note of Tolstoyan courage here).

Then, of course, comes the great left-brained Plato:

His legacy includes the (left-hemisphere-congruent) beliefs that truth is in principle knowable, that it is knowable through reason alone, and that all truths are consistent with one another. By the time of Socrates, the Heraclitean respect for the testimony of our senses had been lost.14

McGilchrist damningly quotes from The Republic a description of the stars as “far inferior” to the “pure numbers and perfect figures” they imperfectly mimic, numbers and figures “perceptible to reason and thought but not visible to the eye” - an awfully left-brained thing to write.15

A couple millennia later one sees the fruit of the left-hemispheric project Plato launched in the knights of the Enlightenment: self-referential Dürer, autobiographical Montaigne, ever-measuring Galileo (whom, McGilchrist maintains, the at times right-brained integrative Church would’ve tolerated, were it not for left-brained Galileo’s insufferable personality), and of course, Descartes, whose assertion that “the things we conceive very clearly and very distinctly are all true” would, in McGilchrist’s judgment “derail the next three centuries of Western thought.”16

You might guess the rest. McGilchrist writes it compellingly. Shakespeare’s complete, holistic, individual characters, whose integrative stories rise in the words of Johnson "as the oak-tree grows from the Earth’s bosom” is a right-brained rejoinder to the Enlightenment and a source of great inspiration to the Romantics.17 Those Romantics champion what the Enlightenment will not (per McGilchrist) - the embodied experience, longing, the particular past. These are, not coincidentally, the component parts of the right-brain syndrome sketched above. The associated premium on experience McGilchrist finds not just among the Romantics but also in Goethe and in the American Pragmatists (Dewey uttering such right-brained sentences as “I should venture to assert that the most pervasive fallacy of philosophic thinking goes back to neglect of context…”18 - a topic of an old Garrison Note).19

What swallows the Romantic impulse but modernism and its children, these being bleakly left-brained movements. The modernist movements - collage, abstract expressionism, functionalism - are all typical of the left hemisphere, preoccupied as it is with utility and component parts and categories or forms, disinterested as it is in the particular human face. McGilchrist quotes the modernist Nietzsche’s auguries that soon “the symbolic replaces that which exists” and hears in the quote the terminus of the left hemisphere’s thought. He spends this section quoting a great deal from the modernist scholar Louis Sass, who links the literary criticism of modernism to the study of self-referential mental illnesses, above all schizophrenia. Per Sass schizophrenics display “a distinct combination of superiority and impotence,” a combination McGilchrist finds distinctly modernist and left-brained. And so on.

What awaits us? McGilchrist imagines the world if the left-hemisphere completes its domination (and reaches a lot for Robert Putnam en route, something I didn’t see coming). These visions are worth quoting at length:

Family relationships, or skilled roles within society, such as those of priests, teachers and doctors, which transcend what can be quantified and regulated…would become the object of suspicion…In such a society people of all kinds would attach an unusual importance to being in control. Accidents and illnesses, since they are beyond our control, would therefore be particularly threatening and would, where possible, be blamed on others…Reasonableness would be replaced by rationalism, and perhaps the very concept of reasonableness would become unintelligible. There would be a complete failure of common sense, since it is intuitive and relies on both hemispheres working together…We would expect there to be a resentment of, and a deliberate undercutting of the sense of awe or wonder: Weber’s ‘disenchanted’ world….As a culture, we would come to discard tacit forms of knowledge…We would become, like Descartes, spectators rather than actors in all the ‘comedies’ the world displays…

What is to be done?

A bit heavy handed of McGilchrist, but one takes his point. I found myself often revolting at the apparent contempt in which he holds the Enlightenment and the left side of our brains more generally. Don’t fMRIs and EEGs and SPECT and all the other tools that equip him to dismiss the Enlightenment arise from the Enlightenment and its accomplice, the left hemisphere? But he issues the necessary qualifications (“I do not underestimate the importance of the left hemisphere’s contribution to all that humankind has achieved…”) and one gets over it.

As for what to do - learn from the Japanese conception of the self (jibun), reject the ironisation of the soul in art, cease our attack on religion, pursue embodiment. I’m not so sure, for the right hemisphere’s vaunted executive function, these right-brained moves get us all that far. But still one leaves the book admiring its ambition and convinced of its science.

Next time: Notes from either my read of Kevin Roose’s new book, The AGI Chronicles, or James Jones’s The Thin Red Line. Or some third option.

Good morning,

How do you learn what right is, and how do you teach it to others? I don’t know for certain. But I’ve gotten some sense of possible answers from my time in the Army. The Army sets aside many hours to teach its soldiers the ethics of their profession. Ask anyone who’s served of late and he or she will likely recall some required classes dealing in these questions. Such classes occur at regular intervals throughout one’s career, and so offer to soldiers a long view of what right might be and how one might learn it.

The trouble with the Army’s efforts to teach what is right is that they’re awfully abstract. Good, smart people have tried hard to distill for the Army what’s right in war and peace into a set of interlocking principles, just as one might seek to distill the use of a heavy machine gun into a machine gun theory or the planning of a campaign into a series of steps. In doing so the Army has ended up with charts like this one, found in a document called Army Doctrinal Pamphlet 6-22:

There’s not much wrong with any one part of this table-chart-figure. Still, in the aggregate, it does not seem like a natural or human way to gain a sense of right and wrong. Of course I’ve plucked it from its context, but my instinct is if the average person reads the chapter from which this table is taken, she will finish not much wiser. The point is not that there’s anything wrong in the chapter, but that such chapters (like those found in the pamphlet’s companion, Field Manual 6-22) end up too circuitous to be instructive in any common-sense, immediately useful way. Here’s how I put it back in 2020 for War on the Rocks:

The chief references of ethics classes are the two remaining doctrinal texts on the Army ethic, Army Doctrine Publication 6-22 and Field Manual 6-22. But the latter only names ethics’ role in leadership, and offers somewhat circuitous means of recognizing an ethical leader. A leader needs ethical development if she “inconsistently demonstrates” the Army values, and is a strong ethical leader if she “models” the Army values. One displays Army values if he “takes an ethical stance” but does not if he acts “without regard for what is ‘the right thing to do.’”

Army Doctrine Publication 6-22 in turn can read as a mass of telescoping lists that overlap, compete, and confuse. Rather than consume a single cohesive ethic, the student must track the characteristics of the Army profession, the Army ethic, expectations for the Army profession, the Army values, the “Attributes associated with CHARACTER,” the warrior ethos, and a soldier’s creed. Many of these refer to each other such that definitions lead nowhere, rather than to a practicable formulation — a succinct example being that the text defines the Army value of “honor” as to “live up to the Army Values.”

When taken on its own, the publication presents more like an inventory than a philosophy, itemizing values like subcomponents of a sterile machine…

Well, what’s an alternative way of learning right and wrong? Action. That is to say, we learn ethics from their enactment by people. Character and narrative - stories - teach us best. In the War on the Rocks piece I argued that rather than teach the profession’s ethics in disaggregated, tabular fashion as rendered in a slidedeck, the Army ought teach those ethics via historical case study. My reading since has only suggested this world view. See for example an old Garrison Note on George Marshall, which marked the attention he paid to embodied character rather than abstracted principle. See also the Garrison Note on Viscount William Slim’s example in motion during the Burma Campaign. I read also hints at the instructive capacity of action in the works of the pragmatists (considered by a Garrison Note here) and in Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary, about which I’ll write next week.

There’s some philosophical basis for this, I’ve gathered. In Meno, Plato suggests that virtue can be observed in the action of statesmen, but not taught. The virtuous statesmen themselves barely know what virtue is - they just enact it intuitively, a gift from the divine:

In Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle disagrees slightly, suggesting that practical wisdom is not a matter of divine gift but a matter of habit - that we learn virtue through doing things repeatedly. The word Aristotle used for this “practical wisdom” is “phronesis”:

How do you depict either the oracular or the habituated but by the stories of them? That is why I think Tolstoy suggested, even in his early stories, that courage is when a man does what he is supposed to do (this from his story “The Raid,” covered in this Garrison Note). This is also what I think Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. means when he says that the life of the law has been experience (covered in the earlier linked post about pragmatism).

The Army knows this, as do most good institutions. Its published doctrine is the sum of so many efforts to bottle the past iterative experiences of those who acted prudently. The trouble, as earlier mentioned, is that not all such efforts are created equal. Some manuals suffer from too much abstraction - it’s as if their authors sought to strip out all the experience and leave only the vague ideas behind. My read of Aristotle is that such behavior amounts to burning wheat and baking chaff.

The good doctrinal pamphlets, the ones that retain records of experience and speak in the common-sense terms of action, are often older ones. I trawl old antique malls whenever I’m on the road because in the stalls selling the dredges of old estates one can often find the old military doctrine libraries of veterans who’ve passed. In these I go fishing for phronesis, and it’s a good day when I leave with at least one old manual. Here’s a small selection from what I’ve gathered over the years:

It’s the middle manual in the above image with which I’d like to close. It’s a remarkable document of lessons learned from World War II - a bulletized list of things one ought do, each bullet written in plain English, all bullets taken from the war-wearied U.S. Army at the tail end of the world’s biggest conflagration. Put another way, comments taken straight from the narrative of a highly-iterative experience during which an awful lot of deliberation was needed (something about which Aristotle cared). Here are some highlights to start your week:

• “The old saying “live and learn” must be reversed in war” (iii)

• “The effect on most men of the impact of battle is to cause them to want to do nothing.” (p. 1)

• “Discipline makes the difference…I have had a few eight-balls who fought like hell, but I had a lot more men who never caused me any trouble, and who were quiet, confident, and disciplined; those men fought a lot better.” (p. 5)

• “Every man in the squad should listen to his squad leader’s orders with the thought in mind that he may have to be the squad leader before the battle is over.” (p. 15) (one might know this from Aristotle’s Politics, below)

  

• “Cavalry cannot rely on sneaking and peeking methods; it has to fight to obtain information” (p. 34)

• “Don’t crowd your scouts” (p. 46)

• “Removing a single brick sometimes provided a loop-hole for firing from a basement” (p. 56)

• “Friendly civilians were generally unable to give precise locations on a map, but were frequently able to pinpoint locations on a photograph.” (p. 63) (something about abstraction and narrative in there)

• “What we go for we get. When we get we hold.” (p. 63)

• “Any messages coming from an unknown source must be authenticated.” (p. 97)

• “One of the soldier’s biggest weaknesses is his waste of equipment and materiel. He does this because of his American tendency to think that ‘there is plenty where this came from.’ Subconsciously he knows that America is a land of plenty and shortages or costs do not enter his head.” (p. 103)

I flip through the book often. Many of the the bullets are no longer relevant - the stuff about wire-laying and M2 treadway floats and the Mark IV, Model 3 (850,000 candlepower) night-time flare and the placement of main switchboards - but they still humble us because we know the knowledge was only gained through suffering. To see each lesson numbered one after another in hard-bitten English is to see phronesis in all its embodied, habituated, muddied glory. And I’m grateful.

Next week I’ll put share notes from a recent read of Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. I’ll soon also have notes on James Jones’s The Thin Red Line. Both are excellent. Very much enjoying ’s new book on the origins of the AI tech firms, The AGI Chronicles. It offers an efficient way of confirming the vocabulary, the cast of characters, and the chronology one needs to make sense of ongoing AI coverage.

Good morning,

There are such things that we feel long before we can articulate them. Then, once we hear them expressed, they suddenly acquire in our mind great purchase for how well they seem to explain our world.1 So it was for me with the idea of American institutional decline. I sensed it before I knew what it was, and then a great teacher assigned me Robert Putnam, and I began to see my whole world in terms of collapsing social capital.2 My impression is this is a well-worn path.

The idea of institutional decline took such root in my mind in part because I first encountered it within an extant institution: the U.S. military. The divide between the garrison and the rest of the polity is at least as old a story as Plato’s Republic, but somehow the divide seemed particularly wide to me these days. The things that made up an institution - the norms, the force they exerted on an individual - I felt every day, but they seemed more scarce in broader society than they used to be.3

Either way, I wanted to know why American society ailed so. First I read Tocqueville, then Putnam again. Tocqueville of course didn’t live to witness the collapse many had decided was occurring. Putnam’s own analysis was less satisfying then his data - generational turnover, his best explanation, did not satisfy me. So I sought other stories. Right around then Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed came out. I read that, some other post-liberals, as well as critiques of liberal society from the left. Marcuse. Polanyi. Their interpreters.

The thing that struck me about all these books, for all their sweeping analysis of institutions, was how incurious they seemed to be about the institution to which I belonged - the Army. The point didn’t have anything to do with me, except insofar as my belonging to my military might’ve warped my sense of its importance. But that didn’t seem to be what was happening - after all, others had in the past agreed that the military was a consequential institution in the abstract. If, for example, we credit Charles Tilly, the military begets many of the institutions everywhere mourned.

The point here is not to whine. It’s only to point out a consequential gap and eventually to fill it. When I say many diagnosticians of Americans institutional decline were incurious about the military, I mean this literally. Neither the indices of the books I read nor the pages the preceded them made mention of the military. It was as if the very institutional die-off which these authors studied prevented them from understanding it because their view was bounded by the civil-military divide that die-off caused.

One gets the sense if pressed many of the authors would dismiss the military as an institution apart, manned by drones, real and metaphorical, or by the socially inert, just to secure what others build. Either way the authors’ non-treatment of the military, in their otherwise sweeping studies, worked as a kind of revealed preference. Whether they professed interest in the military or would if queried, their work suggested disinterest. And even those authors did who treat the military, like Samuel Huntington, vaguely concluded the military to be of a conservative character alien to the country’s founding traditions.

An instinct fast developed within me that the army-sized hole in all this theorization of institutional collapse compromised the theory badly. I began kicking around the idea of how one might begin to chart the place of the American military in the country’s institutional story. As I imagined it, this work would have both a descriptive and a normative aspect. It would describe how the military affected the country’s social capital, and it would try to glean from that effect some hints at how to restore the country’s social capital, because I figure the country worth fighting for and regard social capital as an existential matter.

Well, this sort of work is not what I’m paid to do nor what I am trained to do, so it took a while to write anything. This week’s essay of mine in Liberties is a small step towards the above ends. I’d be honored if you read it and let me know what you think. Below is a bit taken from the beginning.

American institutions are rarer. Where they are found, they are much weakened. Church membership has collapsed. Unions are a shadow of their old selves. Universities have never seemed so reedy. America’s once dense lattice of fraternal lodges and mutual aid societies has given way to a roll of parasocial advocacy groups that permit us via a donate button the illusion of civic life. And Americans have felt the wind. They register in poll after poll their fast-falling confidence in all the above.

If such polls are to be taken as a measure of institutions’ strength, though, at least one appears to endure. It is the American military. The military has retained a distinct form in an ever more formless society. From that form it derives a self-confidence otherwise scarce among the worried institutions that once stood proudly alongside it. Such confidence and form alike attract to the military many Americans who desire both for themselves but cannot find either elsewhere. And as reverence for their relatives and ancestors who served in uniform suggest, even many Americans who do not join the military take shelter in the idea of it.

How did this happen? How is it that the American military now looks to be its country’s last robust institution? Liberalism’s many critics answer, directly but more often indirectly, by saying that the military has outlasted other American institutions precisely because the military takes exception to liberalism. It has survived as an institution, the thought goes, only by standing apart from the liberal tradition which otherwise eviscerates (according to this school of thought) the bonds tying man to man and so makes America that howling plain. In this way, liberalism’s critics offer the American military up as sort of a negative image of liberalism, and suggest that to the extent to which it survives, it reminds us of viable alternatives to the liberal ideal itself.

But a closer study of the country’s history suggests that it is emphatically not so. The American military does not stand apart from the liberal tradition enshrined in the Constitution which it serves. Rather, the American military is one of the country’s great living monuments to its founding tradition. One cannot understand either the American military or the stubborn endurance of the greater American experiment, an endurance which critics of liberalism such as Santayana and his many successors have long struggled to explain, without an appreciation for the fellowship of the two.

My hope is you find the piece lands.

Good evening,

What is modernism? I do not know. I’d like to know.

One reason I’d like to know what modernism means is to understand the First World War. It seems that one way to measure a thing is to observe its effect, as astronomers take measure of a distant planet by measuring how the planet dims a star’s light as it makes its transit. So one might know the War by way of the way culture flickered as it passed.

I’d also like to know the meaning of the words other people use and to use them myself. Modernism is one such word. Sometimes I read modernism in a piece of writing or hear it in conversation. It seems important enough to warrant a definition. Besides, I cannot but recoil at the thought of having been exposed as someone who doesn’t know modernism’s definition before those who do.

Here’s a go at it.

I’m going to try to define modernism by stitching together definitions of modernism from people who’ve come before me who are authorities on the matter. These definitions come from some books through which I’ve pawed about modernism, what came before it, and what followed it. At the end I’ll write out my own definition, as an exercise. Then this letter will end.

Some definitions

Modernism, n.

• “a self-conscious break with the past and a search for new forms of expression” (from Merriam-Webster)

• A literary style characterized by “a declaration of the independence of the poem” which seeks “to overcome the distinction between subject-matter and form,” and so to remove “the well-known landmarks” that normally orient the reader, and “the reasons given for this removal are that land-marks tend to make paths, that paths grow to roads, that roads soon mean walls and railings, and that the pedestrian or motorist, who must keep to the roads, never sees any new scenery.” The resultant clarity is desirable, but not accessible to the reader, for the modernists believe that “the clearness of which the poetic mind is capable demands thought and language of a far greater sensitiveness and complexity than the enlarged reading public will permit it to use.” (from Laura Fielding and Robert Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry)

  

• A loose collection of characteristics rather than a single mode and in this way more so a matter of “family resemblances” than of a single face. One meets this idea of family resemblances in Terry Eagleton’s Modernism (p. 7, 9), Peter Gay’s Modernism (2, 3), apparently taken from Wittgenstein.

• Works that “provided a revelation of a vanished mind of which the modern mind was a continuation. Primitive man on the dolorous steppes, modern man in the city with its noises: there is an unchanging predicament” (this from Lyndall Gordon’s biography of T.S. Eliot, 172)

• A practice that stemmed from a “historical crisis of immense proportions,” which “calls into question the very meaning of history itself,” and seeks “shock, dissonance, montage, fantasy, austerity, fragmentation, polyphony and impersonality” to put “time and eternity in a complex relation with one another” by “compressing time into an infinite singularity” or by tearing “a gap in the fabric of the temporal, through which eternal mythologies or the collective unconscious may come welling up” while crucially retaining an awareness of continuity and of realism, a realism it “bends out of shape” so as to illuminate it. (Terry Eagleton, Modernism, 4, 7, 10, 26)

  Twit twit twit

  Jug jug jug jug jug jug

  So rudely forc’d.

  Tereu

  Unreal City

  Under the brown fog of a winter noon

  Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant

  Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants

  C.i.f. London: documents at sight,

  Asked me in demotic French

  To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel

  Followed by a weekend at the Metropole.

  
  (from The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot)

• A climate, “far easier to exemplify than to define,” one given to extremes but not the middle, that has two defining attributes: “a lure to heresy” and “principled self-scrutiny.” In such a climate artists worked under a cultural assignment: “They must strike through the masks of superficial celebration and mourning to reach the deep essence of life in their own soul, and, as newly liberated artists, do so now.” In doing so, modernist writers are animated by “emotions of engagement and of discontent” - contrary to T.S. Eliot’s aspirations. (Peter Gay, Modernism: The Lure to Heresy, from Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond", 3, 50, 227)

• Something that emerged “on or about December 1910,” following Roger Fry’s exhibition of ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’ at London’s Grafton Galleries. Humanity’s art grew more concerned with life as one lives it: “Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions--trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.” (from Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction")

  

• A form of literature exemplified by the work of Ezra Pound (belonging to the suitably named Pound Era), a form heavily influenced by the then-ongoing great archaeological digs, which found tatters of lost but once-organically unified civilizations, civilizations survived only by fragments, in which modernists sought constellations rather than syntactic connection, for their project was to reveal the fragility of the convention that still lingers “in the average literate psyche” and supposes that ours is “a stable shared world in which all men’s senses participates and the features of which have been labeled by agreement,” for in fact the modernists know language is a “complex coherent organism that is no more the sum of its constituent words than a rhinoceros is the sum of its constituent cells, an organism that can maintain its identity as it grows and evolves in time; that can remember, that can anticipate, that can mutate.” Knowledge of its mutability and its complexity leads modernists to render language polyphonically: see The Waste Land, see The Cantos (quotes from Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era, “The Muse in Tatters” and “The Invention of Language”)

• Tired gossip: “Gossip grows old and becomes myth; myth grows older, and becomes dogma. Wyndham Lewis, Eliot and Pound gossiped with one another; the New Criticism aged them into a myth of Modernism; now the antiquarian Hugh Kenner has dogmatized this myth into the Pound Era, a canon of accepted titans. (from Harold Bloom, “The Dialectics of Literary Tradition” in boundary 2’s Spring 1974, boundary 2 being something other than a Kanye West song)

  Spring . . . . . . .
  Too long . . . . . .
  Gongula . . . . . .

  
  (from Papyrus by Ezra Pound)

• "The transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is the one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immutable” (from Baudelaire)

• An aesthetic movement that aimed to “represent the eternal and the immutable in the midst of all the chaos” by “freezing time and all its fleeting qualities” and thereby “affect the aesthetics of daily life,” employing “divergent systems of representation” to “absorb, reflect upon, and codify” rapid technological change while also suggesting “lines of action that might modify or support” the way people produced, consumed, and circulated themselves - mostly in cities. (from David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 10-19)

• A desire for art that fits with the best of the old but does not conform to it, for “to conform merely would be for the new work not really to conform at all; it would not be new, and would therefore not be a work of art. And we do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value—a test, it is true, which can only be slowly and cautiously applied, for we are none of us infallible judges of conformity. We say: it appears to conform, and is perhaps individual, or it appears individual, and may conform; but we are hardly likely to find that it is one and not the other.” (from T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and Individual Talent,” 1919)

  

• A movement of “oppositional posture” marked by “a disdain for the accessible, the useful, the popular, the politically correct or commercially viable” that believes in the “autonomous status of the artwork” and has a “preoccupation with form” that presents as “self-consciousness” (This from Robert Boyers, The Fate of Ideas: Seductions, Betrayals, Appraisals, Ch. 11)

• A notion that has subsumed both “experimental techniques” that rebelled against established academies and “the intellectual impulses behind the quest for liberation and the act of rebellion…” that can be extended “to the social and political as well as artistic agents of the revolt, and to the act of rebellion in general…” Typified by 20th century Germany, “the modernist nation par excellence” (This from Modris Ecksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, xv-xvi. I wrote about this book here, enjoyed it immensely.)

  

• The stage in the evolution of the human mind by which enough “representational systems” have accumulated that the mind has become “a mosaic structure of cognitive vestiges from earlier stages of human emergence.” The modern representational structure of the human mind “thus encompasses the gains of all our hominid ancestors, as well as those of certain apes. Far from being a diffuse tabula rasa, modern human cognitive architecture is highly differentiated and specialized…The key word here is representation. Humans did not simply evolve a larger brain, an expanded memory, a lexicon, or a special speech apparatus; we evolved new systems of representing reality. During this process, our representation apparatus somehow perceived the utility of symbols and invented them from whole cloth; no symbolic environment preceded them.” (from Merlin Donald, The Origin of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition, the prologue)

• A period inaugurated by Friedrich Nietzsche wherein “the metaphysical and religious beliefs of the classical and Christian periods are shed or marginalized, but in which the moral categories and hopes which they supported are secularized or naturalized in humanist doctrines of autonomous reason, historical progress, romantic self-creation and similar ideas,” and thus a “half-way between the central classical beliefs of the West and an as-yet-unborn- culture in which those commitments had been shed.” (John Gray, Enlightenment’s Wake, 152)

  

• A form of literature that exposes the “creative process itself, this distilling out of the subject aspects, this abstracting away from the objective reality; by gathering together as a literary for his own inability to arrange and master the objective reality in thought, making this into the chaos of the world itself and simultaneously the sovereign act of the writer.” This literature can assume the form of drama, presenting “only this experiential centre as reality, and grouping everything else around this centre, seen only from this standpoint” thus stands in contrast to the realist writers who conceived drama as the objective struggle of opposing social forces.” (from Georg Lukacs, Expressionism, Its Significance and Decline - admittedly not about modernism, but maps on quite faithfully to other definitions, and I’m not sure Lukacs would have used the term modernist)

• A movement in Europe “characterized from its earliest moments by a readiness to turn on its own certainties, a willingness to grasp a world pregnant with its own contraries; its voice was self-mocking as well as self-aware. The Americans moved in a different direction - not toward modernism’s exiled postured but toward Whitmanian affirmation…With them is confidence, discovery, self-delight, not fine distinctions, irony and refusal. These writers liked expansiveness and embrace, not doubt and mockery; crossing over lines, not drawing them.” (from Christine Stansell’s American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century, p. 149)

• A work that knows that “the only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything. This makes the thing we are looking at very different and this makes what those describe it make of it, it makes a composition, it confuses, it shows, it is, it looks, it likes it as it is, and this makes what is seen as it is seen. Nothing changes from generation to generation except the thing seen and that makes a composition. Lord Grey remarked that when the generals before the war talked about the war they talked about it as a nineteenth-century war although to be fought with twentieth-century weapons. That is because war is a thing that decides how it is to be done when it is to be done.” (from Gertrude Stein’s “Composition as Explanation,” 1926)

• A historical process “of social disintegration which clearly derived from the effects of the Industrial Revolution, but which could also be seen to have its roots in Comte’s vision of society as an aggregation of essentially atomistic individuals.” This led to a highly self-referential, obsessive and unnaturally detached mode of art. (Iain McGilchrist, The Master and his Emissary, 389)

Modernism, n.

A literary movement that sought to piece together the fragments of an imagined coherent whole for which its adherents longed, contrary to the convention of the day.

This of course could be wrong. It’s the way it seems right now. I’m unsure that it does all that much that Tolstoy didn’t.

Good morning,

This morning’s is a very short note, a day or two late. That’s because this past week, in lieu of a weekly Garrison Note, I had a piece run in . It’s a review of a novel called Angel Down. That novel tells a magical realist tale of a World War 1 soldier who finds a fallen angel on the battlefield and does his best to deliver her to safety amidst the hellscape of the 1918 Meuse-Argonne offensive. It won last year’s Pulitzer Prize last year.

My review argues that Angel Down conned its way to the Pulitzer prize. You can read the review here.

I originally wrote the review to sort out for myself if and when it matters that a novelist gets historical facts wrong. The piece evolved into a more complete objection. I’m still sorting through the question. I stand by the case the review makes.

The bottom line is that not all errors matter, one need not know everything about a subject to write about it, neither World War 1 nor any other war belong to one sort of author or one genre, there is no one correct way to write of battlefield violence. The trouble with Angel Down is not its author or its subject or its magical realist idea. The trouble is with its execution.

I don’t recommend reading the novel. You might not have time for the review either. Instead, here is Isaac Rosenberg’s “Break of Day in the Trenches,” perhaps the War’s finest English language poem. Rosenberg would not live to see the War’s end. He died at the hands of the German Army alongside some fellow soldiers of the King’s Own Royal Lancaster Regiment in the spring of 1918, not long before Angel Down’s vision is set.

More to come this weekend.

Good evening,

When Harold Bloom, that great literary critic, declared a work of Tolstoy “the best story in the world,” he was not referring to the work we might at first guess. He did not mean Anna Karenina. Nor War and Peace. Nor even The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Bloom instead referred to Tolstoy’s last completed novel. It is called Hadji Murat. I’ve just finished it, to ready for a recording of the Modern War Institute Book Club podcast. I want to record some notes about the book here.

In picking up Hadji Murat I’ve skipped over nearly Tolstoy’s whole career. I say skip, because the last Garrison Note about Tolstoy considered some of his earliest fiction, The Sebastopol Sketches. These were his thinly-veiled reports from the Siege of Sebastopol, written while he served as an artillery officer on the brutal edge of the Crimean War. Though not his first fiction, The Sebastopol Sketches were the first published stories Tolstoy signed, and they were the stories that made him famous.

Tolstoy lived many lives over the half century that separated The Sebastopol Stories (1854-55) and Hadji Murat (finished in 1904, published after his death). He left the army, wrote two epics that each changed literature forever, underwent a Christian awakening, campaigned for social reforms, saw the serfs freed, became a world-renowned spiritual leader, witnessed several attempts on the tsar’s life, nearly killed himself, and began (then several times nearly ended) a monuental marriage.

But for all that life between the two works, what struck me while reading Hadji Murat was just how much it reminded me of The Sebastopol Sketches. This similarity interested me particularly because much is made of the spiritual crisis Tolstoy underwent in the 1870s and 1880s, after he’d written Anna Karenina and War and Peace. Isaiah Berlin famously wrote of Tolstoy’s mind-narrowing turn to monism. His biographer Rosamund Bartlett writes of his “complete break” with his old life.1 Elsewhere one can read of his works of that time - A Confession and What I Believe - about which I am ignorant.

The similarities between The Sebastopol Sketches and Hadji Murat, the bookends of Tolstoy’s writing life, I judge significant of deeper continuities. They are at least three:

• both works dwell on how fickle the truth can be,

• both works dwell on how minute the causes of things are,

• to reveal these first two, both works take a pleasingly panoramic look at things.

Here I’ve time only to note the first - but in doing so one gets a sense of the second and the third.

The Truth

In the last pages of War and Peace, Tolstoy left his story behind to assert some things about the nature of history. First among these was the complaint that conventional histories deceived posterity by oversimplifying. History, Tolstoy suggests, is a lie agreed upon. Last summer, in a small piece for the Modern War Institute that attempted a Tolstoyan critique of the use of AI in military command and control technology, I summarized that complaint this way:

“The human mind cannot grasp the causes of events in their completeness,” but “the desire to find those causes is implanted in the human soul.” People, desirous of coherence but unable to espy the many small causes of events, instead see grand things and great men that are not there. Here Tolstoy makes a crucial point—it is not that there are no causes of events, just that the causes are too numerous and obscure for humans to know. These causes Tolstoy called “infinitesimals,” and to find them one must “leave aside kings, ministers, and generals” and instead study “the small elements by which the masses are moved.”

Tolstoy might’ve developed this complaint into maturity at the end of War and Peace, but it first occurred to him while he was a young officer in the Caucasus and then Crimea - if not before. We’ve reason to think he might’ve already been reading Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma, which makes much the same critique in its opening chapters by way of its depiction of the Battle of Waterloo (subject of one of the very first Garrison Notes, “Did Waterloo Happen?”).

History’s falsenesss occurred to Tolstoy when he was a young soldier because the war he witnessed looked nothing like the reports of it he read. Indeed, while still barely a battery commander on Sebastopol’s bloody fourth bastion, Tolstoy proposed to the Tsar the launching of a military journal that might run reform-minded, clear-eyed prose. Perhaps, he thought, if Petersburg only received more accurate reports of the events in Crimea, the army might be able to reform thanks to knowledge of the need and Russian society would better understand the course of human events. But the Tsar Nicholas denied the request for fear of frank dialogue within his suffering army.2

Denied his ability to write frankly about the war in a military journal, Tolstoy turned to fiction. In the resultant Sketches (particularly Sebastopol in August) the protagonists have a whale of a time figuring out what is going on (much like Stendhal’s Fabrizio del Dongo at Waterloo).

The same is true of the Russian army in Hadji Murat. The whole story is told as a memory of the unnamed narrator who happens upon a Tartar thistle on his land (someone an awful lot like Tolstoy, who himself thought of the story for Hadji Murat when he happened upon a broken Tartar thistle on his estate):

And I remembered an old story from the Caucasus, part of which I saw, part of which I heard from witnesses, and part of which I imagined to myself. The story, as it shaped itself in my memory and imagination, goes like this….3

From that opening the story is one train of confusing reports about what has happened - at least on the Russian side. There is a wrenching story of a meaningless skirmish between Caucasian mountaineers and Russian regulars, in which a noble peasant dies. The action is reported to the family and the military as a lopsided victory involving much heroic hand-to-hand combat - in other words, as the narrator puts it, as “this fiction.”4 So too is an immensely costly and futile campaign referred to as “the rescue” to spare the ego of the Prince that led it. Even the Caucasian mountaineers, in other ways the noble foils to the rotted Russian imperial system, do the same.5

Tolstoy’s dogged observation of such confusion invites a question: does he imagine himself as the author - or philosopher - to be above it? Certainly the earlier quoted passage from the narrator reads like a sign of humility from Tolstoy - he too is taken in by the temptations of the human mind to espy narrative where there is none and to concoct facts where known ones are wanting. How does he negotiate these temptations such that he feels himself empowered to safely chastise society for indulging them?

Hints of an answer to this question come from Tolstoy’s painstaking, years-long research for Hadji Murat. Research, because the novella is named for an actual Caucasian leader, one contemporaneous to Tolstoy’s own Caucasian service, and in recreating Hadji Murat on the page Tolstoy sought witness testimony of the man’s likeness and manner. Such research comes as little surprise to those who know Tolstoy as a realist, but it still struck me for its care.

One finds many traces of this research effort in Tolstoy’s letters. I’ve two volumes edited by R.F. Christian which I kept close at hand while reading. In one, also quoted by Richard Pevear in the Penguin Classics introduction to Hadji Murat, he asks the mother of his friend who’d hosted Hadji Murat at Nukha a list of questions about his limp and the color of his horses and whether their home had a garden.

In a letter to his cousin and close friend Alexandra Andreevna Tolstoy, who helped him with some research material he seems acutely aware of the risk of the same confusion he desired to critique:

And since I like to write only about things I understand well, ayant, so to speak, les coudées franches, I need to possess completely, so far as I can, the key to his character. That’s why I’m collecting and reading everything relating to his life and character.6

In the novella that arises from this research, Tolstoy imagines what it might be like for false battlefield reports (preciously the sort which he’d sought to correct fifty years before in Sebastopol) to travel up the chain of command to the Tsar himself. For it is the Tsar, in 19th century Russia’s totalitarian system, that serves as the arbiter of truth - at least within the imperial bureaucracy which he commands, if not in history.

That Tsar - Nicholas I, the very same that denied a young Tolstoy his desired military journal - comes in for a beating in Hadji Murat. Tolstoy depicts him as an obese, lecherous, vain, temperamental and ignorant man. So brutal is this depiction of a by-then-long-dead tsar that it ensured Hadji Murat did not see publication in Tolstoy’s lifetime. Either way, everything the Tsar understands about the situation in the Caucasus seems backwards - including both the cause and the effect of his own wartime policy.

To illustrate the falseness of the stories such men tell themselves, be they the daydreams of a libidinal monarch or the contents of a jealous minister’s leather portfolio or the grievances of some sidelined general, Tolstoy marshals across Hadji Murat’s 110 pages an army of details. These details and the characters they make up do not just remind us of panoramic Sebastopol Sketches. They are so varied and so purposeful that it moves one to wonder whether Tolstoy ever needed the additional 1,100 pages he took for himself in War and Peace to make much the same point.

And that point - of Hadji Murat’s detail, its polyphony, its kaleidscopic quality - seems to be this: such details reveal how preposterous any monocausal account of events ever is. The Tsar issues a death penalty because he feels a strange guilt about deflowering a young woman, a village is burnt to the ground because a policy is miscarried, a young officer can’t help the protagonist because of a wicked gambling problem, and ultimately, in a way that all but makes a fool of the author and the tsar and the generals and the reader and the man himself, Hadji Murat, for all his terrific likability and strange terror, dies because of a bad rain.

“It’s Kafka-esque.” So declared Lieutenant Thomas over a mug of coffee to his fellow lieutenants of First Battalion

“Kaf-what?” asked Lieutenant Gallo.

“Kafka-esque” said Lieutenant Thomas again, slower, working on a fried egg.

“What’s that mean?” Gallo asked.

“Kafka-esque means,” cut in Lieutenant Ungerman, speaking as he always did, in that way his fellow lieutenants hated but forgave, as if hovering about the conversation was an invisible audience with which he was in league, an audience he sought to impress, “Kafka-esque means, when people turn into bugs.”

Lieutenant Thomas only nodded in grave agreement, as Lieutenant Gallo replied, reaching for his tin of Copenhagen,

“Well, I guess Kafka-esque is right, because,” Gallo dropped a fat pinch of dip into the pocket of his big lower lip, “that’s exactly what fucking happened.”

Indeed, the soldiers of First Battalion had arrived at work that morning to discover their battalion commander had turned into a lanternfly. The two majors up at staff, Major Vazquez and Major Barnes, were the ones to make the discovery, at what was supposed to be their regular morning meeting with the battalion commander that always preceded the morning workout.

At first the two majors figured the battalion commander had simply overslept, not seeing him seated as he usually was in his office behind his big desk. But several things gave rise to doubts. For one, the commander’s truck was parked in his marked spot, just as it was every morning. For another, a lanternfly sat atop the big desk in a way, that, it must be said, made the bug look rather comfortable. And after a couple squints, Major Vazquez and Major Barnes alike concluded that the bug, just like the commander, had something of a belly.

That was to say nothing of what happened when, after exchanging more than a single glance with Major Vazquez, Major Barnes stooped, cleared his throat and addressed the lantern fly.

“Erm, sir?” he’d said, feeling foolish, but only a little more so than he did every other day.

And then the fly had turned, had unmistakably turned, to Major Barnes, as if to receive his question.

“Sir, is that you?” Major Barnes pressed on.

A flutter of the wings. Then, also feeling acutely the absurdity of it, Major Vazquez joined in.

“Sir, I’m gonna you need to uh, flap your wings, sir, if that’s really you.”

The laternfly gave its two great teardrop grey wings yet another flutter, flashing briefly the tell-tale red underneath and, suddenly, First Battalion had on its hands an extraordinary problem.

Or several problems. It depends on how one counts them. The first came by way of the headquarters first sergeant, who after morning reveille brought to Major Vazquez a simple question. The first sergeant wanted to know if the battalion commander was to be marked present on the daily roll. No one had seen the commander at formation, the first sergeant mused, but then again, the commander’s truck was parked in the battalion lot.

A flustered Vazquez, his mind now tumbling through images of a lanternfly behind the wheel, asked the first sergeant to repeat himself.

“Should I mark the battalion commander present, sir?”

Major Vazquez thought for moment, opened his mouth, closed it, then, after a long pause, excused himself to consult with Major Barnes. What did it mean to be present for duty? Certainly the man the army knew to be the battalion commander was not entirely here, but then, Major Barnes asked, could it be said that the battalion commander was ever entirely there?

Major Vazquez nodded gravely. And further, pressed Major Barnes, was now the time to tell anyone otherwise? Was that - he searched for a word, plucked one down, used it – prudent?

Major Vazquez returned to the first sergeant and said, in what he hoped was a conclusive tone,

“The battalion commander is as present as ever.”

But such questions only kept coming. The personnel officer found Major Barnes after breakfast to ask about readiness reports. What about them, Barnes surprised himself by snapping, his thoughts having been moments before far away, wondering at the meaning of presence. After all, the battalion commander, what with his little paunch and narrow shoulders, had always seemed somehow absent, somewhat surprised to find himself in command.

Was there any change, the personnel officer wanted to know, to the battalion commander’s readiness status? Was the battalion commander still a readiness class one – fully deployable to war?

“Why wouldn’t he be?”

The personnel officer only nervously shifted, said no one had seen the commander, and there was talk that maybe he was undergoing a -

“A what?” Barnes

“A medical issue.”

It was then that Majors Barnes and Vazquez brought the staff officers into what they began calling “the circle of trust,” not knowing that word about the battalion commander had leaked hours before, when the private on orderly duty had, while taking out the trash, seen the majors consulting with an insect. At first the two majors struggled to put down a minor staff rebellion. An upstart sergeant asked how a bug could be deployable, but this was put down by Major Vazquez, who pointed out that lanternflies traveled quite well, actually, were literal invasives, and that we all had something to learn from them. That settled it.

Besides, said Major Barnes, readiness status was a relative thing and the commander, seated atop his desk, looked healthy. For a laternfly, that was.

Still other questions followed. The intelligence officer wanted to know who would be making the command decisions. Major Vazquez was second in command as the battalion executive officer, but if the commander was present, was it right to bypass him? Major Vazquez thought, then concluded that the only things worse than having a commander were not having a commander or being a commander. So the gathered staff spoke to the lanternfly, worked out that if it flapped its wings, it meant to say yes. The staff officers would’ve liked for two flaps to mean “no,” that being a simple system, but instead the laternfly would just fly away to the windowsill, and no one knew if that meant “no” or “I have to think about it.” After a torturous pause, Major Vazquez decided it meant “no,” after all, and without realizing, made the first decision of his life. To document their system, Major Barnes had the upstart sergeant draft a memorandum, which they then filed in a drawer.

That still left the problem of the upcoming exercise. First Battalion fought Second Battalion in a fake war every autumn, and, as long as anyone could remember, First Battalion always took a beating from Second Battalion. There’d been hopes in First Battalion that this year would be different, but the battalion commander’s entomological turn seemed to scuttle them, especially because, as the weeks went by, the lanternfly spent more and more time on his office windowsill. How would the soldiers train? Who would direct them?

Then something remarkable began to happen, something that had never occurred before in the annals of First Battalion. In the absence of orders, company commanders and platoon leaders and the senior sergeants began to have ideas of their own, ideas perhaps that had all along lain like larvae in their minds, and those ideas began to escape their lips, and find their way into plans, where they morphed on maps and schedules into schemes of maneuver and operational timelines. These maps and timelines the subordinate commanders and their lieutenants would spread out on the commander’s big desk for review, but on them the lanternfly would only excrete something sticky, so Major Vazquez soon took to giving feedback himself, feedback which proved surprisingly good. The companies went through their preparatory maneuvers. They readied their trucks.

All the while the exercise hurtled through the calendar towards the battalion. Then, one fine day, it arrived. The soldiers and officers of First Battalion saddled up and rode out to the exercise grounds. Though by this point Major Vazquez was its chief executive, the battalion could not bear to leave the lanternfly behind, and besides, the staff had reported him deployable, and would not be made liars, so deploy him they did. The Command Sergeant Major with one of his big hands ladled the lanternfly into a cleaned-out Copenhagen tin, pocked lovingly with holes, and tucked it on the Humvee dashboard.

The exercise went off splendidly. Second battalion tried its usual trick, a nighttime assault of a hill which made a seam in the First Battalion lines. But this time, the companies of First Battalion fought a clever retrograde, then, moving in organic concert like the many legs of some giant creature, wrapped around the attacking salient, which by first light of dawn the companies pierced in a lively counterattack. By the next nightfall, Second Battalion was sapped, and just like that, for the first autumn in as long as anyone could remember, First Battalion emerged the victor. Major Vazquez and Major Barnes shared a triumphal hug, then got ahold of themselves, and cracked the Copenhagen tin so that the battalion commander might share in the moment. The lanternfly hopped up and down and everyone was happy.

Back in the exercise grounds motor pool, Lieutenants Gallo and Thomas and Ungerman walked among the trucks with two buddies from the losing battalion, doing their best not to gloat.

“It was a good fight,” said Thomas, conciliatorily.

“It was,” replied a lieutenant from the other battalion.

“You had us at first,” said Gallo, spitting some tobacco juice into the dirt.

Ungerman couldn’t help himself – “We did end up whooping your ass though.”

The lieutenants from the other battalion stopped in their tracks, then, after a moment, smiled at each other.

“What?” Ungerman said, an eye cast to his invisible audience, in search of company.

“Well, I wouldn’t be too proud is all,” said one of the lieutenants from the other battalion, as the group began to walk again, “because, and this is going to sound a bit Kafka-esque, but, see, the thing is, our battalion commander is a…”

“Is a what?”

“Well,” said the lieutenant from Second Battalion, “our battalion commander is a lanternfly.”

Good morning,

In the early 1970s a Vietnam veteran named Joe Haldeman tried to publish his Iowa Writers’ Workshop thesis as a novel. The manuscript told of a soldier who fights in a galactic colonial war against a mysterious alien species, stalked all the while by doubt about the justice of his own army’s cause. After 17 publishers rejected the novel on the grounds that readers would not care for a Vietnam space opera, the book found a home at St. Martin’s. It went on to sell millions of copies, win every major science fiction award, and make a mark on our popular imagination.1

Clocks, fast and slow.

One of the ways The Forever War made its mark was by its depiction of time dilation. That’s the phenomenon wherein two objects experience time differently because they’re moving at different velocities or because they’re subject to different gravitational pulls.2 You may know time dilation from Interstellar. As a spaceship hurtles through the void at near light speed, its passengers will experience time more slowly than we do here on Earth. Haldeman, who earned a degree from the University of Maryland in physics and astronomy, imagines how that might that work in some galactic war.

It’s not the physics of time dilation in The Forever War that makes the book worth your attention (“someone will have to explain it to me someday,” shrugged the Times reviewer in 19763). If it were strictly a matter of firsts or of physics, one might instead turn to Poul Anderson’s Tau Zero, published in 1970.4 Rather, what makes The Forever War worthwhile is the way it fashions from time dilation a tool for taking up all sorts of profound personal and social questions. These include: What makes a thing alien? What is worth fighting for? What is eternal and what is finite in human affairs?

What is forever in war?

Perhaps the best use of time dilation in The Forever War5 is as an exposition of what in war changes and what doesn’t. Haldeman’s protagonist, William Mandella, travels far faster in his various spacecraft than Earthlings, so he ages far slower than those back home. That means technological advances which took fifty years back home seem to him like monthly developments. What’s more, humans and their alien enemies bop around the galaxy through various collapsar routes, so they meet on a given planet having experienced time differently, in different stages of technological advancement.

The upshot of all this is that the protagonist, William, can never be sure as he heads into battle where his technology stands relative to that of his enemy. Is the enemy hopelessly backwards? Or is their weaponry more advanced than his because they’ve had more time to innovate, relatively? Or will the two sides enjoy something like parity? Haldeman has lots of fun with this, and so the reader does, too. At first humans appear far more advanced. Then the enemy, too, learns mysterious, violent tricks. Then humans demystify those tricks. Drones appear. Artificial intelligence assumes command.

In this way The Forever War’s dual-track timeline - one measured in Earth centuries and one measured in the years of a young galactic soldier’s twenties - exposes what the theorist J.F.C. Fuller called the “constant tactical factor.” Fuller’s idea was that for every innovation in war there soon follows a countermeasure which negates much of the first innovation’s use.6 Armies must do two things: quickly exploit the temporary window of advantage an innovation opens before some countermeasure emerges, and better adhere to the principles of war that outride these measure-countermeasure cycles.7

Haldeman artfully observes Fuller’s “constant tactical factor” in the final battle of his novel’s multi-century galactic war against the aliens. On some distant planet, after so many ever-more-advanced cycles of weapons development, William Mandella’s strike force meets the enemy. To make a long story short, the two sides have so negated each other’s advantages that, in the final chapter of this epic space opera, they fight each other with bows and arrows, shields and darts. What wins the day is not some superweapon, but eternal factors embodied by William: creativity, leaderly instinct, wisdom.

The Forever War is thus something of a fake-out. The cover art of its many versions tempt readers to conclude the book is just a futurist’s fever dream or else some sort of cyber dystopia. And if the novel ended after its first 150 or so pages, one could defensibly summarize it in roughly those terms. But over the thousand years the novel covers, the once dystopian Earth that William visits during his break in service recovers (then falters then recovers then falters). Technology works miracles then negates them then works them again. The novel starts with death and ends with birth. Haldeman concludes things are cyclical.

What is forever in Ukraine?

Which brings us to Ukraine. J.F.C. Fuller observed the measure-countermeasure development cycle and the constant tactical factor at a moment in history when technological development famously picked up speed - the First World War. Today, that same acceleration is occurring once again. Indeed, while reading The Forever War I was repeatedly struck by the thought that one need not travel at near lightspeed to experience time differently. One need only travel to Ukraine. For as even the most casual observer of wartime technology can tell you, things are moving a lot faster on the battlefield in Ukraine than they are elsewhere.

Take the recent story (snipped below) about a simulated battle between a Ukrainian drone unit, Nemesis, and a U.S. Army brigade (featured in a Garrison Note from earlier this summer). The encounter between Nemesis, with its drones and its experience and its novel tactics, and the at-times Gulf War-era tech of an interwar U.S. Army unit, is not unlike an encounter one might expect from Haldeman’s The Forever War: two units, from radically different technological moments, meet on the far side of a collapsar jump. If WSJ reporting is to be believed, the same thing which happens in the novel happened in the simulated battle: a one-sided massacre.

Such technological superiority tempts us to worship at innovation’s feet. But what happens when both parties innovate on the same technological timeline? What happens when both sides innovate measure and countermeasure at the same pace?

Well, by way of an answer, consider the waves of tech hype we’ve seen over the war in Ukraine: the Bayraktr TB2 drone, the Javelin, the GMLRS round, the ATACMS, unmanned surface vessels, FPV drones. All are important, and useful in their way, but none delivered the war-altering effect their most zealous champions anticipated. Each opened temporary windows of advantage for one belligerent or another, windows that went underexploited for lack of means or lack of organization or lack of time or some other reason. Then a countermeasure arrived, and the window closed. This point has been made in sustained, compelling fashion by Stephen Biddle.

Perhaps nothing has more vividly displayed this measure-countermeasure cycle than the small drone’s evolving use in Ukraine. First, wireless drones began dropping grenades on defensive positions. Then both sides began improving positions with overhead cover or obscuring their heat signature. Then drone operators began operating first person view kamikaze drones to more precisely attack their enemies. Then those defending developed means of jamming those wireless connections. Then drone operators began operating their drones via fiber optic wire to defeat jamming.

Now, across eastern Ukraine (and in Russia), soldiers on both sides of the front line have begun stringing hundreds of kilometers of fishing net to block the threat of fiber optic controlled drones (and others). Beneath the netting, eternal principles of war assert themselves again. These images call to my mind the stasis fields that reduce the combatants of Haldeman’s The Forever War to a battle of darts and spears at the novel’s end. Just as Haldeman’s time dilation allows the reader to witness an epoch of measure/counter-measure cycles over 250 pages, the war in Ukraine has allowed students of war to watch the same grim cycle play out, but at the cost of real human lives.

Know your windows and know your cycles

The point here is not that innovation is unimportant. This spring’s massive defeat of a U.S. Army brigade by a Ukrainian drone unit at Hohenfels Training Area demonstrated that innovation very much does matter, battle to battle. So too did the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki demonstrate that weaponry can make a difference (see also the Battle of Omduran or even the needle gun at Königgrätz). Rather we must recall that the windows of advantage are temporary, and that fundamentals of war endure throughout the opening and closing of those windows. It would be a sad irony if in pursuit of innovation the U.S. Army neglected the eternal principles that constrain it. Another reason to read The Forever War.

Good evening,

Today passed peacefully here in western Brooklyn, as many summer Saturdays do. Families milled through farmers markets under an unbroken blue sky. Runners ran at their own pace, some to music, weaving among the revelers spilled out from innumerable bars, or else around sidewalk tables laid already for a fourth lunch seating. The only shrieks were those that children let out as they dug, charged, and tumbled their way to exhaustion in some little park. Small shops did good business. Dogs waited on coffee chats.

It was peaceful enough to forget entirely that today marks 250 years since, in this particular place, the United States came as close as it ever has to total annihilation. If George Washington ever stared into the abyss, his greatest biographer would later write, he did so here, 250 years ago today.1 And our country owes its survival to a decision that Washington, having contemplated that abyss, made that same evening, atop the bluffs at Brooklyn’s western edge, at a place we now call Brooklyn Heights.

What follows is a glance back on the Battle of Brooklyn from the same ground on which it was fought. This is not a military history. Others have recounted the battle better than ever I will. My idea here is only to retrace the battle’s violent and fateful course through present day Brooklyn, and so throw into relief just how much was won on August 29th, for all the preceding days’ losses. Because for all this country’s shortcomings, it is hard not to walk through this happy corner of it and find a peace worth fighting for.

First, some scene setting: in 1775 the Revolution began. By early 1776 the Continental troops had forced the British to evacuate Boston. George Washington then led the Army to New York to defend the city and its harbor and the mouth of the Hudson from British reinforcements the rebels knew would come. That British force arrived at Staten Island in July of 1776, well manned, well trained, and well supported by the largest fleet ever assembled. Major General William Howe commanded the British troops, and his brother Richard commanded their fleet.

For their inevitable assault on Manhattan, the British enjoyed options. They might move up the East River or up the Hudson to the west, or land on Long Island and fight their way in. Even if the British did land on Long Island, there was little telling where they might choose to do so and how they might proceed once landed. The Brits’ numerical advantage - their 22,000+ far outnumbered the sickly Continentals - meant the British could also split forces while remaining relatively strong. Washington seemed capable only of guessing.2

The British chose to land on Long Island. They did so at Gravesend Bay on August 22nd, dropping some 15,000 redcoats onto a beachhead without opposition. Washington poorly estimated British strength at Gravesend and so thought the whole thing a feint and left present-day Brooklyn poorly prepared. Several thousand Continentals strung a gap-riddled line of defense across Long Island but the British outmaneuvered it, finding a massive hole at the town of Jamaica that allowed them to flank around to Brooklyn Heights from the north.3

The one place the Continental troops gave a real fight was roughly that of present-day Prospect Park. There, an alcoholic gluttonous debtor with a disputed claim to Scottish title who styled himself Lord Stirling led the spirited defense of a ridge line called Guana Heights. Hessians and Highlanders had it out with ill-clad Continentals in the glens and groves and hollows of the wooded heights. The Hessians proved particularly violent, killing many Americans in wooded nooks with bayonet and giving no quarter.4

The disaster would have been far greater were it not for a single regiment known to history as the Maryland 400. After several hard hours it became clear to Lord Stirling that he would have to fall back (he had himself “fought like a wolf” according to one subordinate).5 He left behind a Maryland regiment under William Smallwood to cover the retreat. These men fought a vicious rearguard action down the north slope of the Guana Heights (for which the neighborhood Park Slope is now named), to Gowanus Creek.

Historians now estimate the Maryland 400 lost 60% of their ranks in those hellish hours - one of the worst combat loss rates in American history.6 Many of these men died or were wounded taking a farmhouse that the British had established as a strongpoint, since rebuilt at the corner of 5th Avenue and 3rd Street. Others drowned as they waded back towards Brooklyn Heights through Gowanus Creek, or else were shot doing the same. A Connecticut soldier later recalled the survivors emerging from the water like “river-rats.”

Washington watched from atop Cobble Hill through an eyeglass as the Marylanders died covering his troops’ retreat. He watched as three of five Maryland companies were simply wiped out and the rest much reduced.7 An eyewitness reported it this way

General Washington wrung his hands, and cried out, “Good God! What brave fellows I must lose this day!”8

For all their suffering, the 1st Maryland Regiment - now styled as “Washington’s Immortals” - succeeded. For their stubborn defense, the British could not give immediate chase to the retreating main body of the Continentals. Perhaps thousands of troops under John Sullivan and Lord Stirling made it back to Brooklyn Heights. There they immediately began entrenching themselves on the night of the 27th, anticipating a final defense of Long Island. Thankfully, for reasons we’ll see momentarily it wasn’t to come.

Today, Guana Heights is peaceful but no one calls it that anymore. Those glens where Hessians bayoneted Continentals are now the many nooks of Prospect Park Forest, past which joggers and chatters wend. Run clubs and aspiring triathletes and the occasional deliveryman tear up the road that rings the park. On the great lawn that runs along its northwest side one finds each weekend a twenty-first century Renoir. Everywhere there are strollers, picnics, volleyball, lovers.

To the southwest, at the end of the Guana Heights, sits Green-wood Cemetery. Before it became a city of the dead these four hundred acres also saw some hard fighting (hence its peak, “Battle Hill”). Now it is a quiet and holy place. Those passing through may notice that Green-wood’s roll of burials at Green-wood Cemetery makes for a panorama of American excellence, a panorama made possible by the valor of the Maryland 400: Morse, Steinway, Greeley, Pfizer, Beecher, Basquiat, Bernstein, Pop Smoke.9

Down the park’s north slope stands the rebuilt “old stone house” from which the Maryland 400 fought to dislodge the British as the surrounded Continentals fell back. On any given afternoon nowadays, a visitor is surrounded by the shrieks of playing children, because the house sits in a playground. Community boards besiege it declaring local art exhibits and kids’ programs. Maryland flags adorn windows, marking some otherwise forgotten saviors:

Further down the slope is the Gowanus Canal, an industrial canal and superfund site carved from the brackish creek in which too many Continentals drowned. Clean-up of the site continues, and probably will forever. That has not stopped a breathtaking run of new residential development. Attendant bakeries and restaurants have cropped up, as have the expected concerns about displacement and prices. Still, the surge of investment suggests an optimism likely alien to the Marylanders who died there.

Past these places the Continental troops would have retreated, over the now-urbane Cobble Hill, to Brooklyn Heights. The 27th had been a brutal day. The Battle would be the largest of the entire Revolutionary War (which would burn for another nearly seven years). A German chaplain wandering the battle field at the day’s end wrote home of the revulsion he felt for what he saw. The dead “had been hacked and shot all to pieces.”10 Many of those American troops who were captured rather than killed would eventually succumb to starvation on British prison ships.

But those who got to Brooklyn Heights were able to take refuge in Continental fortifications, already begun under Washington’s orders. These improvements gave the badly beaten troops brief reprieve from the British, but not from the elements. On August 28th a cold rain fell, filling the American trenches, some up to soldiers’ waists. Munitions and weapons soaked and cook fires went out. All the while, the British patiently began sapping their way towards the Americans, from tents not 2,000 yards away. Washington and his officers had little time.11

Making things more urgent for the Americans was the British fleet. Ships under Richard Howe’s command threatened to sail up the East River from New York Harbor and fire upon the Americans at Brooklyn Heights from their rear, thereby completing a fatal encirclement. The British sailors feared running aground on the shoals of the East River, and so paused just past Governor’s Island, waiting for the right moment to cut off any chance of an American retreat.

Instead, on 29 August, 1776, at 4:00 PM - 250 years ago today - George Washington called a war council at a house called Four Chimneys on the bluffs of Brooklyn Heights. There he and his gathered officers discussed their options and concluded unanimously that the only thing to do was to withdraw the thousands of Continental troops to Manhattan as soon as possible. Only such a withdrawal could ensure the Continental Army would survive to fight another day. And the time to withdraw was that night.

Washington’s decision - hardly the obvious one, given the proximity of the British fleet and the state of his troops and the darkness of night - saved the country. Much has since been made of the British hesitation to press the attack that night, and many suggest it was Howe’s error rather than any special insight that enabled the American escape. But such comments risk indulging hindsight too much. Howe and the British had every reason to think the Americans would still be atop Brooklyn Heights on the morning of the 30th. The East River narrow and well observed; the weather was hard; the men were tired.12 Still.

Washington’s daring paid off, in part thanks to his own leadership. He personally led thousands of demoralized, wounded, soaked American troops down the cliffs of Brooklyn Heights to the waterfront. He enforced a strict evacuation timetable, ensuring no regiment moved too early or too late (even sending some back to their trenches when they jumped the gun), both to maintain adequate security and to prevent panic. Some officers told troops they were going on a night assault, just to keep them from rushing.13 Washington also kept regimental campfires burning long after regiments evacuated, to fool the nearby British.

Down at the water, an amateurish armada awaited. A call had gone up and down the Manhattan and Long Island coasts for ships of every sort, and over fifty answered - rowboats to schooners and everything between.14 Continental troops from coastal Massachusetts took charge, expertly piloting boats through the night, wrapping oars in cloth to dampen the noise. A providential fog descended at roughly 2 AM, giving these mariners the cover they needed to slip past the British fleet by Governor’s Island.

As the sun rose on August 30th, the few troops remaining in the trenches atop Brooklyn Heights worried they would be sacrificed to the British, finally alert to the evacuation. But no such thing happened. Washington saw the last of the troops to the awaiting boats, and then, as if anyone needed further proof of his bravery, he boarded one of the very last boats out of Brooklyn. Washington had been so occupied with the safe evacuation of his Army, it is said that he did not dismount his horse for 48 hours. It had been a grueling night, in the words of his biographer, one of “appalling tension.”15

So began a long, hard several years for George Washington and his Army. They would be shortly chased up Manhattan, into Harlem Heights, then into Jersey, then down Jersey. They would survive humiliations at places like White Plains, withering winters in Newburgh and in Valley Forge, mutinies in the Jersey and Pennsylvania lines, treason, a stingy Congress, a fickle French ally, and much more. But Washington and his Army would emerge from the war intact and victorious.

No such victory would have been possible had Washington and his men not managed their evacuation from Brooklyn on the night of August 29th. It is so, so easy to imagine one additional day elapsing owing to any number of issues - insufficient boats, insufficient fog, insufficient British patience, a fire in camp, insufficient daring on Washington’s part, insufficient competence on Washington’s part - and had one day elapsed, the British likely would have destroyed the Continental Army and so ended the war. That is what I think Washington’s biographer means when he speaks of the “abyss.” But that’s not what happened.

A final thought on Washington. Many have rightly pointed out that the Battle of Brooklyn was a humiliating defeat, in part because Washington misunderstood the British plans time and time again. “In general, our generals have been out generalled” goes John Adams’s famous quip. But it is worth recalling that the British expeditionary force and supporting fleet were the largest ever assembled up to that point in history, and Washington had little experience in any operational art and few trained troops. How could he not have lost? More astounding is the retreat he managed, and that, when so many others didn’t, he learned so many lessons from his defeat.

These days, Brooklyn Heights gives proof of Washington’s victory. It is a well-to-do neighborhood of leafy streets and handsome townhouses. In the middle of the 19th century, developers built these homes atop Dutch farms to serve as modern housing for the country’s first commuter suburb. Those first suburbanites took the Robert Fulton’s steam ferry across the East River, from the same spot Washington’s evacuees would’ve launched their little armada. The waterfront has only grown busier since.

Today, you can visit the site of Four Chimneys, that house in which Washington and his officers made the decision to evacuate Brooklyn. It’s at the southern end of a promenade overlooking Manhattan. Down that promenade, first dates walk and grandfathers carry grandkids and people take catch-up calls and work calls and sad calls. They pass the Four Chimneys site without much notice (it is about as well marked as Hagen Daaz just up Montague Street, the first one ever opened). The promenade’s view is of the most majestic skyline in the world, that of the world’s capital, an epochal monument to the country Washington and the men under him won. And tonight, for all that might be wrong in the world, that monument looks peaceful.

Good evening,

This week’s letter offers notes from Leo Tolstoy’s story Sebastopol in August. It is the first story Tolstoy ever signed with his full name, and so marked the public debut of perhaps the greatest writer of fiction since Shakespeare. Readers of Garrison Notes may recall that previous letters commented on Tolstoy’s time in the Tsar’s army, including his stint at the Sebastopol during its infamous siege. These next two weeks mark the anniversary of the final Anglo-French assault on Sebastopol in the summer of 1855, which broke the Russian defense for good. That anniversary, and the near daily news reports of the fight for Crimea, together seem as good reasons as any to return to the story the scenes from the assault inspired.

The Crimean War

First, some context: In the early 1850s, the ascendant Russian Empire asserted its sovereignty over parts of southeastern Europe still then claimed by fast-weakening Ottoman Empire. The Turks responded with a declaration of war, and soon the French and English threw in with them, too. The Russians threatened Istanbul from the far side of the Black Sea, where their famous Black Sea Fleet sat at the Crimean port of Sebastopol. To end that threat, English and French landed at Crimea and laid siege to the city, in late 1854.

Some 171 years ago this week, that siege succeeded and the Russians lost the war.

But why care?

• The war helped free 20 million serfs. Some have it that the war convinced the new tsar, Alexander II, that Russian society had to emancipate its twenty million serfs so as to modernize and avoid another humiliating defeat.1

• The war helped unite Germany. The war also untethered Austria from its historic sponsor, Russia, and neither England nor France replaced Russia. Without a great power to back it, Austria fell prey to the ascendant Prussians, and so modern Germany was born in the Prussian make.2

• The war did much to modernize medicine. Without wading into the historiography, it seems clear that the war, which saw many more soldiers die from disease than from war, was a major catalyst for the development of modern public health administration. The avatar of this change is of course Florence Nightingale (she also had a hand in inventing modern infographics with her novel polar diagrams - they made clear to the British public how much more deadly disease was to the British soldier than combat).

  

• The war helped change our understanding of truth. One of the reasons the Crimean War proved a catalyst for public health reform was that people back home knew of disease’s toll for the first time. The public knew sooner and more than ever before because the Crimean War was the first major war to occur in the age of photography and telegraphy. Words and images from its battlefields made their way in far greater number and at far greater speeds and in far less filtered fashion than previous wars. Letters from soldiers and independent reports describing recent events appeared in print alongside, and at odds with, official reports. This near-instantaneous, distance-collapsing, worldview fragmenting reportage ushered in a new, modern age.3

Tolstoy, war reporter

That matter of reportage brings us to today’s topic: Leo Tolstoy. He came to the Crimean War as an ensign in early 1854. He came indirectly from the Caucasus, where he’d seen small action in the guerilla war that seemed to always smolder there. The western theater drew Tolstoy to it with the promise of big time fighting, and in this way at first it disappointed him: The Tsar’s army seemed to him backward in the face of Western threat, incapable of putting up a modern fight. Besides, Tolstoy got posted to pacific Bucharest, where rearguard generals threw garish balls as fighting raged on Crimea.4

To spark in the Russian army much needed reform, the young Ensign Tolstoy proposed to the army headquarters a new military journal. His idea was that such a journal, permitted some degree of editorial independence from the tsar, would offer a venue for officers to propose ways the military might be improved (a topic I wrote about briefly for the U.S. Army’s Harding Project here). The Tsar’s answer came back in the negative: the Tsar could not tolerate the risk of open professional discourse in the uniformed ranks.5

By the time Tolstoy got his negative answer from the Tsar, he’d made his way from Bucharest to Crimea. He’d seen the carnage at Sebastopol and talked to allied prisoners and, having been denied his desired military journal, desired an outlet to describe the ills he’d found. That outlet came to him in the form of Sovremenik, or The Contemporary, a journal whose editor had shown Tolstoy friendship in St. Petersburg earlier on. For The Contemporary Tolstoy began sending thinly fictionalized dispatches from Sebastopol. We now know these as The Sebastopol Sketches.

Tolstoy’s first sketch, called “Sebastopol in December” (meaning here December of 1854) caused a sensation. Though still optimistic about Russian prospects, it was a grittier and more realistic work than those to which the reading Russian elite were accustomed. The sketch moved Turgenev, that great realist, to tears.6 Even the Tsar ordered it reprinted for wider distribution. The Crimean War had already produced the first modern war correspondent of the English world in The Times’s William Russell - it now did the same for the Russian world, if more indirectly, in Leo Tolstoy.7

When the summer of 1855 swung around, things got far worse for the Russians. Their several counterattacks against the encircling allies had failed, including a brutal and brutally mismanaged affair on August 16 of 1855 at the Chernaya River. In late August (these being the old calendar dates), the Allies began a series of preparatory bombardments for the decisive assault on Sebastopol. These would’ve been the most sophisticated and largest bombardments in history up to that point - an ugly presage of the Great War to come. Once the sixth such bombardment ended, the Allies stormed the Redan and Malakhov redoubts, and soon raised their standards above the city.8

Tolstoy witnessed, in one form or another, nearly all these events - save the final attack - and led more than one battery through fighting that hard summer. All this is the subject of Tolstoy’s third and final sketch of Sebastopol, “Sebastopol in August.” The story follows two officers through the final days of the siege of Sebastopol. They are the Kozelstov brothers. The older brother is a veteran, returning to Crimea a final time after recuperating from battlefield wounds. The younger one is a green officer, newly arrived from training. They meet each other on the road back into the city, working their way from the Russian rear area towards its front line.

The set up is familiar to those who have already read Tolstoy’s stories from the Caucasus: a young, impressionable, naive, romantic man learns from a wiser, more even-handed man the true nature of bravery. This is in essence the plot of “The Raid” (which I cannot recommend enthusiastically enough) and “The Woodfelling” (also great). In fact, Tolstoy finished the latter at roughly the same time that he was writing the first of his Sebastopol sketches.

But in other ways, “Sebastopol in August” is different from Tolstoy’s Caucasus war stories. For one, Tolstoy brilliantly uses the protagonists’ passage through the Russian rear lines as a chance to sketch a panorama of the many ugly functions that support a war effort, and so expose for a St. Petersburg audience the rot that afflicted its state. For another, Tolstoy also sketches a great group portrait, not unlike those of the Old Masters, of the many faces of courage. Then, the story also inverts the expected endings, and so leaves us wondering whether any of these carefully drawn distinctions matter that much at all.

Kinds of courage

On the question of courage: Tolstoy, as he does in “The Woodfelling,” takes an inventory in “Sebastopol in August” of all sorts of courage and fear. Below are some notes to that end, notes in which I consider whether the two brothers model two different kinds of courage.

But before we get to the brothers, we might pause to think about Tolstoy’s treatment of the reasons men decide to become officers in the Tsar’s army. Some of these reasons sound alien to our 21st century ears and some sound familiar. Here’s one that might be familiar: In “The Woodfelling” wartime service is considered an important credential for later success in St. Petersburg high life (in fact, in that story Tolstoy presents this certification of young men’s virility as the actual Russian justification for the unending war in the Caucasus). Tolstoy suggests some of those same pressures are at work in Sebastopol.

Take this account of an officer, met at a post-station outside Sebastopol, who seems a little slow in arriving at the scene of battle:

…at that particular moment this officer was an abject coward, though six months previously he had been very far from one. He had experienced the upheaval common to many men, both before and after him. He had lived in one of those Russian provinces in which there are cadet corps. Although he had occupied a good, quiet position in civilian life, the experience of reading, both in newspaper accounts and in letters he had received from friends, about the deeds of the heroes of Sebastopol - his former colleagues and companions - suddenly inflamed his ambition and, even more, with patriotism. To this emotion he had sacrificed much: his comfortable position, his flat with its upholstered furniture…

When at length he had found himself - alone, with heartburn, his face caked with dust - at the fifth posthouse, where he had encountered a despatch rider from Sebastopol who filled him in on the horrors of war, and had had to wait twelve hours to obtain a change of horses, he had utterly repented his thoughtless decision, contemplated what lay in store for him with ill-defined horror and completed the remainder of his journey in a kind of trance, like a lamb going to the slaughter.”9

The protagonists meet other types of fear and courage, too. There is a commisariat officer, a sort of quartermaster, who spends his days in a drunken stupor with a useless assistant, far from the guns and in a constant state of self-pity (contempt for which the veteran protagonist gracefully masks). There is a sort of simpleton’s survival instinct, more palatable for being without pretension, in the form of a cadet named Vlang. There is a brazenly reckless figure named Melkinov, whose bravery seems divorced entirely from social expectation or tactical utility. And there are the nurses of the hospital, who stoically care for the brutalized and the sick.

These portraits (there are others) matter because by their light we can study the two protagonists. The younger Kozelstov brother, a green officer named Volodya, professes a desire to see combat to himself and to others. Beneath such professions a fear lingers, one that almost stops Volodya from leaving his buddies, bound for staff duty, and joining his battle-bound brother. Only familial fidelity seems to overcome Volodya’s fear - that and a prayer, which infuses him with divine courage (one wonders if this was a censor’s addition - these stories underwent much censorship, and it’s such a strange turn in the narrative, so it invites suspicion. Perhaps not.)

As he travels to Sebastopol, the younger brother, Volodya, imagines himself valiantly fighting and then dying:

We slaughter them all, but in the battle I’m hit a second and a third time, and I fall down to the point of death. Then everyone comes running up to me; Gorchakov arrives and asks me if I have a last request. I tell him there’s nothing I want except to be put to lie beside my brother, and that I want to die with him. They carry me over and put me down beside my brother’s blood-stained corpse. I raise myself on one elbow and say merely: “Yes, you placed too little value on two men who truly loved their fatherland; now they have both fallen…May God forgive you!” - and then I die.10

It is a memorable passage because it reads so naively, so much like a young man’s daydream, and it is contrasted immediately in the reader’s mind with what the reader knows is to come, especially from Tolstoy, especially reading as the first readers might’ve read, on the far and losing end of a bad war, in St. Petersburg.

Volodya’s reverie ends when the two brothers cross a pontoon bridge from the rear area across the Sebastopol Harbor to the city proper. It is hard not to read in the moment parallels to the crossing of the River Styx. The two brothers leave behind the comforts and corruptions of the rear area and enter into a black night, “a morgue,” where only the fatal and unrelenting detonations of enemy shells shed light. It is upon this crossing that Volodya’s bravado sours. Here Tolstoy raises a thought to which he will return decades later in Ivan Illyich - the idea that we think everyone will die except us:

“Lord, am I really going to be killed - I, of all people? Lord, have mercy upon me!” he said in a whisper, and he crossed himself.

“Well, let’s be off, Volodya” said his older brother, as the waggon rolled on to the bridge. “Did you see that shell?”11

Now in Sebastopol, the two brothers visit a hospital, where the older one, whom we can call Misha, desires to visit a wounded comrade. That comrade cannot recognize Misha, nor give any consolation to soldier or reader - he can only moan, and wish the war were over.

After this wrenching visit, Misha leaves young Volodya to find his assignment within the wasted city. A guide takes him only so far, then deposits Volodya outside his commander’s bivouac. Left alone briefly, young Volodya feels the grip of fear:

This consciousness of his own isolation and of the danger he was in - in the jaws of death, he thought - lay on his heart like some cold and unspeakably heavy stone. He stood still in the middle of the square and looked round to see if anyone was watching him, clutched at his head and thought out loud, with a sense of horror: “Lord! Am I really a coward?”12

Then something perhaps predictable happens - once he gets close to the action, rather than turn out to be a coward, the younger brother, Volodya, finds something like courage. “Finds” might be too active a verb. He volunteers to go to the Malakhov Bastion, a violent place, but instead is made to draw straws - and is picked (an early comment on randomness, a Tolstoyan theme that endures). He then watches himself approach the viciously bombarded Malakhov Bastion, and sees himself exposing himself to fire, and sees himself perform basic gunning duties under that fire, and thinks to himself:

So here I am on the Malakhov, and it isn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be! I’m able to keep going with ducking, and I’m far less afraid than the others. Does that mean I am brave?

Shortly before the allied assault that would end the siege began, Volodya directs his troops to the guns again, and again finds himself brave, and is mightily pleased with his own conduct - so much so that he unbuttons his jacket so to better look the part, and leans forward of his guns. His soldiers look on admirably.

Things are a little different with the veteran Misha. We get hints of that difference early. The strongest one comes in a memorable conversation between Volodya and a soldier guiding him through the Sebastopol ruins. The guide says Volodya’s brother is a strange man for choosing to return to Sebastopol, a comment that confuses Volodya:

“What do you mean? After all, my brother is completely recovered now, replied Volodya, hoping by means of conversation to dispel the unpleasant feeling that had taken ahold of him.

“Recovered! What kind of recovery is it when he’s still as sick as a dog? The ones who’ve really recovered, and the ones who’ve got any sense, those fellows stay in hospital at a time like this. What joy can a man expect out here, eh? He’s more likely to get his arm blown off - that’s all. And he won’t have to wait long before it happens, either…”13

Misha, we learn, once separated from his brother, returns first to the soldiers of his battery. They’re burrowed in a casemate when he finds them, all huddled about a single literate soldier, who is reading aloud from a primer:

“Fear of death is an inborn sense in man.”

When the soldiers see that their old wounded commander has returned, they cheer up. It is clear that Misha has a hard-won, warm and humane relationship with his men. His presence heartens them and eases the fear they feel. After issuing some perfunctory remarks about meeting the French in the open in the coming days, the older brother takes leave of his men and joins the officers.

It is with his fellow officers, in a casemate on the edge of Armageddon, that Misha then surprises the reader. Rather than play the straight-edge officer to whom his younger brother ought aspire, Misha contradicts his own earlier admonitions and begins to gamble (much as Tolstoy did, compulsively, in the army). The narrator averts his eyes from the sort of pathetic scene, and cuts back to the younger brother.

To put it simply, the reader begins to wonder if Misha, the older brother, wants to die. Or rather, perhaps Misha knows he will die and is indifferent to this fact. The fatalistic return from injury, the gambling, the stoic calm he displays as they approach Sebastopol - it’s all suggestive of a resignation to death in battle. But it is a different sort of resignation than the young brother’s

The next time we return to Misha, he is leading a charge against the assaulting French, saber drawn. He scatters the French, but takes several bullets that eventually kill him. In his last moments he asks for reassurance from a priest that the day is won, and the priest grants him that false assurance. So Misha dies with a “sense of ecstasy” that he had performed a heroic deed.

Volodya dies a different death. Rather than lead some successful countercharge when the attack comes, Volodya can only supervise the firing of a couple rounds of grapeshot. His death is described rather unceremoniously. A loyal cadet attempts to save Volodya by urging him to fall back, and Volodya stands frozen atop an overtaken parapet as French Zouaves swarm about. The next time the cadet glances back, he sees merely that “something wrapped in a greatcoat was lying face down in the place where Volodya had been standing.”

So what would you call brave?

In “The Raid,” Tolstoy’s first story from the Caucasus, a volunteer asks an old captain, “What would you call brave?” and Tolstoy puts in the mouth of that Captain Khlopov this definition of bravery: a man who does what he ought to do is brave.

Volodya and Misha both seem to pass this test, if one grants that an officer’s place is on the front line with his troops. But Misha dies with knowledge, if false, that he had done a heroic deed. Volodya seems to die without any thought at all - if he had one, we’re not privy to it. This strikes me as ironic, given that Misha returns to battle - despite his wounds, with a fatalistic gambling itch - out of a sense of duty. Volodya goes for the first time very much desirous of glory, so much so that he daydreams of it.

What to make of this contrast? I don’t know. Perhaps Tolstoy would’ve written it differently were it not for censors. Perhaps the two brothers are meant to offer two pleasing counterexamples to the rot of the rear area. Perhaps it is about the naiveté of the Russian elite and the wisdom of the common soldier. I’ll have to think about it, I suppose.

Good morning,

This week the Wall Street Journal reported that Ukrainian troops recently defeated a U.S. brigade in simulated battle at Hohenfels Training Area. “Wiped out,” is how one source described the brigade, an armored one from Fort Hood. The story has prompted a lot of chatter from online commentators about what the defeat could mean for the U.S. Army or unmanned systems or the nature of war. dispensed with most of that chatter in a good short piece yesterday. For students of war, Justin’s piece is worth a read.

The trouble is, those commentators are getting riled up over the wrong story. The actual story from Hohenfels is not in the Wall Street Journal’s reporting. It is this: the U.S. Army has no idea what happened at Hohenfels at all.

The good news is, the Army is fixing that.

First, the non-story: Of course the Fort Hood brigade (3/1CD) lost to the Ukrainian troops. Our armored brigades almost always lose the battles they fight at our training centers. As any veteran of the opposing force will gladly volunteer without having been asked, armored brigades are “wiped out” in major exercises several times a year. That’s all by design.

Once you mix Ukrainian troops into the opposing force, it would be a miracle if a peacetime U.S. brigade managed anything better than complete annihilation. The Ukrainian military has spent a decade locked in a fight for its life against a peer threat, innovating under existential pressure and with immediate feedback. The U.S. Army has begun to modernize too, but in peacetime, without either the same pressure, or, crucially, meaningful feedback.

That brings me to what I think is the actual story: the U.S. Army doesn’t know much at all about what happened in the simulated battle at Hohenfels.

What do I mean by that? Certainly the U.S. Army’s individual observer-coaches from the Joint Multinational Readiness Center at the Hohenfels know what happened. These observer-coaches are professionals, no doubt watched the exercise closely, and gave good after-action reviews to the troops from Fort Hood on whom the Journal reported. I don’t call into question their judgment.

What I mean is that while the observers-coaches at Hohenfels know what happened, and the troops from Fort Hood know what happened, and the opposing force knows what happened, the U.S. Army does not. In fact, the U.S. Army maintains no institutional knowledge of what happens at any of its Combat Training Centers, and so cannot discern what “happened” at Combined Resolve 26-07, either in a vacuum or relative to other fights.

The Army so lacks institutional knowledge of these training exercises because the Army does not systematically collect structured data from its combat training centers. Data collection from these training exercises is episodic, decentralized, and non-standard. The collected training data - the record of what happened in a given fight - varies from training center to training center, within a training center across observer teams, within an observer team over time as team leadership changes. Historically, whatever does get collected is often stored in unstructured, non-standardized and decentralized fashion - on Teams channels, sharedrives or SharePoints, desktops, in slidedecks, in screenshots of .csvs, in word documents and so on.

Here’s how Lieutenant Colonel Jon Bate and I described the problem in a piece for MWI in early 2025:

Today the problem abides. Army Regulation 350-50, Combat Training Center Program, which governs combat training center operations, remains ambiguous as to what rotational training unit data must be collected. Beyond the terabytes of raw instrumented data produced by the Combat Training Center–Instrumentation System, most rotation data lives in unstructured take-home packets, consisting of after-action review slide decks intended for trained units. For lack of a regulatory standard, collection practices and take-home packets vary with different observer coach-trainer (OC/T) authors, creating gaps that make longitudinal analysis difficult. In this sense the Army leaves money on the table at the Training Centers each month.

This means the Army has no proprietary dataset that describes what has happened at its combat training centers. It has no authoritative record of what typically happens in a brigade-on-brigade fight at a training center.

This is all despite simulating those fights over twenty times a year, at four separate world-class training centers, to the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. Here’s how I put the question of training center costs in an old post, a post about the sort of knowledge you can only gain from experiential training:

There is likely no other army on earth but the U.S. Army that can afford the National Training Center. For other armies such exercises are either too expensive or too honest. Those honest enough to run unscripted exercises that expose their shortcomings are not rich enough to pay for exercises so big and so frequent. And the few militaries rich enough to run an equivalent of the National Training Center are, it seems, not honest enough to do it. They cannot afford the political risk of unscripted outcomes.

Either way, because the Army has no record of baseline performance, the Army has nothing to which it can compare what recently happened at Hohenfels. It therefore has no way of systematically observing what was different about the performance of the Fort Hood brigade from the performance of other armored brigades in other fights. The Army can’t say whether the “wipe out” observed in the recent training exercise was more pronounced than defeats in other rotations. In assessing what caused what, the Army cannot control for leader experience, or leader competence.1 It cannot control for maintenance practices, nor force structure, nor for maneuver tactics, nor for opposing force structure, nor for weather, and no, nor for drones. That is what I mean when I say the Army does not know what happened at Hohenfels. Put broadly, the Army cannot make a systematic study of what is working and what isn’t working in its operational force.

An important qualifier: no one thinks data can displace human qualitative judgment. You might not need a large dataset to know that drones made a difference in a fight. But if you are an institution, like the Army, trying to comprehend trends within an activity as complex as war in an operational force comprising over a hundred thousand soldiers, data certainly helps. And we’re starved for operations data now.

This is all the more tragic because though combat training centers are not perfect, they are extraordinarily promising venues for observing the operational force - certainly relative to any known alternative. They are large. They are well resourced. They are home to a large and effective opposing force. They are instrumented. And important variables that in war can confound any analysis - terrain, enemy make-up - are highly controlled.

You may be thinking: if all this is true, then why and how can leaders make quantitative claims about what happened at combat training centers, as they have done over the years? In short, when leaders invoke numbers concerning a unit’s battlefield performance at CTCs, whether or not they know it, the numbers they are invoking are almost always made up. Claims about a given formation being x% more lethal, or less effective, or better at communicating simply cannot be falsified.

The way senior leaders get these numbers is that they ask the operations groups for them. For lack of a query-able database, operations groups must ask the members of their Training Analysis and Feedback Facilities (TAFFs) to scour myriad unstructured files and generate a bespoke, non-replicable analysis for the individual senior leader question. Some TAFF contractors and leaders spend a whole week running down a general officer’s question because the structured data, which could answer the question with a key stroke, does not exist.

There are some metrics - died of wounds rates, for example - that are collected relatively consistently thanks to the enterprise of individual Centers of Excellence - but they are the exception, and absent the systematic collection of other variables (enemy strength, battlefield outcome), we can’t really know what they mean. Others - the fleet health of vehicles, the loss-exchange ratio of combatants, sUAS flight minutes, tactical task accomplishment - are sometimes collected, sometimes not, usually in unstructured form.

How did it get this way?

It wasn’t meant to be this way. Data collection was always part of the Army’s vision for its combat training centers. Here’s how we put it in that MWI piece:

How can the Army know itself? In November 1976 this question was on the mind of Major General Paul Gorman, the deputy chief of staff for training at US Army Training and Doctrine Command. That month he told a gathered audience at Fort Monmouth that the Army struggled to know itself because it did “not have a lot of data being turned in by ordinary units trying to do their job in a well simulated operational environment.” So Gorman proposed a radical solution that he and his influential boss, General William DePuy, had been developing: the construction of a giant combat simulation in the wilderness to train soldiers and collect that data. With such data, the Army could learn the ground truth about the state of its operational force, as if gazing in a costly but unprecedentedly clear mirror. In doing so, it could learn what worked best in simulated war, and so ready itself for the next real one.

Trouble began almost immediately. A 1986 Government Accountability Office report found that the National Training Center was not fulfilling its data-collecting function. Thirteen years later, another report found the situation had not much improved, observing that the Army for lack of centralized data “does not know the extent to which center exercises are improving the proficiency of its units and leaders.” The War on Terror made the training centers venues for pre-deployment certification and so sidelined the effort entirely.

What has gotten in the way of meaningful knowledge at combat training centers?

• Command relationships: For a long time, the training centers have had “too many dads.” The two overseas training centers report to their theater commands. The continental ones for a long time reported to Forces Command, an entity more interested in short-term readiness than in longitudinal lessons learned and data analytics. The entity more interested in those lessons, Training and Doctrine Command, was responsible for “accrediting” the training centers but had little authority over them. Thankfully, that has changed - more on the change momentarily.

• Ambiguous regulation: As mentioned earlier, the Army Regulation 350-50 currently on the books does not tell the operations groups at the combat training centers what the Army wants them to collect. Put another way, the Army does not say what it wants to know. It’s no surprise then that non-standardized practices proliferate. The regulation also does not name any one entity responsible for the maintenance of the institutional knowledge, and so the data suffers from a lack of ownership.

• Culture: Training center culture is perhaps the largest obstacle to systematic data collection. Trainees and observers alike are disinclined to collect data from training exercises for any purpose other than the after-action review of an individual unit. That’s for at least two reasons: (1) some leaders do not think the training centers exist for any other purpose than making the individual training unit more ready for war than it was when it showed up, and they jealously guard that purpose. High-flying ideas about “institutional knowledge” are to these leaders merely a distraction from the centers’ sacred purpose. (2) Leaders worry that data collection will, more than simply distract, ruin the training centers by compromising the learning environment found at them, an environment carefully cultivated over time by the operations groups. The idea is that deliberate data collection policy will make the training units’ battalion, brigade and division commanders feel under the microscope, and warp their behavior a la Goodhart’s Law.
  
  There are counterpoints to each of these cultural concerns, and we addressed them in the MWI piece and elsewhere. But the Journal article raises another: improved regulation won’t cause people to start talking about data collection and lessons learned at combat training centers, because people already are talking about lessons learned from the training centers. Improved policy will only discipline an extant and sloppy discussion about what is and isn’t happening at the training centers.

The good news: the Army is fixing this.

Now, the good news. The Army is addressing each of the three causes of the problem named above.

First: culture. Though there are no doubt defensible skeptics, there appears to be something of a cultural pivot ongoing across the training centers towards a more data-enabled approach to observation and coaching. The Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center led the way of its own initiative by instituting standard reports several years ago, though it runs too few rotations to yet have a high ‘n.’ The Joint Multinational Readiness Center at Hohenfels is fast developing a set of standard reports. So too are the Joint Readiness Training Center and the National Training Center. Some have been tested this summer.

One might worry that all this good initiative is less than the sum of its parts because each of the four centers’ approaches will be different and so one won’t be able to compare unit performance across centers. Fortunately, the Army Transformation Initiative resolved the aformentioned command relationship issue. The former Combined Arms Center under TRADOC is now the Combined Arms Command under T2COm and it is working through what a minimum standard might be for all continental training centers, something it now has the authority to task those centers with implementing.

Lastly, the regulatory ambiguity may soon resolve itself. The Army is concurrently revising Army Regulation 350-50 to implement a minimum standard, much like that of CAC’s, for all training centers. If the new AR 350-50 included such a standard, three decades of regulatory ambiguity would end.

One doesn’t want to count chickens early, but taken together, these changes suggest that soon, with a little luck and a lot of effort, the Army will know what is happening at Hohenfels, after all.

Good morning,

This week’s letter is only long enough to ask some questions. Its topic is again the Somme. I would worry about tilling the same ground over and over, but as the battle’s start ranks among the most violent mornings in human history, it seems worth sustained attention from students.

Some time ago I read Anders Engberg-Pedersen’s book Empire of Chance. The book makes the case that Napoleon did much to make the modern Western mind. Napoleon did so, as Engberg-Pedersen tells it, by giving Western epistemology “a concussion” at Austerlitz in 1805.

How so? At Austerlitz Napoleon demolished not only the Holy Roman Empire but also the geometric way of perceiving the world that characterized the Western way of war up to that point. His superior form of war abandoned fixed rules and Vaubanian formulas for probability and initiative. Hence his “Empire of Chance.”

A year after Austerlitz, at Jena-Auerstadt, a young Prussian officer named Carl von Clausewitz would watch Napoleon teach the Prussian Army much the same lesson. As Engberg-Pedersen relates it with much erudition, Clausewitz would formalize these lessons about probability and battle in his great work, On War.

Now I am thumbing my way through a book called Command or Control?: Command, Training and Tactics in the British and German Armies, 1888-1918 by Martin Samuels. I picked it up with vague ideas of connecting the doctrinal developments of the British military with the literary developments of its poet soldiers.

Such connections have not emerged before me from the book yet. But many questions have. They again concern what “modernism” is, what math might have to do with it, what WWI might have to do with it, and what pragmatism might have to do with it.

Here’s Samuels’ argument: the Germans did outperform the British in WWI (a once controversial thing to say), and Germans did so because of their better “philosophy of combat,” one which privileged decentralized decision making (what sometimes they called auftragstaktik), and especially because that philosophy guided German training and tactics.

To explain auftragstaktik - a concept that is familiar to many Western students of war today1 - Samuels invokes a metaphor I’d not seen used for this purpose before: jazz. Samuels pulls a description of jazz he found quoted in a separate book on Mao to make the point:

…the whole band works to one broad harmonic framework or direction, but each individual player improvises upon it harmonically, melodically and rhythmically…It is the adaptability of individual initiative to emergent opportunities that makes the jazz session an evolutionary rather than static process. Each player is sensitive to any change of direction, either from the lead instrumentalist or from something good arising out of the developing music, to which he then makes his own response…2

In contrast with auftragstaktik (or what Samuels chooses to call directive control), the British military subscribed to a philosophy of what Samuels calls restrictive control as well as another, contradictory one called umpiring. I’m going to parse these now just so I have them down in my head.

As Samuels presents them, the British alternating practices of umpiring and restrictive control lie on either side of auftragstaktik: umpiring is decentralization without an animating mission, and restrictive control is excessive control in pursuit of a named mission.3

Come WWI, the British suffered from both. At Gallipoli Samuels accuses Ian Hamilton of the abdication of responsibility that is the hallmark of umpiring4 - and of course the rigid timetables that spelled mass death at the Somme are examples of British restrictive control. The Fourth Army Chief of Staff put it simply enough: “Men must learn to obey by instinct, without thinking, so that in times of stress, they will as they are accustomed to do.”5

So far, so good. Somehow the concussion at Austerlitz made the Germans more flexible than the British and the former reaped their reward over the latter at Thiepval. The birth of modernity might’ve occurred at Austerlitz, but modernity displayed its mature form at the Somme, and we’re living in its shadow still. The narrative is neat enough, if obviously simplified.

Still, some questions arise:

(1) then why did the British win? After all, the British actually defeated both Napoleon and the Kaiser - something Samuels is quick to acknowledge - so for all the Germans’ tactical overperformance, either the British played jazz better at some other more determinative level, or perhaps we ought not be playing much jazz after all? (will look to to interpret Roger Knight for me on this question)

(2) my other reading thread these days is the American Revolution. In that reading I meet again and again with testimony to the importance of the tradition of English liberty on the founding fathers (most convincingly in Bernard Bailyn’s Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, subject of an old Garrison Note here). A philosophy of decentralized initiative seems more in keeping with the tradition of English liberty than of Junker politics6 and Isherwood stories aside, it seems the Germans don’t play as much jazz as Anglo countries do. How did the Germans come to claim a fighting philosophy that seems more at home among its nemeses?

(3) and what exactly fostered auftragstaktik in the German military vs. restrictive orders or umpiring in the British military? Samuels’s answer is that the German schooling was simply more dynamic than British schooling - the kadettenhäuser where young Germans headed for the officer corps got their schooling offered superior education to British boarding schools (in part, Samuels says, because of how broad kadettenhäuser were: “An interest in literature, drama, fine arts and music was also encouraged…”7). Could it be? Will have to read more of Samuels.

(4) And what does Crimea have to do with all of this? The fact that Tolstoy watched Crimea with Stendhal in his pocket and concluded that history was random (here another simplification) has fascinated me since Isaiah Berlin suggested it to me (I even wrote for MWI about what Tolstoy’s Crimea days could teach us about integrating AI into C2 here). Samuels suggests the entire British General Staff spun out of a shortage of maps at Crimea (could it be, will have to read more ).8

(5) And how do we train auftragstaktik, if it’s worth emulating? We flatter ourselves in the U.S. Army that we practice it, even if accidentally, but I’m not so sure always. I began ham-handedly to think through that question in a letter about my reading and our combat training centers - “How and Why to Fake a War” - but still have some thinking to do.

Until then, I’ll have to finish Samuels - and some of the modernists, whom I am now reading. Perhaps I will pair them with some jazz.

Good morning,

This letter is late. Please forgive that. The reason is travel. Earlier I was in Germany. Now I am in Asheville, North Carolina. Rather than trace some thread through a book or historical episode, as most Garrison Notes try to do, this letter only records some scattered notes from that travel which delayed it.

When on the road, I try to read books that bear in some way on my destination. It is so easy these days to not be in mind where you are in body that you have to make extra efforts to not forfeit the good to be had from travel. Hitching my reading to my itinerary is one such effort. In Germany I had scarce time to read. Here in Asheville I’ve had more time.

I also try to read in thematic batches (there’s surely a better way to put that). Time has taught me that when you read a book in isolation, it cannot stand in your memory on its own, and you more easily forget it. But if you buttress one book with other books which deal in the same theme, the whole structure of knowledge holds better in your mind, and you remember it.

It’s a great thing when you find some alignment between your travel and the themes that presently occupy you. Such coincidence makes for high payoff reading. One book can at once make the most of your travel and of your memory. What’s more, your mental life and physical life seem less discordant, you feel yourself more coherent, and so you are happy. That’s good.

These two rules, to which I loosely adhere, led me on this particular trip to F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. I was only glad to end up with the Fitzgeralds as the style of F. Scott’s prose has long been a lodestar of mine. And their connection to Asheville I’ll get to in a moment. But the Fitzgeralds also sustain a theme that already occupies me, for they are modernists.

Readers of Garrison Notes may have detected that I am trying to know what people mean when they say modernism, and whether the idea is useful for making sense of human events. In its first year this newsletter has asked questions to this end:

• did Stendhal witness modernism’s birth at the burning of Moscow then inscribe it in his opening of The Charterhouse of Parma?

• or did modernism arrive seven or so years earlier, at Austerlitz?

• or did modernism happen basically in 1896, when William Jennings Bryan lost out to William McKinley?

• or did modernism ride in with the Blaue Reiter at the century’s start?

• or can we find modernism in the debris from the bombardment of the cathedral at Reims?

• or was it born at the Somme, when a Georgian named Siegfried Sassoon lost his religion in a trench?

• or did modernism amble through the background of these great scenes in the body of the good soldier Švejk?

• or did it descend from the heavens and land in Paris, to utter delirium, as the Spirit of St. Louis?

Of course the answer to all these questions is “not quite,” and perhaps these questions of modernism’s birth are the wrong ones to ask, and they make for an awfully meandering path towards the truth. But perhaps that’s the only sort of path there is, and it’s a been a pleasure to think my way along it, and I’ve learned about many other things en route.

Either way, in hopes of figuring out what modernism is, I am gradually turning from questions of modernism’s birth to the people we now call modernists. Wikipedia lists the Fitzgeralds as modernists, so they must be, and of all the modernists to read, F. Scott Fitzgerald to me is particularly good. So when I considered what to read while in Asheville, and I recalled the Fitzgerald connection, the matter settled itself.

That connection is: Zelda Fitzgerald spent much of the last twelve years of her life in Asheville as a mental patient at the Highland Hospital. She died in a fire that burned much of the hospital to the ground in 1948. F. Scott, or Scott, visited her there several times, as did her daughter Scottie. Her death in the fire was only sad punctuation to a tragic life.

So I bought Tender is the Night at a used bookstore downtown here. I’d never read the novel but have been meaning to, both in the vague way we all aspire to get around to all great books and in a more pointed way since I came across a passage from it in Modris Eksteins’s Rites of Spring suggestive of modernism’s emergence on the battlefields of World War One.

Tender is the Night was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last finished novel. Scribner’s published it in the spring of 1934. At the time, Zelda Fitzgerald had just left care at the Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic in Baltimore and was installed at the Craig House in Beacon, New York, just above West Point on the Hudson. From Beacon she wrote to Scott that she was happier than she had been in Baltimore:

Why not bring Scottie up for Easter? I promise you absolutely that by then I will be much better - and as well as I can. Dear: PLEASE remember that you owe it to the fine things inside you to get the most out of them. Work, and don’t drink, and the accomplished effort will perhaps open unexpected sources of happiness, or contentment, or whatever it is you are looking for - certainly a sense of security - 1

Such words acquire even more meaning than they already have when one learns, as I did from Nancy Milford’s biography of Zelda (helpfully on hand in our hotel room alongside towels and soap), that weeks prior Zelda had been moved to hysterics by a draft of Tender is the Night, for in its character Nicole Diver, ostensibly modeled on a wealthy ex-pat named Sara Murphy, Zelda saw a devastating portrait of herself, drawn by her own husband:

What made me mad was that he made the girl so awful and kept on reiterating how she had ruined his life and I couldn’t help identifying myself with her because she had so many of my experiences. It was a chronological distortion and I suppose one has a right to do that in an artistic creation. But on the whole I don’t think it’s true - I don’t think it’s what really happened.2

Meanwhile, Scott had arranged an exhibition in New York of Zelda’s paintings. At first Zelda opposed the idea, but when the exhibition was put on, she took the train from Beacon to see them and later told her doctor that she liked very much the exhibition and what they suggested of her own artistic potential. The critical press took disappointingly little notice.3

Zelda’s paintings sold only to friends. The couple that did much to inspire Tender is the Night, Gerald and Sara Murphy, bought one of some acrobats called “Chinese Theater.” Gerald Murphy later called the figures depicted “repellent,” and even at the time Zelda thought that the painting “singularly inappropriate” for the Murphys, offering to paint them something better suited to their spirit.

When Zelda returned to Beacon from her exhibition, Scott stayed back to await publication of Tender is the Night. He drank, contrary to Zelda’s counsel, with James Thurber as a companion. Thurber tried to cheer up an apparently despondent Scott by telling him what a great work Gatsby was (it hadn’t yet sold like it one day would), but all Scott could do was drunkenly and absent-mindedly hand out brochures for Zelda’s paintings to actresses and bar patrons.4

When Tender is the Night came out on April 12, Zelda began asking Scott all the time to send her reviews. These he sent, but with qualifications that suggest he felt some guilt about the way he’d written Zelda into Nicole Diver alongside Sara Murphy.

I feel very strongly about your re-reading it. It represents certain phases of life that are over now…the only sadness is the living without you, without hearing the notes of your voice with its particular intimacies of inflection. You and I have been happy; we haven’t been happy just once, we’ve been happy a thousand times…The sadness of the past is with me always. The things that we have done together and the awful splits that have broken us into war survivals in the past stay like a sort of atmosphere around any house that I inhabit. The good things and the first years together, and the good months that we had two years ago in Montgomery will stay with me forever.5

The same letter contained hope for another happy spring between them, but one proved stubbornly elusive. By 1936 Zelda would enter care in the Highland Hospital at Asheville. There she struggled to get better, at times enthusiastically embracing her status as patient, while at other times denying she needed any care. Scott, by then working in Hollywood for lack of cash and in search of sustained fame, visited her when he could.

Scott’s visits to Asheville, and Zelda’s hopes for more, provoked the same nostalgia that permeated their earlier letters (and much of the fiction both wrote). So Zelda wrote to him from Highland Hospital:

I wish we were astride the tops of New York taxis and a little hilarious in parcs and public places, and younger than young people…6

These riotous earlier days the couple tried to relive a final time in early 1939. On a gin-fueled bender Scott flew to North Carolina, scooped up Zelda (who by this point badly desired escape from Highland Hospital), and took her to Cuba. There Scott intervened in a cock-fight, was beaten within an inch of his life, and collapsed from exhaustion.

Zelda, so often the charge, became the caretaker. She took Scott to New York, saw him to the hospital, where he stayed two weeks. Before heading back to Highland (where she stayed and to which she returned technically of her own volition - she was not committed), Zelda devised a cover story for their trip, then said:

please take care of yourself. So you will be well again and happier than these last times. There are so few people of our era who have made original contributions to the life about us, and not many who can be so charming, and almost not any with a greater capacity for enjoyment.

There are still a great many things which could give us pleasure.

And there are such a lot of people who are fond of you…7

It was the last time Scott and Zelda saw each other. Though neither knew it, the letter Scott sent once back in Hollywood befit a valediction:

You are the finest, loveliest, tenderest, most beautiful person I have ever known, but even that is an understatement because the length that you went to there at the end would have tried anybody beyond endurance. Everything that I said and that we talked about during that time stands-8

Not two years later, Scott was dead. He died of a heart attack on December 21st, 1940. Zelda did not attend the funeral, but wrote that Christmas Day to a friend:

Life seemed so promissory always when he was around: and I always believed that he could take care of anything. I seems so useless and purposeless that I won’t be able to tell him about all this. Although we were not close anymore, Scott was the best friend a person could have been to me…9

Zelda for her part would drift in and out of mental care for the next eight years, all the while trying to write, and trying to paint, sometimes successfully. She was back at Highland Hospital by the spring of 1946. Reminiscences of her time there include accounts of her talking “for hours” about her time with Scott in Paris in the twenties.

In these last years, Zelda’s thoughts were reportedly most ordered when she spoke of her former days with Scott. Otherwise, she seemed disordered. She dressed in strange attire and her thoughts came in fits and starts. Children pointed her out in the street as “that crazy woman.” Then, when a visitor would mention the beauty of the opening passages of The Great Gatsby, a light would return to Zelda’s eyes.10

In March 1948, Zelda wrote to her daughter Scottie that she had gained some weight, that hoped to see her new grand child, and that “there is promise of spring in the air and an aura of sunshine over the mountains…” Perhaps, Zelda wondered, she would be able to get out of Asheville and see her daughter and her growing family.

The next night, in the hospital building where Zelda stayed atop a hill in the Montford neighborhood of Asheville, the kitchen caught fire. The flames travelled quickly to the higher floors, where Zelda slept sedated. There Zelda died, one of nine who did that night. They identified her body, as Milford puts it, “by a charred slipper lying beneath it.”11

A question that occurs to me is this: is the sort of nostalgia and longing that, as so many have observed, laced the lives of the Fitzgeralds - does that have anything at all to do with modernity?

Good morning,

If you ever feel you’ve been dealt a tough hand, you might console yourself with a copy of William Slim’s Defeat into Victory. That’s not the reason I picked it up, but it’s the reason I’ll be keeping the book close at hand: for whenever self-pity threatens.

Defeat into Victory tells of the British fight for Burma during the Second World War. It was a fight Slim himself commanded. For its historical import alone, the story warrants our attention. The lessons we might glean from the Burma campaign about soldiering are also enough on their own to reward a read.

But what makes Defeat into Victory one of the great memoirs of all time (and a great antidote for self-pity) is the portrait it gives of its author. Slim appears, somehow uncontrived, as a deeply human expression of the scarce qualities which make a leader. This letter records some of my margin notes from a recent read of Defeat into Victory with the idea of marking those lessons.

But first: what was the Burma Campaign?

The country we now call Myanmar occupies a spot on the map of great strategic value. It can serve as an eastern doorway to India and a western doorway to China. The long Tenasserim (or Tanintharyi) peninsula guards the northern approach to Indonesia (and its oil). From it, one can threaten the Bay of Bengal, Singapore and the South China Sea.

It is for these reasons in part that the British seized control of Burma in the 19th century. For a long time the British governed it as part of India, an arrangement deeply resented by the Burmese people. By the start of World War II, however, in part because of Burmese nationalism, the British had made Burma its own Crown Colony.

[An aside: A young George Orwell served as a colonial police officer in Burma for about six years - those being 1922-1928. In the 1930s he immortalized the difficulties of the whole arrangement both in his debut novel Burmese Days and in his extraordinary essays on the nature of power, “Shooting An Elephant” and “A Hanging”]

For all the same strategic value, the Japanese invaded Burma in 1942. They quickly dealt to the British a series of rapid defeats. By early March of 1942 the Japanese had taken Rangoon, and British forces were in disarray. It seemed the British would be routed from the country, yet another in a series of great humiliations (Singapore had just fallen).1

Enter William Slim. An unlikely general, Slim entered the world in Bristol at the end of the 19th century, without the advantages of title or money. He saw brutal action and was wounded at Gallipoli, but hung on. He then rose through the ranks, commanding Gurkhas, teaching at staff colleges, and acquiring all the while a reputation for uncommon leadership.

When the Burma disaster unfolded in February-March 1942, British high command picked Slim to fix it. As he did at birth, in Burma Slim inherited few advantages. The terrain - a mix of roadless jungle, saw-like hills, deep and wide rivers, and dry desert - made movement nigh impossible for his motorized troops. He had no intelligence. He was not priority for supply. He had no air support.

But fix it, Slim did. He managed well a hard retreat north into India. Then from late 1942-1943 rebuilt his formation into the 14th Army, still without much materiel support from allied high command (his men took to calling the 14th Army “the Forgotten Army”). In early 1944 Slim commanded his rebuilt Army in the great British victories at Imphal and Kohima. By 1945, Slim and the 14th Army had thrown the Japanese out of Burma.

This is the story Defeat into Victory tells. In doing so, the book teaches many lessons - too many to list here. I want to mark only three, for my own study.

Lesson One: God Helps Those Who Help Themselves

As earlier mentioned, Slim’s 14th Army fought in a hard place without much help from higher headquarters. Europe, at Marshall’s and Churchill’s insistence, was the priority theater, and MacArthur in the Pacific was not overly concerned with Burma. This meant that if Slim was to win in Burma, he would have to do so on his own (he would never put it this way - we can for him).

"God Helps Those Who Help Themselves” thus became the unofficial motto of the 14th Army. And did they ever help themselves. The 14th Army, including a great deal of West African and Indian and Burman soldiers, built its own roads, cut its own airfields, launched its own navy, even made its own parachutes. Three short illustrations follow:

Slim had to protect the Indian-Burma border but had no road to resupply the front. He also could get no road metal locally and had no hope of getting any from high command. So he directed the construction of a road made of brick that wound hundreds of miles, supplied by specially built kilns every 20 miles. The road was ready in time for the Japanese invasion of India, and was essential to the defeat of that invasion.2

Slim also had no boats. Yet his situation demanded that his Army cross the great rivers of Burma - the Chindwin and the Irrawaddy. There were other, higher priority shows planned that demanded Allied landing craft so the 14th Army built and salvaged its own navy - pulling Japanese vessels from river beds, commandeering ferries, even using elephants to haul teak logs by the thousands from the jungle and fashioning them into dumb barges. It all worked.3

Even with roads and boats, the resupply troubles did not end, so the 14th Army planned a great many air drops. The trouble was Slim had no parachutes, and there were other, higher-priority airborne operations planned that demanded the Allied supply. So Slim used the jute available from Bengal to invent and test a “parajute” - not safe enough to drop men, but safe enough to drop supplies. All at the cost of 1/20th the silk variants then in use.4

These are not just cute stories. In the moment each problem - the roadlessness, the lack of watercraft, the inability to air drop - might have seemed enough license for a lesser commander or lesser Army to give up. Time and time again, Slim and his Army made do, and for this can-do attitude, won.

Lesson Two: Morale depends more on the spiritual than the material.

If there was ever a commander had cause to fixate on the importance of good materiel - aircraft, watercraft, munitions, parachutes, fuel, trucks - it was William Slim. Yet, even a cursory read of Defeat into Victory impresses on the reader that more than any of that, Slim cared about morale.

The troops Slim inherited were thoroughly demoralized by disasters at the Sittang River in February 1942 and at Rangoon. Ahead of them lay a daunting retreat, and once that retreat ended, a miserable stretch in India at the very bottom of their high command’s supply priority.

Slim called this collapse of morale “our last and most fundamental danger.” It’s the sort of comment you might breeze past. Let’s not. Despite all these aforementioned problems, in the eyes of a commander wounded brutally at Gallipoli and again in Abyssinia, schooled in combined arms warfare, morale was the most fundamental danger? Yes. He presses on - “the most important thing about a commander is his effect on morale.5

What to do? First, understand what morale is. Here is how Slim breaks it down:

Note the order given. Spiritual matters come first in Slim’s telling. It’s almost an inversion of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It would be one thing for someone who is materially comfortable to pontificate about the importance of the spirit above all, or for a hated commander to lecture about the relative unimportance of physical comforts. But this accounting comes from William Slim, perhaps the most materially-deprived Army commander in the entire Allied force - and also the most beloved by his troops.

How does one shore up his soldiers’ spirits? Slim gives many answers. Here’s one:

I felt there was only one way to do it: by a direct approach to the individual men themselves. Not by written exhortations, by wireless speeches, but by informal talks and contacts between troops and commanders. There was nothing new in this; my corps and divisional commanders and others right down the scale were already doing it. It was the way we had held the troops together in the worst days of the 1942 retreat; we remained an army then only because the men saw and knew their commanders.”6

Slim lives up to this dictate. The memoir (and other accounts of his leadership) tells many stories, and not braggadocios ones, wherein he flies or trucks up to the front, into enemy fire, to be seen among his men and to check in on them. At one point, his own flyers refuse to fly him to the decisive battle at Meiktila in 1945, so he arranges for an American crew to do so.7

Another approach a longer letter than this one might explore: Slim’s approach to medical evacuation. He believed the spirit mattered first, but did not want his men to suffer needlessly. Perhaps because he himself had received awful wounds in his early career, Slim saw to it that the 14th Army moved hospitals up and reserved aircraft for medical evacuations - a far less brutal experience for the wounded than over-land evacuation. The attention Slim paid to the sufferings of the most vulnerable soldiers no doubt made his spiritual exhortations to the healthy ones more credible.

But, as Slim already knew and demonstrates to the entire Allied force, more than any visit to a trench or air evacuation, the single most effective way to raise soldiers’ spirits is to give them the chance to fight. This insight brings us to this letter’s third and final lesson:

Lesson Three: We learn we can do things by doing them.

Slim understood something deceptively simple: the way to take broken, self-doubting, impotent soldiers and turn them into victors is to get them to do what they are scared of. One cannot wait to first feel comfortable before he attempts the thing that daunts him - such thinking gets matters exactly backwards. Only once he does a thing does a soldier know he can.

The clearest example given through Defeat into Victory is that of jungle fighting. The Allies in 1942 were completely outclassed by the Japanese in the jungle. This proved a huge problem for the Allied fight in Burma, where a dearth of roads meant fighting took place often in the jungle. Japanese infantry routinely throughout early 1942 outflanked the road-bound Brits by moving parallel to the road through the jungle, then establishing a road block to the British rear and destroying the retreating force.

Slim’s approach was this: get the men into the jungle as often as possible. He credits the Australians with leading the way in this regard at the Kokoda Track in New Guinea - their success there “broke the spell” of Japanese invincibility.

Once they knew it was possible, the soldiers of the 14th Army had to only replicate Australian success. “But all this could not be convincingly put over by talking and educating alone,” Slim writes, “it had to be demonstrated practically.” In language we would not use today, but reflects certainly the mood of the time, and has the advantage of simplicity, Slim summarized an entire training philosophy this way: “We had first to get the feel through the army that it was we who were hunting the Jap, not he us.”8

In much the same way, Slim directs that his men gain confidence by attacking - not irresponsibly, nor prematurely (as his higher command directed he do in the failed First Arakan Offensive) - but early and often. In doing so, his men learn that they are the soldiers they want to be.

This is, as Slim tells it, the only way we can ever learn such things. It echoes the pragmatic tradition on which Garrison Notes has dwelt before. And we’ve cause to be grateful - not only for the lesson we might apply in our own lives, but because in teaching this lesson to his men, Slim dealt the Imperial Japanese a great defeat.

A Final Thought

Slim was no perfect man, as later allegations against his conduct while Governor General of Australia reveal (these his family vehemently denies). But reports from his soldiers and his peers and other leaders - including the notoriously stingy Vinegar Joe Stillwell - suggest he was a great soldier. Defeat into Victory contains many hints as to why, in addition to all those listed above. I’ll just mark one more in closing:

Slim manages to tell all of this with breathtaking humility. Every complaint is couched in comments about why circumstances were the way they were. Rather than shake his fist at the sky or attempt some sorry self-exoneration, Slim is constantly pointing out that he could have had it worse were it not for the efforts of some peer or subordinate, why even the least likable characters might’ve been justified in behaving the way they did, or why he himself was as much to blame for a given defeat or shortcoming or failure as anyone else.

Slim’s almost reflexive tendency to consider the other side of a given problem than his own, a tendency he never enunciates but comes across clear as day in his memoir, is itself a gift. The above lessons and this one are alike integrated in his character (a sort of integration which we’ve explored before in Garrison Notes), and for coming to us in the form of a man are far more legible and lasting than if they were laid out in some abstracted list. And if that man, a man as disadvantaged and underrated in his generalship as Slim, can unfailingly maintain such humility and patience with his fellows, then we all can. In this way too, he teaches us to help ourselves, and so win the help of God.

Yet, though my dreams that throng the darkened stair
Can bring me no report of how you fare,
Safe quit of wars, I speed you on your way
Up lonely, glimmering fields to find new day,
Slow-rising, saintless, confident and kind—
Dear, red-faced father God who lit your mind.

Good morning,

So goes Siegfried Sassoon’s elegy for his fast and close friend, the fellow poet Robert Graves. Sassoon wrote it at the Somme when he heard news of Graves’s death, on this day in 1916. The Somme by then was already a staggering disaster. Before the fighting finished, some 120,000 British soldiers would die. A half-numbed Sassoon called the poem “To His Dead Body.”

The trouble was that Graves wasn’t among the dead, except in the literal sense.

It happened in the morning. Graves had been waiting atop a ridge alongside some other Royal Welch to support some doomed breakout on a hardened part of the line near High Wood. A well-bracketed German barrage began to fall on their position, and the men began a short retrograde. As Graves fell back through a cemetery to safer ground, an 8-inch shell blew up behind him. Shrapnel tore through his shoulder and came out through his lungs.

The field doctor who found Graves said there was no chance he would live. Word passed up through the ranks that the young officer was good as dead. An ambulance removed Graves’s body to an old German field hospital at Mametz Wood, where Sassoon had weeks before shown a strange sort of valor. By the time Graves’s “dead body” reached the field hospital he was unconscious.

The next morning some orderlies began hauling away the deceased. It was then that one noticed Graves was breathing. They put Graves, now semi-conscious, in a field ambulance, but the journey up the wrecked roads to higher care was so rough that he barely scratched out a letter home, then screamed in agony until he blacked out again, at which point he was thought dead for good. His battalion commander received word that Graves was gone, and dispatched a consolatory note to his mother, dated July 22.

Of course, it turned out Graves was not dead, not even then. In a hospital at Rouen he languished, fluid in his lungs, immobile and nearly mute. Still he tried to write and to speak. In Goodbye to All That, Graves tells of his early recuperation at Rouen with that irony that Paul Fussell later called the literary legacy of the War. Here Graves is, playing with an orderly about condensed milk and tea, as if the whole thing were a Blackadder skit:

“It amused me,” Graves said, “to watch the little bubbles of blood” his breath made in his wound. But of course, it must not have been funny most of the time, if at all. Fussell writes movingly of just how searingly painful, how hellish this stretch must have been for Graves. You can see that even Graves can’t keep up the joke in his own memoir - the nights “were horrible,” he allows.

Over the next few weeks in France then England he staged a recovery that per his biographers still flabbergasts medical professionals. By early August Graves was able to speak and write and read. This was important because it meant he could read a correction, run in a circular of The Times, on August 5th:

Captain Robert Graves, Royal Welch Fusiliers, officially reported died of wounds, wishes to inform his friends that he is recovering from his wounds at Queen Alexandra’s Hospital, Highgate, N.

Sassoon, himself now in England with his own medical troubles and aware that Graves had pulled through, sent a delighted note of congratulations. Graves, for his part, memorialized his first death in a satirical poem called “Escape.” Here is a bit of it:1

Cerberus stands and grins above me now,
Wearing three heads, lion, and lynx, and sow,
Quick, a revolver! But my Webley’s gone,
Stolen…No bombs…no knife…The crowd swarms on,
Bellows, hurls stones…Not even a honeyed sop…
Nothing…Good Cerberus!…Good dog!…but stop!
There’s still some morphia that I bought on leave.
Then swiftly Cerberus’s wide mouths I cram
With Army biscuit smeared with Tickler’s jam;
And Sleep lurks in the luscious plum and apple.
He crunches, swallows, stiffens, seems to grapple
With the all-powerful poppy…then a snore,
A crash; the beast blocks up the corridor
With monstrous hairy carcase, red and dun -
Too late! for I’ve sped through.
O Life! O Sun!

The image of Graves straining to scratch out a letter as his ambulance rattles up a bombed-out path, of him whispering jokes about condensed tea to the orderly as his chest heaves with fluid, of him delightedly reading corrections of his own death notice in The Times - let alone the image of his close friend Sassoon, writing “To His Dead Body” in some forsaken trench on the banks of the Somme - these all make only more moving another Graves’s poem, published later, called “The Cool Web.” It gives us some hint as to why Graves fought so hard to keep on speaking amidst his suffering:

Children are dumb to say how hot the day is,
How hot the scent is of the summer rose,
How dreadful the black wastes of evening sky,
How dreadful the tall soldiers drumming by.

But we have speech, to chill the angry day,
And speech, to dull the rose’s cruel scent.
We spell away the overhanging night,
We spell away the soldiers and the fright.

There’s a cool web of language winds us in,
Retreat from too much joy or too much fear:
We grow sea-green at last and coldly die
In brininess and volubility.

But if we let our tongues lose self-possession,
Throwing off language and its watery clasp
Before our death, instead of when death comes,
Facing the wide glare of the children’s day,
Facing the rose, the dark sky and the drums,
We shall go mad no doubt and die that way.

Good evening,

If you were to conjure in your mind a map of revolutionary America, what would be its western limit?

In my mind that map has always faded out somewhere around the Alleghenies. The endless latitudinal lines that flew westward from Virginia disappeared into nothing somewhere past the mountains that fence in the eastern seaboard. I vaguely knew that beyond those mountains were furs and trappers and the great tribes and lone Frenchmen and canoes, but the form of pre-revolutionary midwest and its importance in its time were alike fuzzy to me.

That’s changed of late. Now in my mind that Revolutionary map extends well west to present-day Michigan. Likewise, my sense of the Seven Years’ War has deepened, as has my sense of New France (once this peripheral stamp on a map’s top left corner), of the significance of the Quebec Act to the Founders, even of those who fired on a young George Washington at Braddock’s Defeat - all thanks to a book I’ve just finished called Masters of Empire: Great Lakes Indians and the Making of America by Michael A. McDonnell. Some notes on that book follow.

Who are the Anishinaabe?

Masters of Empire argues that the Anishinaabe people of the Great Lakes played a great and unsung role in shaping the political events that led to the American Revolution. That’s why I picked it up - for a book club some friends and I have going, the aim of which is to understand the American founding in honor of that founding’s 250th anniversary. Masters of Empire handsomely served those ends. It taught me not only another way of understanding the revolution, but another way of orienting my mental map of the Americas.

The Anishinaabe are a group of tribes indigenous to what we’d now call the Great Lakes Region. That group includes some tribes the names of which the layperson in America might still know - the Odawa (or Ottawa), the Algonquin, the Ojibwe - but also the Mississauga and the Potawatomi and the Nipissing. For much of known history, they lived on the banks of the Great Lakes, derived their livelihoods from those lakes, claimed the lakes, fought over those lakes, all from the hull of birch canoes.

The Anishinaabe so matter to any history of North America because they controlled crucial territory. At a time when roads were few, the watershed of the Great Lakes provided unparalleled access to the North American interior. I’d never thought much about this, but once prodded by McDonnell to consider this, it seemed suddenly obvious. Consider his description of Michilimackinac, the major Anishinaabe settlement at the northern tip of Michigan’s lower peninsula, at the first chapter’s very opening:

Standing on the shores of the straights of Michilimackinac or atop the bluffs of Mackinac Island, it is easy to understand why many believed this region to be the birthplace and center of the world. The teeming blue waters of Lukes Huron and Michigan bending away from the narrows both east and westward give an impression that one is standing on a peak of sorts, at the top of the world…a vast interconnected systems of waterways could take a savvy paddler just about anywhere on the continent and beyond…From Michilimackinac, anything is possible.1

The Emergence of New France

Such a position, combined with political savvy and fighting prowess, made the Anishinaabe the natural partners of the Frenchmen who began showing up looking for furs in the 17th century. This much is common history. But whereas many histories tell of French designs to use the native tribes to establish an imperial holding in the new world, McDonnell makes a sustained case that the reverse is true - that the French were used by the Anishinaabe to shore up their own Great Lakes Empire.

So McDonnell describes the emergence of New France, not as an act of conquest, but as the work of the Anishinaabe. Early in the colony’s history the French explorer Samuel de Champlain had attacked the Iroquois repeatedly and soon discovered he was in over his head. French settlers soon became victims of Iroquois raids. By the 1650s, emboldened had Iroquois extended these raids into present-day Michigan, inducing the Anishinaabe to organize an Algonquian-speaking coalition to reduce the Iroquois threat until the French reached a peace treaty with the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondoaga and Oneida in 1665. “The French colony would survive,” McDonnell summarizes, and “the Anishinaabe had helped ensure it.”2

The relationship that emerged between the French and Anishinaabe thereafter was per McDonnell one of dependence - of the former on the latter. The French paid the Anishinaabe tributes for protection, for escort, for transport, for translation, for mediation with the surrounding tribes (including the Huron), and, of course, for access to fur sources. High rates of intermarriage among vulnerable French traders and Anishinaabe women only made this dependence more locally felt. To literally survive and to be comfortable, the French were absorbed into Anishinaabe kinship structures that complicated efforts by French administrators to preserve for New France a separate colonial outlook.3

The Anishinaabe did not permit other tribes to strike up equivalent relationship with the French nor the French to diversify the source of their services. This had the effect, a happy one for the dominant Anishinaabe, of keeping both the French down as well as their challengers among the other Great Lakes tribes. By the 1730s, the Anishinaabe had, by way of war, intermarriage, and careful trade, expanded their control of the present-day midwest such that it stretched from Niagara Falls through the Upper Peninsula and across to the east Dakotas.4

The End of New France

McDonnell is consistent. Just as Anishinaabe support made New France possible, so too does he argue that the self-conscious withdrawal of Anishinaabe support from New France lead to its downfall. Either way the determinant of the French fate in the New World was the support of their sponsor, the Anishinaabe. And the fateful withdrawal of that support occurred amidst what we now call the Seven Years’ War.

Conventional tellings have it that the Seven Years’ War began at Jumonville Glen, where in 1754 a hapless and young Virginia militia officer named George Washington either accidentally or intentionally oversaw the killing of a French emissary during a skirmish while trying to stake a British claim to the Ohio River Valley (there was even a Garrison Note about this episode and its effect on George Washington - you can read that here).

But as McDonnell tells it, what we might call the Seven Year’s War in fact became inevitable by, was “arguably initiated” by events at Michilimackinac in July 1754 - all for reasons unrelated to Washington’s ill-fated foray. There the Odawa gathered over a thousand delegates from the various tribes to make a case for war against the British. They did so out of frustration with the nature of English expansion - its pace, the exclusivity of land use within it, the paltry finished goods it introduced into Anishinaabe trade circulation. The French were merely a useful ally in a war with its own Anishinaabe logic.5

These were the motivations of the Indians whom Washington saw coaching the French through Braddock’s Defeat. The battle occurred on 9 July, 1755, when an English expeditionary force led by Major General Edward Braddock (whom Washington served as a sort of aide, hoping for a royal commission that never came) seeking to seize Fort Duquesne was ambushed. The English column of 3,000 was handed a brutal defeat, in large part because it was not prepared to fight in wooded terrain far denser than that to which the British officers were accustomed in Europe, against an enemy of French and Indians able to fight in small agile groups behind cover. The impact of Braddock’s Defeat on Washington’s development is beyond the scope of this letter, but it certainly punctured the young Virginian’s visions of British invincibility.

A brutal war followed, marked by the battlefield victories against the British of the Anishinaabe and their Huron allies (including the seizure of Fort William Henry, infamous for its violence and immortalized by James Fennimore Cooper in The Last of the Mohicans). These victories were numerous enough that through 1757, the war overall seemed a success to the Anishinaabe involved. McDonnell summarizes the sentiment this way: “[the Anishinaabe] had rolled the English back to almost Albany…growing English power had been curb. The balance of power between the English and French had been redstored. And they had achieved this while maintaining intertribal unit between most of the major players.”6

The trouble is that the war continued well past 1757. In late 1757 a smallpox outbreak tore through the tribes of the Great Lakes. By some reports it all but wiped out the Potawatomi. Canoe parties hugging the shores of Lake Michigan found villages full only of bodies. This depletion of manpower, a fall-off in French tributes, and the fact that most Anishinaabe objections appeared secured, meant that the Anishinaabe withdrew their support for the French, though the war dragged on for the Europeans. In 1758, the Anishinaabe received British emissaries and signed the Treaty of Easton, which brought peace in exchange for a guarantee that English settlement would end west of the Appalachians.

The Anishinaabe’s exit from the conflict meant that the French were without support from a crucial ally. This and a dozen other important factors, including the reform of the British personnel system and the rise of William Pitt, meant that the French would end up the loser of a war that had started out for them so well. The details of this war I learned from Fred Anderon’s remarkable book Crucible of War, covered in the earlier referenced Garrison Note, “A Backwoods Education.” Suffice to say the Treaty of Paris left New France much reduced.

The Second Anglo-Indian War

That the Anishinaabe had concerns separate from the French and were very much masters of their own grand strategy is also suggested by the fact that they recommenced war against the British on their own terms in 1763 after the French were exhausted. This new conflict McDonnell calls the “Second Anglo-Indian War,” adamant that the perhaps familiar term “Pontiac’s War” is too narrow, too personalized.7 It began after the Anishinaabe recovered from the massive toll of smallpox and came to resent what they regarded as too stingy, insufficiently differential British successors to French traders. The purpose of the renewed hostility was to establish a more advantageous relationship with the British than the British seemed willing to permit - one characterized by the same tributes and exclusive dealing that the Anishinaabe enjoyed from the French prior to the war.8

The Anishinaabe attacks on the British that followed - at Detroit, Fort Pitt, Michilimackinac, Fort Sandusky, and the many settlements of the Ohio River Valley - won them the Proclamation of 1763, passed by the British Parliament, which prohibited British settlement between the Mississippi and the Appalachians. Whether the Proclamation was intended as a temporary expedient or permanent policy is debated, McDonnell acknowledges, but he is quick to point out many founders of the American republic vociferously opposed it for its effect on the value of their land holdings - Washington included.9

Either way, the Second Anglo-Indian War, which presents in McDonnell’s account as a victory for the Anishinaabe over the English, would shape the founding of the United States a great deal. For one, McDonnell suggests that the war’s aftershocks, including the murders by the vigilante group the Paxton Boys in western Pennsylvania in 1764, sowed longstanding animosity between the Great Lakes tribes and English settlers that precluded future attempts at peaceful coexistience.10

The war also convinced the British that a standing army would be needed in the colonies to ensure piece on the western periphery. This army proved costly and at times threatening to the local English settlers. The revenue-generating measures instituted to help cover the costs and the indignities imposed on the colonists by a standing army garrisoned in a time of peace both became major grievances of the American Revolution. So too did the Quebec Act of 1774, intended to establish a reserve for native tribes in what used to be New France.

As coda to this history, McDonnell points out that the last battle of the American Revolution was in fact that battle of Blue Licks in Kentucky, where Hurons and “Lake Indians” ambushed Kentucky militiamen. The British rangers met consequences, but the Huron and their allies got away relatively unscathed. Though this point goes underdeveloped, the sentiment stays with the reader - that Anishinaabe outlasted the British again, and remained, despite American independence, yet again, captains of their own fate. I’m glad to have learned about it all. It’ll be hard to see revolutionary maps the same again.

Good morning,

A happy Fourth to all readers of Garrison Notes.

This weekend Americans will celebrate the Declaration of Independence many ways - as an act of great bravery, as radical philosophy, as a gesture towards unity, as a promissory note. These characterizations are how we are accustomed to hearing about the Declaration, and though they all seem right in their way, at times they can bury the document like so much tinsel.

To sift through that tinsel which buries the Declaration in my own mind, I spent the week reading about the founding. While reading I came across yet another way to understand it. And though this way of understanding the Declaration sounds obvious once said or written out, it had not occurred to me before, and the more I think about it, the more it makes sense to me.

That is, we can understand the Declaration of Independence as a military communique.

“Fresh Incentive to Every Officer and Soldier”

It certainly was the case in the literal sense that the Declaration was intended to be communicated to the Continental Army. On July 4th, 1776, just after it unanimously adopted the Declaration of Independence, the Continental Congress in Philadelphia voted that their handiwork be disseminated widely (emphasis added) and made their intended audience explicit:

That copies of the declaration be sent to the several assemblies, conventions and committees, or councils of safety, and to the several commanding officers of the continental troops; that it be proclaimed in each of the United States, and at the head of the army.1

They got their wish. A good book by Emily Sneff called When the Declaration of Independence Was News traces the various public readings that followed the Declaration’s adoption over the summer of 1776. These public readings included many to colonists in uniform, under arms, serving in the varied militias and formations of the Continental Army.

Perhaps the largest such reading occurred at City Hall Park in New York City at the order of the commander-in-chief of the Continental Army, General George Washington. It happened on July 9. Here is how a portion of Washington’s General Orders from that day read:

The Honorable Continental Congress, impelled by the dictates of duty, policy and necessity, having been pleased to dissolve the Connection which subsisted between this Country, and Great Britain, and to declare the United Colonies of North America, free and independent STATES: The several brigades are to be drawn up this evening on their respective Parades, at six OClock, when the declaration of Congress, shewing the grounds & reason of this measure, is to be read with an audible voice.

The General hopes this important Event will serve as a fresh incentive to every officer, and soldier, to act with Fidelity and Courage, as knowing that now the peace and safety of his Country depends (under God) solely on the success of our arms. And he is now in the service of a State, possessed of sufficient power to reward his merit, and advance him to the highest Honors of a free Country.2

This excerpt alone rewards a close read. There is much in it. The parsing of duty, policy and necessity. The appeal to reason. The dual consideration for the honor of Congress and the personal stakes of the individual soldier. The parenthetical reference to the divine. The more I read of Washington, the more I am convinced he understood the revolution completely, though he was less articulate than Jefferson or Franklin.

Either way, as ordered, at 6 PM on July 9 the gathered Continental Army brigades then in New York heard of the cause for which they would be asked to suffer and die. They met those words and that cause with three loud huzzahs. The words so moved some soldiers, that, once released for the evening, they formed a mob to topple the statue of King George III on Bowling Green (later melted down for musket balls) - and met with George Washington’s disapproval.3

We gain a sense also of how the Declaration played among the officers of the Continental Army from their letters. One, to Henry Knox from his friend Colonel Henry Jackson, commander of 16th Massachusetts Regiment, makes clear just how directly the Declaration bore on the question of the fight that lay ahead: “at Last the grand Question of Independence is determined and I hope every true American will support it with his Life and Fortune…now we fight upon an equal footing which we did not before.”4

To Nerve the Arm of Patriots

I don’t think one can overemphasize the fact that the Founders declared independence at a time when their success seemed improbable. Early July, 1776 was a dire moment for the Continental Army. That March it had defeated the British under Thomas Gage in Boston, but since then the more competent William Howe had taken command of the British fight and was beginning to bring British power to bear on the rebel colonists in New York.

In fact, at almost exactly the time that George Washington ordered the Declaration be declaimed to his troops at City Hall Park in Manhattan, General Howe was finishing up the landing of some 10,000 professional and trained British troops on Staten Island. Almost immediately after the July 9 reading, his brother Vice Admiral Lord Richard Howe arrived at New York Harbor with still more troops and some 150 vessels.5

That the American troops would be on “equal footing” (to echo Jackson from above) in the material sense with such a force was doubtful - it was not clear that they would be paid, clothed, and armed, let alone trained to a standard comparable with the British. But if Colonel Henry Jackson’s sentiments are reflective of the other continental officers, and there is much reason to think they were, what mattered to the Continental Army was that it fought the British one as that of an equally sovereign state.

And that is the effect the Declaration’s authors sought: that their words would fortify the hearts of an army facing a dire fight. Absent that army’s success, no bonds would be dissolved, no train of abuses would be ended, no new guards would be established for liberty, no new government would be instituted. For these reasons, the July 9th reading of the Declaration of Independence to the gathered brigades of the Continental Army was as important a public reading of the Declaration as any, both to history and to the authors of the Declaration itself. So suggests Pauline Maier in American Scripture:

…the Declaration of Independence had many practical uses: it provided a vehicle for announcing Independence to the American people, and, if properly framed, might evoke a deeply felt and widespread commitment to the cause of nationhood and, above all, inspire the soldiers who would have to win the Independence that Congress proclaimed. For those purposes Congress specifically directed that the Declaration should be sent not only to the state assemblies, congresses, and conventions that were its immediate constituents and to their Committees of Safety, but to the commanders of the Continental Army, and that it be proclaimed not only in all the states, but at the head of the Army.6

And just as the Continental Congress’s instructions that the Declaration be read to the Continental troops was fulfilled, so too, in retrospect, does it seem their wish for its effect was realized. Or at least, so suggests the eulogies of the Declaration’s authors. One eulogist wrote in 1826, following the deaths of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams (on this day), that their Declaration was “the text of the revolution - the ruling vital principle - the hope that animated the patriot’s heart and nerved the patriot’s arm.”

A pragmatic tradition.

William James, a leader of the Pragmatic movement (perhaps the most American philosophical school), said in his 1894 lecture “The Will to Believe” that belief might be defined as something upon which one is willing to act:

[Hypotheses] are measured by his willingness to act. The maximum of aliveness in an hypothesis means willingness to act irrevocably

Is that not what the Declaration required of the Continental soldiers who gathered to hear it read? The Declaration asked of these many, many men - roughly clothed, ill-armed, dubiously trained men, under threat of a looming, larger army - that they fight and perhaps die for the words they were hearing, words adopted unanimously by the Continental Congress 250 years ago today.

To use William James’s language, can one act any more “irrevocably” than that to sustain a hypothesis? Does not the willingness of the Continental soldier to fight for the Declaration he heard make the hypothesis contained in the Declaration as alive as any words ever written? If one understands the Declaration of Independence as a military communique, if one remembers the soldiers who fought for it, one will see them both in this pragmatic light. And, in such light, the Declaration and its foot soldiers alike somehow gleam even more American.

Good morning gang,

A brief note to let you know that I’m co-hosting a new podcast about books and war produced by West Point’s Modern War Institute. The first episode released this morning, on Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny. We’ll next cover Viscount Slim’s Defeat into Victory.

If that intrigues you, please, give the first episode a listen and let me know what you think. The hope is it’s something like Garrison Notes, but with more polish, and as audio. Garrison Radio?

Either way, the podcast is dedicated to the idea that a military which reads books is a military that wins wars. The idea is not a new one (especially, I imagine, to those reading this newsletter), but in this automated era the point seems worth making nonetheless. As long as men have waged war, great soldiers, from Napoleon to William Tecumseh Sherman to George S. Patton, have readied themselves for battle by reading great literature.

My co-host is MWI’s great editorial director and former soldier John Amble. Each month we’ll consider one book together. We’ll cover fiction and non-fiction, old and new, bestseller and cult classic - any book that promises to teach listeners something about the nature of war and military service.

Our discussions will include not only the summary of a given book but the context in which it was published, the great passages, the great characters, and above all the great lessons each book can teach us. We hope that you can read along, and we’re always eager to hear what we ought read next.

Listen anywhere you get your podcasts (Spotify here, Apple Podcasts here, Audible here).

Tomorrow, back to regularly scheduled Garrison Notes programming.

Welcome to Garrison Notes, a weekly letter of marginalia from the education of a soldier.

An essay of mine appeared in Chronicle of Higher Education last week. The essay traces the great liberal arts curricula of the 20th century to doughboy education during the First World War (let me know what you think - registration gets you a free article at CHE).

This week’s letter considers the view of those First World War programs from a very different vantage.

Thank you as always for reading - if you’d like more letters like this, please do subscribe:

Good morning,

A literary critic writes in 1933:

His fame spreads in Europe and Asia. It is startling to see how many critics write of [him] as of some emerging American Zola or Tolstoy. Among our younger writers, his is the one career that excites vast hopes. Most American writers die after a first brilliant explosion of talent. But year after year, he grows. He adds foliage to his great tree, sends deeper and deeper roots into the American soil…1

Of whom does the critic speak? Faulkner? Fitzgerald? Hemingway?

In fact, the critic refers here to John Dos Passos. This may surprise us, because the intervening years have disproved the critic’s prediction. Dos Passos has not endured in our memory like those other Lost Generation writers, let alone become another Tolstoy. To the extent we know him now, we do as the author of the U.S.A. trilogy, the final volume of which the quoted critic goes on to hotly anticipate.

Today’s letter instead considers Dos Passos’s “first brilliant explosion.” That explosion came a decade before the launch of the U.S.A. trilogy (about which it seems we’ll soon get a write-up on U.S.A. from - looking forward to it), as a World War I novel called Three Soldiers. Despite its name, the 1921 novel largely follows one American soldier named John Andrews through the war, from initial training through demobilization. There are two others - Fuselli and Chrisfield - to make the titled three, but they appear in supporting roles.

Though Three Soldiers was not Dos Passos’s debut, it marked Dos Passos’s arrival as a writer. It won him his first critical notice, was praised as a new and more honest sort of novel, stripped of the romance which plagued American writing about war. H.L. Mencken said the realism of Three Soldiers demolished “the prevailing buncombe and sentimentality” and F. Scott Fitzgerald said it was “the first war book by an American which is worthy of serious notice. Even The Red Badge of Courage is pale beside it.”2

None of this is what initially excited me about Three Soldiers. I picked it only up because Paul Fussell mentions it in The Great War and Modern Memory and I’d loved Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer. Here, I figured, was some underdiscussed witness testimony to the First World War from a master modernist, coming to me a time when I am trying to understand what people mean when they say modernity and the War’s role in midwifing whatever that thing is and how literature reflected all that. Still, I was interested in, not excited by, the prospect of Three Soldiers

That changed. I grew excited when I discovered, about halfway through, that Three Soldiers would give me a near-contemporaneous account of something I’d been studying already but from an entirely different angle: the Y.M.C.A.’s educational programs for American soldiers in the First World War (the topic of my essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education last week). I’d seen the thing from the archives, but now, I thought, I would get a novelized treatment of the same thing by a pen as talented as the great if forgotten Dos Passos. Thrilling.

The thing I want to mark about Three Soldiers in today’s letter is its notion of freedom, as suggested by the way Dos Passos treats his protagonist’s journey through that same Y.M.C.A. program for educating soldiers. That protagonist, John Andrews, concludes something radically different about the army during his studies than what my own writing concludes. There’s likely a longer essay to be written here for the six people on earth who share the interests I have, but I’ll have to keep myself to a couple paragraphs because other duties call.

A little bit about the plot to make the point: John Andrews is an educated young man of a great Virginia family who nonetheless feels himself an outsider artist and so enlists in the military at America’s entry in the war rather than take the typical path of his caste by commissioning as an officer (that is to say, Andrews is a lot like Dos Passos). He fast feels himself humiliated and brutalized by the impersonal, bureaucratic reality of army life So he begins to get a sense, he thinks, of how the world actually is.

When Andrews finally gets to the front, he is quickly injured in battle. The injury is serious enough to leave him bedridden for weeks. Otherwise, the injury comes as something of a relief to Andrews because it excuses him from those degrading camp duties, until the hospital becomes too boring to bear.

So long is his hospital stay that the war ends while Andrews is still in a hospital bed. It’s hardly a break. At his hospital discharge, rather than get sent home, Andrews is sent right back to his division to await demobilization (it took months and months to get the AEF out of Europe). In some dead-end French town, assigned to his division, Andrews must continue scrubbing windows and marching just as he did before the front.

But Andrews finds an out. He is able to make his escape from army camp monotony by applying and gaining admission into a new Y.M.C.A program that authorizes soldiers to study in French universities while awaiting demobilization. To get that authorization Andrews must grovel for various clerks and officers, pal around, cash in on his Harvard connections, and that Andrews does so is a fine measure of his desperation for a life more rich in spirit and art than that he finds in the barracks. He resents the humiliation (and perhaps these reminders of his own status) but heads off to music conservatory in Paris as its reward.

According to the studies and pamphlets and letters I’ve read in online and physical archives, this might be the end of John Andrews’s story. A frustrated soldier finds an outlet for his creative energy in an improving artistic education provided courtesy of the American Expeditionary Force and the Young Men’s Christian Association. But a happy epilogue of music composition and young love in Paris is not how John Dos Passos chooses to end Three Soldiers.

Instead, and here I’ll basically ruin the book, John Andrews drifts through Paris, veering within his soul from euphoria to despair, losing his innocence, gaining something like a music education, all the while growing ever more resentful of his chafing army tunic (members of the student detachment had to remain in uniform so they could be policed by roving M.P.s). This resentment comes to a head when Andrews absent-mindedly leaves Paris without pass, ends up in M.P. cuffs and then in a labor battalion, and finally decides to desert.

These events serve as backdrop (or foreground?) to John Andrews’s evolving thoughts on freedom. In short, the army makes Andrews feel deeply unfree - he must ride transport trains for days without anyone caring to tell him where he is going or permitting him to hop off the car, he must scrub windows for hours, he must wait on his cot for weeks, and above all, he must march as part of a faceless unthinking column. He comes to crave an individuality, as he sees it, that the army not only cannot give him but seeks to destroy. Here’s a sample:

Andrews thought suddenly of all the tingling bodies constrained into the rigid attitudes of automatons in uniforms like this one; of all the hideous farce of making men into machines. Oh, if some gestures of his could only free them all for life and freedom and joy.

Andrews concludes, semiconsciously, that he can only claim freedom and so his individuality (for, it is suggested, his person only is confirmed by self-directed unconstrained action) by rebelling against the army machine. Reprieve from camp life via combat is not enough. Reprieve from combat via the hospital is not enough. Reprieve from the hospital via a return to the camp is not enough. Reprieve from war via the armistice is not enough. Reprieve from the post-armistice army via study in Paris is not enough. So Andrews rebels, clocking an M.P. on the chin when, following his arrest, an officer corrects Andrews’s shoddy salute. He then deserts, and is in the last pages, caught.

Read this way, Three Soldiers has the makings of a classical tragedy. Andrews seeks freedom but ends up a victim of his errors - random error (failing to get and carry on his person a travel pass) and error in judgment (punching an M.P.) and error of disposition (his terminal restlessness). When I’ve re-read and understood Aristotle’s Poetics I’ll revise this paragraph to seek if any of it makes sense (let me know).

But there’s something modern about the novel’s idea of freedom, too. As the earlier quote might’ve made clear, Three Soldiers reads at times as a wartime accompaniment to Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. Freedom is defined by John Andrews as the negative state of not being a cog nor being ground down by cogs. This definition is easily understood if one recalls the book came out in 1921, when the mechanized machine seemed a sound metaphor a new way of life.

A book I read recently that helped me chart the emergence of this sense of freedom was The Search for Order, 1877-1920 by Robert Wiebe (notes on that slim heavy-hitter here and here - note the period examined ends just as Dos Passos is writing Three Soldiers). Wiebe covers ground that was elsewhere and earlier covered by the likes of Durkheim and Weber and Simmel. But Wiebe conveys, particularly in the American context. His bottom line is that in America, too, organic society gave way to mechanized impersonal society. So went with it interest in spiritual content:

[Modernity] obliterated the inner man. The focus had shifted from essences to actions…As Arthur Bentley said, the individual was meaningless as a unit for investigation; only men’s social behavior deserved analysis.3

Perhaps that’s why Andrews, though he escapes successive constraints (training, combat, hospital, demobilization, school), cannot satisfy himself - he becomes preoccupied with the negative constraints on his freedom rather than the positive development of his happiness. Or perhaps, the army, a manifestation of the new bureaucratic life, has obliterated his inner self, so that no matter what he does, he feels himself empty, unable to enrich his sense of self.

The questions of what Andrews wants to do with his freedom and why he can’t get satisfaction leads us back to the thing that brings Andrews to Paris: the Y.M.C.A. school program for soldiers. One of that program’s progenitors, John Erskine, was a literature professor on loan from Columbia and like, John Andrews, a pianist and composer. He would eventually head Julliard. Last fall I went spelunking in his archives on Morningside Heights, and I found a vision of Y.M.C.A. soldier education different than that of Three Soldiers. Erskine’s vision of the school program was that it would capitalize on precisely the discipline Andrews resented, but to enrich life, rather than merely free it. So he wrote in a report (covered in this post from last year):

The mobilization of our Army has shown, on the other hand, how rich potentially the manhood of our Nation is, and how quickly it responds to the regular life and scientific care, whichever a hurried preparation for war supplied. The soldiers in general enjoyed such health as is the rule in no other community. The total discipline of their life - regular hours, rational diet, and decorum of conduct - have brought out their best physical and moral traits, so that, to look at this condition of health and good living has quickened to the full their intellectual capacities…

Erskine’s idea was that the soldiers, so educated, would use that enriched education in the exercise of a more positive freedom back home. So he (somewhat sentimentally) wrote in this (unpublished?) note which I found in his papers:

What is the truer account of the Y.M.C.A. program? And of the soldier’s experience? And of modernity? Three Soldiers? Or Erskine’s? Here’s what H.L. Mencken thought, from the same comment quoted at the open of this letter:

Until Three Soldiers is forgotten and fancy achieves its inevitable victory over fact, no war story can be written in the United States without challenging comparison with it—and no story that is less meticulously true will stand up to it. At one blast it disposed of oceans of romance and blather.4

Well, as Mencken anticipated, it seems Three Soldiers is all but forgotten, and perhaps fancy about the war and a soldier’s education has emerged victorious, as evidenced by such faff as my own essay with the Chronicle. But my instinct is Erskine and Dos Passos were in their way circling the same question: how to ennoble our lives in the modern era. I’ll have to get back Erskine’s archives, to see if they ever corresponded about it.