[RascalPuff]

(‘War and civlization, which were born as Siamese twins, may also end together’. - Gwynne Dyer)

“Precisely who invented the first real armies, and how, we can never know. It may even have come about in different ways in different places. In one case a village militia may have discovered the rudiments of discipline and gained experience in a series of intervillage squabbles, and then been taken in hand by a prehistoric Napoleon who saw the possibilities in a systematic program or conquest. He may have been more interested in loot, slaves, and rape than in creating the basis for a complex and productive farming economy, but his conquests would nevertheless produce the latter effect.

“In another case, an agricultural area may have been conquered by warriors from a tribe of hungry nonfarmers who then turned themselves into a military ruling caste. It is even conceivable that in some cases the initial work of political and economic unification over quite large areas proceeded without violence, but in a world where armies have come into being, even such a pacific society will survive only if it rapidly develops an army of its own...

“There was also, in the ancient kingdoms, a persistent phenomenon that is all too familiar to the citizens of modern states: the intoxication of power. Though no man can have absolute power, the illusion of it is engendered at all levels in a state administration that is backed by the right and ability to punish or even kill those who disobey. The practical basis for ordinary moral behavior is the recognition of shared humanity and mutual vulnerability, which is precisely what is destroyed by the illusion of absolute power. Thus those who controlled the first civilized states - which were all, without exception, totalitarian tyrannnies - felt entitled to torture and kill their own subjects for any act of defiance and to massacre entire populations of foreigners who threatened their power. The former assumption is still very common, and the latter universal, in the states of today.”

‘After all, previous wars ended up in the besieging of major cities, and in besieging a city what was the idea? To cut off all supplies, and the city held out if it could until they’d eaten the last dog, cat, and sewer rat and were all starving, and meanwhile the besieging forces lobbed every missile they could lay their hands on into the city (*less modern wafare tactics included catapulting deteriorating human and animal bodies over the besieged cities walls, to spread disease), more or less regardless of where those missiles landed, as an added incentive to surrender.’
- Sir Arthur Harris, head of RAF Bomber Command, 1942 - ‘45.

“...over 90% of all the states that have ever existed have been destroyed - and often their people with them - because they failed to have enough military power available at the critical moment. It is a lesson that is indelibly engraved in the consciousness of every government from Pharaoh Narmer’s to Premier Gorbachev’s.”
- Gwynne Dyer, WAR, p.p. 15, 16, 17, 19.____________________

“In the few generations before 2,000 BC, nomadic herdsmen from southern Russia, who had discovered the use of horse drawn chariots, began expanding in every direction. Within a couple of hundred years these ‘Indo-European’ peoples had spread over most of Europe and spilled over the mountain wall separating the great Eurasian plain from Asia Minor and northern India. Eventually they overran most of northern Asia Minor (and Semitic refugees fleeing before them conquered Egypt for the first time in its history). Further east, the Aryan branch of the IndoEuropeans extinguished the urban civilization of the Indus Valley so thoroughly that not even its language is known.

Prelude To Armageddon
“By about 1500 BC, however, the worst of the upheavals was long past. Egypt had thrown off foreign rule, and the indo-European conquests to the north, like the domain of the Hittites and the Mitanni, had become civilized kingdoms themselves. The Middle Eastern and Mediterranean world had never been so prosperous or so intimately interconnected by trade and travel: it was almost a golden age. And it was in this period, when historical records are relatively plentiful, that an Egyptian army marched north to a place called Armageddon and left us the first detailed account of a battle.” - Gwynne Dyer, WAR, p 22

Armegeddon (also known as the city of Megiddo)
1480 BC:
(Armegeddon was located just west of the river Jordan, not far north of the ancient cities of Jericho and Jerusalem, near the shores of the extreme eastern Mediterranean (Aegean) sea; about 150 miles south of the Isle of Cyprus and in line with the shoreline cities of Antioch, Kadesh, Tyre and Damscus. Armageddon was also about three hundred miles north of Cairo, and Alexandria, Egypt.)

“For several generations past, the cities of Palestine and Syria had been vassals to Egypt, but in 1480 BC the king of Kadesh, a rich and strategically important city at the northern end of Bekaa valley in Lebanon, declared his independence. Most of the other cities in the region promptly acknowledged his rule, for the Egyptian army had not left the valley of the Nile in twenty two years. But by early the following spring there was a new pharaoh on the throne, and the army moved north.

“The Egyptian army that the young Pharoaoh Tuthmose III led into his first campaign at the the age of twenty two was noticeably different from the armies of five centuries (or five millennia) before Some twenty thousand strong, it still consisted mostly of infantrymen carrying spears, swords, and axes, but it also included archers with the relatively new and far more powerful composite (*’recurve’, ‘cupid’s’) bow. It was divided into divisions of about five thousand men and so had the ability to perform at least some modestly complicated maneuvers on the battlefield.

“Tuthmoses army also had horses, which had arrived in the Middle East with the Indo-European invaders about five hundred years before. They were not used as cavalry chargers - partly because the horses of this period were still too light and too weak in the back to be ridden for long by a man in armor and partly because before the invention of stirrups the back of a horse was not a stable fighting platform. But yoked in pairs the horses would pull light two wheeled chariots carrying a driver and a warrior armed with a bow and throwing spears.

“The Egyptian army, like others of this period, had hundreds of chariots which could maneuver in mass formations Chariots were attached to each division and were very useful to harass unbroken formations of enemy infantry from a distance, darting in, launching weapons, and swiftly withdrawing again They only tried to charge home, however, against troops already showing signs of flight: the best way to take or hold ground was still, as always, to mass infantrymen on it shoulder to shoulder.

“Tuthmose’s army took three weeks to march from the Egyptian frontier fortress at Tjel (approximently on the present Suez Canal) to a place called Yehem in northern Palestine, just the other side of the mountains from the city of Megiddo, also known as Armageddon, where the army of Kadesh was drawn up to meet him...

“There is no account of the tactics of the actual fighting.... once the battle has been joined, in armies like this, there is little for a leader to do. A commander’s role is to train his troops beforehand and position them as advantageously as possible before the battle begins, but the key phase is the head-on clash of massed formations of heavy infantry who can neither hear a commander’s orders over the noise, nor obey them if they could hear them.

“What really matters is what happens at the line of contact where the two disciplined mobs of soldiery crunch together. And there it is push and stab and shove and stumble in a sweating frenzy, with the leading edge of the two formations eroding moment by moment as men go down, until one side starts to panic and tries to break contact. But it cannot break contact, of course, for there are other lines of men behind who have not yet caught the panic and who continue to press forward. So the cohesion of the losing formation breaks, and once that happens it is doomed The men seeking to flee find themselves trapped in their own crowd and are cut down from behind.

“The Egyptian account of Armageddon contains no description of what happened at this crucial moment, when the forces of Kadesh lost their nerve and so were lost, but the same moment comes in almost every battle. Four or five centuries later, in one of the battles on the plain below Troy, a thousand miles to the northwest, a similar moment came and was remembered centuries afterward in Homer’s Iliad. Despite the typical emphasis on the deeds of individual heroes and the absence of any explicit discussion of tactics, it is quite clear what happened when the losers turned to flee.

Meritones pursued and overtaking (Pheraklos) struck in the right buttock, and the spearhead drove straight on and passing under the bone went into the bladder He dropped, screaming, to his knees, and death was a mist around him.

Meges killed Pedaios... struck him the sharp spear behind the head at the tendon and straight on through the teeth and under the tongue cut the bronze blade and he dropped in the dust gripping in his teeth the cold bronze.

Eurypylos killed brilliant Hypsenor running in chase as he fled before him struck in the shoulder with a blow swept from the sword and cut the arm’s weight from him, so that the arm dropped bleeding to the ground, and the red death and destiny the powerful took hold of both eyes.

So they went about their work all about the mighty encounter. - Homer

“Unless two armies were grossly dissimilar in numbers or weaponry, what decided most ancient battles was principally the morale and discipline of the troops - which side could hold its formation one minute longer - plus, as always in military affairs, a substantial element of chance. On the plain of Armageddon, it was the army of Kadesh that panicked ‘They fled headlong to Megiddo in fear, abandoning their horses and their chariots of gold and silver’. The people of the doomed city slammed the gates shut against the fugitives for fear that the Egyptians would follow them in, but it was an unnecessary precaution. At that point, greed overcame discipline in the Egyptian ranks, and the troops stopped to loot the fallen, leaving time for most of the Kadesh army’s survivors to be hauled up inside the walls on ropes fashioned from their own clothing.” - Gwynne Dyer, WAR. p. 25

‘Megiddo’s (Armageddon’s) garrison, thus reinforced, withstood a long siege, in which Tuthmoses built a great wooden wall around the city to prevent any movement in or out. The city was eventually starved into surrender, and many of the citizens enslaved. The pharoah then went on to capture and plunder a number of other cities in Lebanon, and the rich loot that he gathered from them was more than enough to repay the costs of the expedition. Tuthmose was so favorably impressed by this return on investment that he waged fifteen more campaigns in Lebanon and Syria during his reign, all of them successful.

“The battle of Armageddon can stand as the model for almost all the battles fought in the world from 5000 BC to at least four thousand years later. The weapons became somewhat more effective with time, as stone spearheads gave way to bronze and then to iron, and the average numbers involved in a big battle probably rose gradually as empires grew bigger and richer. However, even at the end of the period, armies rarely exceeded twenty thousand men, and probably never got much bigger than fifty thousand, partly because these were all still subsistence agricultural societies which simply couldn’t afford to support large numbers of nonproductive members like soldiers, but more importantly because of the practical difficulties in supplying larger numbers of troops in the field or controlling them in battle.

“There must have been at least several thousand battles like Armegeddon over the millennia before 1479 BC and there have certainly been many thousands like it since For those who were there, each battle was a matter of life and death, with the whole future seeming to hang in the balance. And they were not entirely wrong in their perceptions If the future is defined simply as the rest of their lives. From the historian’s point of view empires rise and fall, whole peoples appear and disappear, and borders fluctuate like droplets of rain running down the windowpane as the centuries flicker past, but ordinary mortals do not enjoy such godlike perspective.

For ordinary men born in Egypt in 1500 BC, the wars in Syria that began when they were twenty were still the dominant foreign event in their lives in 1450 BC, when they had probably become grandfathers - unless of course, they died at Armegeddon when they were twenty. And the outcome of battles like that really mattered at the time, for although most were not decisive, a single catastrophic defeat, happening between dawn and sunset on a single day, could leave a whole empire exposed to invasion, plunder and massacre.

“It is little wonder that most of the history of those times that has come down to us is military history, for how an army of twenty or thirty thousand men fared on a single day of battle could determine the future of vast areas for generations or centuries. Military power had become not just the symbol but the real basis of political power across the whole civilized world, and war was the most important task a ruler had. And although the language we use today disguises the similarities, war is still our ruler’s most important task.

“Yet all the effort and sacrifice entailed in fighting wars - each of which seems so important at the time - doesn’t actually lead anywhere; in the end, it is virtually canceled out. The only thing that makes the battle of Armegeddon important to us is the fact that we know about it. It is hard to feel any real sense of regret about the men who lost the rest of their lives on that day, because they would have been dead for over 3,400 years now anyway. It is impossible to care much about who won the battle, because both sides lived long ago and far away, and most of what they cared for - their family and friends, their language, their religion, their personal and political hopes and fears - has vanished utterly. This is not at all the way we feel about the Normandy invasion of 1944, but if history goes on long enough, the day will come when Armageddon and Normandy will seem on a par: equally futile and equally meaningless.

“Naturally, we resist and resent that conclusion with all our strength. That war of 3,400 years ago was obviously a mere power struggle with no moral justification, whereas, any war our own nation becomes involved in today will be just and necessary. The soldiers who were killed on the battlefield in Armageddon died in vain, but if today’s generation of young men have to die in the Central Front in Europe, it will decide the moral fate of mankind forever. The man in the ranks of Tuthmose III’s army of Armageddon was deluded about the importance of his death, but the man in a Chieftain tank (or a T-62) in Germany today is not. And I am the Queen of Sheba.” - Gwynne Dyer, WAR, p.p. 26-27

“It can never be proven, but it is a safe assumption that the first time five thousand male human beings were ever gathered together in one place, they belonged to an army. That event probably occurred around 7000 BC - give or take a thousand years - and it is an equally safe bet that the first truly large scale slaughter of people in human history happened very soon afterward.” - Gwynne Dyer, WAR, p. 11

“... the question we rarely ask, because our history is replete with such scenes, is, How could men do this? After all, in the tribal cultures from which we all come originally, they could not have done it. (* As a rule, to which we are learning there were exceptions.) Being a warrior and taking part in a ritual ‘battle’’ with a small but invigorating element of risk is one thing: the mechanistic and anonymous mass slaughter of civilized warfare is quite another, and any traditional warrior would do the sensible thing and leave instantly. Yet civilized men, from 5000 BC or from today, will stay at such scenes of horror even in the knowledge that they will probably die within the next few minutes. The invention of armies required more than just working out ways of drilling large numbers of people to act together, although that was certainly part of the formula. A formation of drilled men has a different psychology - a controlled form of mob psychology - that tends to overpower the personal identity and fears of the individuals who make it up.” - Gwynne Dyer, WAR, p.p. 12 - 13
(*Refer, Eric Fromm’s ANATOMY OF HUMAN DESTRUCTIVENESS, ‘conformist, group aggression’ - the most common, powerful, dangerous, and difficult to stop.’ )

“You’re dealing here with compllcated psychological states. No man in battle is really sane. The mind set of the soldier on the battlefield is a highly disturbed mind, and his is an epidemic of insanity which affects everybody there, and those not afflicted by it die very quickly.” - William Manchester, World War II veteran.

“To exert power in every form was the essence of civilization: the city found a score of ways of expressing struggle, aggression, domination, conquest and servitude.” - Lewis Mumford