Military History Revelation

I used to be dead set against studying or even reading military history, but I recently discovered and have come to see that certain aspects of military history are among the very best for the type of history I have always been most interested in, “bottom up” history, social history, histories of the more common folk. I am somewhat surprised that I stumbled upon this revelation on my own and after so many years of reading and studying history. In fact, given that the history of man seems to be little more than one violent conflict after another, it’s actually quite disappointing that I did stumble upon this revelation.

It all started from my desire to read a piece of great Russian literature. And, of course, what’s one of the most revered examples of Russian literature? War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. The book took me close to a year to finish (starting and stopping) and mostly I did not care for it at all. But the middle third, the descriptions of the battles between the invading French and retreating Russians was quite captivating. Most of the description centers on high ranking Russian military figures, but there are still scenes that describe the impact of the war on peasants and even among the wealthy, the connections between family members on the front lines and in the rear provides some sense of the strains and consequences of war.

Reading the fictionalized account of that war led me to listen to Adam Zamoyski’s remarkable work Moscow 1812: Napoleon's Fatal March. (This is also the book that I got me hooked on audiobooks.) The detail that Zamoyski describes of the soldiers and their victims, from both sides of the campaign, the countryside they marched back and forth on is just, incredible. There are accounts of the invasion from Napoleon’s highest commanders but their views on the conduct of the war served well to contrast the class differences with the sufferings of the thousands of fighting men under their command.

From there I read coincidentally another military “history,” which is a fictionalized account of a band of mercenaries that fought with the English King Edward III during his invasion of France and the Battle of Crécy and the siege of Calais in 1347-48, the Essex Dogs trilogy. The author is the popular medieval historian Dan Jones, who is an excellent writer and knows the period so well he was able to recreate the everyday life of the combatants during this remarkable period, which if you know your history also overlapped with the first wave of the Black Death.

The most recent military histories I’ve listened to are the finely detailed accounts of the American Revolution by Rick Atkinson, The British Are Coming : The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777 and The Fate of the Day : The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780. He drew on so many letters and diaries, from every level, of both sides of the war, that it was type of common man history I can only wish to write. Needless to say these several examples really shifted my view on the possibilities of military history.

Although I would also note that this insight into the common solider or the lives of people who had their lives destroyed by military maneuvers across their land, is not a necessary component of military histories. Barbara Tuchman’s no less remarkable history, The Guns of August: The Outbreak of World War I, which is an entire book centered on just 30 days of a four year conflict is every bit a military history but of a very different sort that takes a much more top down approach.

A final book worth mentioning along these lines that maybe straddles these two approaches that I very much enjoyed is Megan Kate Nelson’s The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West. There is some sense of the common folks involved in or affected by the war, particularly the Native Americans of the Southwest, but tends to focus on the larger political issues and actors of the conflict. (I am very much looking forward to reading her newest book, The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier, a remarkable scholar who will appear elsewhere on this site when I start writing about all of the wonderful information I am learning from the podcast “Drafting the Past.”)