The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World!

Our book today is Sir Edward Creasy’s durable 1851 classic work of popular military history, The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World, a worthy work that no 21st-century reader can approach without feeling just about the saddest irony in the world. Creasy, surveying the sunny morning of his Victorian era, with Napoleon Bonaparte long since defeated and with international diplomacy enjoying its golden age, could look upon his subject – warfare – with the complacency of a doctor looking at the last remaining laboratory specimens of a once-rampant disease:

It is an honourable characteristic of the Spirit of this Age, that projects of violence and warfare are regarded among civilised states with gradually increasing aversion. The Universal Peace Society certainly does not, and probably never will, enrol the majority of statesmen among its members. But even those who look upon the Appeal of Battle as occasionally unavoidable in international controversies, concur in thinking it a deplorable necessity, only to be resorted to when all peaceful modes of arrangement have been vainly tried; and when the law of self-defence justifies a State, like an individual, in using force to protect itself from imminent and serious injury.

Still, he concedes immediately, “There is an undeniable greatness in the discipline, courage, and in the love of honour, which make the combatants confront agony and destruction.” And through close accounts of fifteen big battles (‘big’ is one of his unapologetic criteria, although he’s much keener to ‘pivotal’ than his critics used to give him credit for being), he gives his readers ample amounts of honor, courage, agony, and destruction.

He’s got a sweet tooth for enormous set-piece affairs, especially if they’ve got a moral twist to them. From the ancient world, he picks the battles of Marathon, Syracuse, Arbela, and the massacre of the Roman legions in the Teutoberg Forest, where Publius Quinctilius Varus lost three legions and a great big crowd of auxiliaries through both tactical stupidity and, as something Creasy lays on with a trowel, through a vaguely Asiatic and very un-Roman decadence that the German mercenaries all around watched with steely interest:

For this purpose, the German confederates frequented the head-quarters of Varus, which seem to have been near the centre of the modern country of Westphalia, where the Roman general conducted himself with all the arrogant security of the governor of a perfectly submissive province. There Varus gratified at once his vanity, his rhetorical taste, and his avarice, by holding courts, to which he summoned the Germans for the settlement of all their disputes, while a bar of Roman advocates attended to argue the cases before the tribunal of the Pro-consul; who did not omit the opportunity of exacting court-fees and accepting bribes.

From the Middle Ages, he picks the Battle of Chalons in 451, the Battle of Tours in 732, the Battle of Hastings in 1066 (how could he not?), and Joan of Arc’s victories over the English at Orleans in 1429 – the whole while adding a running context that actually makes this a more fluid reading experience than “Fifteen Decisive Battles” might suggest. And as his time-frame inches closer to his own day, he chooses the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, the Battle of Blenheim in 1704, the Battle of Pultowa in 1709, the defeat of General Burgoyne at Saratoga in 1777, the Battle of Valmy in 1792, and of course he winds things up with the grand finale of Waterloo in 1815. And it’s all done with such quintessential Victorian gusto (and a good deal of very solid research – military historians are a notoriously fussy lot, but several of these accounts hold up in their main lines even today) that the book is immediately readable.

Still, there’s that clinging sad irony, inescapable when Creasy hits his favorite triumphalist note:

In closing our observations on this the last of the Decisive Battles of the World, it is pleasing to contrast the year which it signalised with the year that is now passing over our heads. We have not (and long may we be without) the stern excitement of martial strife, and we see no captive standards of our European neighbours brought in triumph to our shrines. But we behold an infinitely prouder spectacle. We see the banners of every civilised nation waving over the arena of our competition with each other, in the arts that minister to our race’s support and happiness, and not to its suffering and destruction.

Creasy died in 1878, so he lived long enough to at least begin to see, in names like Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Gettysburg, that he and all his fellow club-members had been wrong about the demise of armed warfare. But he was gone to his grave long before he could learn just how wrong he’d been. The horrible roll-call that’s extended since his death – the Somme, Verdun, Kursk, Luzon, Khe Sanh, and on and on – might have been sufficient to curb his armchair enthusiasm for that “undeniable greatness.”