REVIEW: Soldiers: Army Lives and Loyalties from Redcoats to Dusty Warriors by Richard Holmes

Image from Amazon

Note: This book review was originally written for an academic reading course on "total war". That conceptual focus is reflected in the review.

Total war as a concept requires, among its many facets, discussion of total mobilisation, which in turn requires insight into the men and women being mobilised for total war aims. Richard Holmes’s Soldiers contributes to that discussion by providing a social history of the British soldier, woven tightly around military history but centring the lives and structures of those who serve as contrasted to spotlighting the events they lived through. One aspect that Holmes highlights right from the beginning, is “not how much [the British soldier] has changed: but how little”. This is a meaningful statement to hinge the volume on. Conceptually, total war is best understood as a continuity, rather than a descriptor for a singular event or events. Holmes’s recognition that the centrepiece of fighting a total war – its manpower – must also be a continuity tracks well onto the framework and thus raises both the utility and the applicability of this book in the broader corpus of literature engaging with concepts of total war.

REVIEW: The Shadows of Total War: Europe, East Asia, and the United States, 1919–1939 ed. Roger Chickering and Stig Forster

Image from Cambridge University Press

The Shadows of Total War is the fourth volume in a series of five collating the proceedings of the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C’s conferences on total war. This collection of 18 essays examines the concept through the interwar period, covering a spread of topics from military history as well as interdisciplinary perspectives. The strength of the volume is unequal, with the third and fourth parts, ‘Visions of the Next War’ and ‘Projections and Practice’, bearing out as much stronger and cohesive to the theme of total war. More so than in the first two parts of the volume, these later essays interrogate the social, philosophical, and policy implications of responding to the First World War as a total war and preparing – materially, ideologically, or both – for the next war as one of similar calibre. 

REVIEW: The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It by David Bell

Image from Amazon

When does a war become total? David Bell answers that typological question by illustrating the first time, to his eyes, a war ever bore the social, philosophical, and practical hallmarks of a conflict that saw mass mobilisation, radicalised war aims, and blurred the civilian-soldier line – hallmarks that, arguably, best encapsulate total war as a concept. The central thesis of The First Total War is that the Napoleonic wars demonstrated a significant break in military culture from the limited style of warfare that followed the religious wars. Bell illustrates this well and suits his purpose with this volume, although his argument forfeits detailed evaluation of total war as a continuity of features.

In Bell’s argument, the chief arena of change is social and philosophical rather than technological, though he certainly highlights the distinction between infantrymen fighting pikes versus cannon. Within the first chapter, Bell highlights the lack of distinction between spheres of life in the officer corps, where the theatre of aristocracy is staged in equal parts at court and during the campaign. Here, war is a part of social identity and a bridge to intellectualism, crossed by figures like Lauzun, Marquis de Sade, and Napoleon. These figures show their faces throughout, such as in the chapter on the National Assembly debating warmaking powers, but the throughline of cultural transformation is less clear in the rest of the book, which shifts its focus to the atrocities and radicalisation of a revolutionary army sweeping across Europe. In a way, the somewhat ambling structure of the book reflects the decline of the aristoracy as the centre of the military story into just another level of the corps in an increasingly distinct military identity.