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mburnamfink 's review for:
The Last Full Measure: Death in Battle Through the Ages
by Michael Stephenson
The Last Full Measure is contemporary military social history in the style of John Keegan, travelling most well-trodden examples of how soldiers die. In some sense, the task is impossible. No historian, however able, can conjure up Achilles' shade to ask "So what was it like to die?"
Stephenson starts with some insights from anthropology. Indigenous people worldwide, and our near cousins in chimpanzees, practice a similar form of 'raiding' warfare, based on ambush and sudden violence against the isolated and unweary. From this he moves into 'Western warfare', based on a close analysis of the Iliad and historical accounts of phalanx and legionary warfare. There's a clear distinction between 'heroic' combat between champions of similar social status and ability, the random mass crush of arms, and the hit-and-run tactics of nomadic horse archers.
A clear break with the past is the introduction of gunpowder weaponry, which change combat from the duty of a martial elite to the levy en mass, with new ways of dying from lead shot and cannons. Stephenson discusses the bayonet debate, following the conventional wisdom that almost no bayonet casualties arrived to be recording at field hospitals, but allowing for the alternative that bayonets were a secondary weapon used to finish off the wounded in close assault.
From there it's a leap to the best section, a discussion of death in the industrial abattoir of the Western Front in World War I, where men were murdered and mangled by the millions by high explosive shells, machine guns, and poison gas. Sections on the Second World War, and war since, round out the book.
I'm torn, because this is a very good history within its bounds, and has a great selection of excerpts. But Stephenson doesn't have an explicit thesis or argument about death in battle. His choice of sources is thorough, but also entirely conventional. There's nothing about how, say, Vikings saw death, or the mercenaries who ravaged Europe in the 15th-17th century, prior to modern explicitly national armies. Death is horrifying, and killing the central aspect of war, but there's an element of pornography to this book, and how it shows men in their last and most vulnerable moments. Call it a four, but a low four.
Stephenson starts with some insights from anthropology. Indigenous people worldwide, and our near cousins in chimpanzees, practice a similar form of 'raiding' warfare, based on ambush and sudden violence against the isolated and unweary. From this he moves into 'Western warfare', based on a close analysis of the Iliad and historical accounts of phalanx and legionary warfare. There's a clear distinction between 'heroic' combat between champions of similar social status and ability, the random mass crush of arms, and the hit-and-run tactics of nomadic horse archers.
A clear break with the past is the introduction of gunpowder weaponry, which change combat from the duty of a martial elite to the levy en mass, with new ways of dying from lead shot and cannons. Stephenson discusses the bayonet debate, following the conventional wisdom that almost no bayonet casualties arrived to be recording at field hospitals, but allowing for the alternative that bayonets were a secondary weapon used to finish off the wounded in close assault.
From there it's a leap to the best section, a discussion of death in the industrial abattoir of the Western Front in World War I, where men were murdered and mangled by the millions by high explosive shells, machine guns, and poison gas. Sections on the Second World War, and war since, round out the book.
I'm torn, because this is a very good history within its bounds, and has a great selection of excerpts. But Stephenson doesn't have an explicit thesis or argument about death in battle. His choice of sources is thorough, but also entirely conventional. There's nothing about how, say, Vikings saw death, or the mercenaries who ravaged Europe in the 15th-17th century, prior to modern explicitly national armies. Death is horrifying, and killing the central aspect of war, but there's an element of pornography to this book, and how it shows men in their last and most vulnerable moments. Call it a four, but a low four.