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Unit Spirit and Morale: |
Set your men in order by tribes, by clans, Agamemnon,
and let clan go in support of clan, let tribe support tribe.
If you do it this way, and the Achaians obey you,
you will see which of your leaders is bad, and which of your people,
and which also is brave, since they will fight in divisions,
and might learn also whether by magic you fail to take this
city, or by men’s cowardice and ignorance of warfare.
—Homer, Iliad
We must be very careful what we do with British infantry. Their fighting spirit is based largely on morale and regimental esprit de corps. On no account must anyone tamper with this.
—General Bernard Montgomery
The unique cohesiveness that existed among individuals within a phalanx accounts for much of the success achieved by Greek hoplites, especially in contrast to foreign troops. Although fragmented by city-state rivalries, badly outnumbered, hastily assembled, and plagued by outright betrayal, the Greek defenders during the Persian Wars routed the Eastern invaders in nearly every land battle in which they met. Besides the presence of Greek generals on the battlefield, the key must have been the camaraderie in the Greek ranks, the confidence which grew out of the bonds among hoplites in the phalanx which could allow Leonidas, on the eve of his certain destruction, when told by Xerxes to send over his arms, to reply on behalf of his men simply, “Come and take them.” (Plut. Mor. 225 D 11)
Confidence in their commander and weapons, even love of country and past experience in battle, can all explain why an army once engaged operates successfully on the battlefield, but does it explain entirely why individuals will endure the sight of combat and in those last seconds advance into the spearheads of the enemy? True, many of the Greek hoplites may have become inebriated, but the use of drink was not necessary so much to convince a hoplite to charge out as to make that prospect easier to stomach. The soldiers of the city-state met the charge of the enemy, I suggest, because of their general and because of the men at their side, the wish to protect them from the thrusts of the enemy, the shame of the playing coward before their eyes. The ideal of the brave man in their view was the hero of old Kallinos’ poem: “while he lives, he is treated as almost divine. Their eyes gaze on him as if he stood like a bastion before them. His actions are like an army’s, though he is only one man.” (1.17–19)
After exhaustive interviews with American combat soldiers, researchers concluded after the Second World War that the reason “why men fight” was due to “a matter-of-fact adjustment to combat, with a minimum of idealism or heroics, in which the elements which come closest to the conventional stereotype of soldier heroism enter through the close solidarity of the immediate combat group.” (Stouffer 112) In plain English, men say they fight to protect their comrades at their side. Under these circumstances, we should not be surprised, for example, that the innovative Athenian general Alcibiades was unable to forge two separate phalanxes into one army at Lampsakos in 409. Men who did not have any shared blood ties and who had no common experience under fire were hardly willing to form up together into the dense ranks of the phalanx: “The older soldiers had no wish,” Xenophon says, “to be deployed with the troops of Thrasyllos, for they had always been unconquered while the others had just arrived from defeat.” (Hell. 1.2.15) William Manchester, in his narrative of his wartime fighting in the Pacific, wrote:
Those men on the line were my family, my home. They were closer to me than I can say, closer than any friends had been or would ever be. They had never let me down; and I couldn’t do it to them. I had to be with them rather than let them die and let me live with the knowledge that I might have saved them. Men, I know now, do not fight for flag, country, for the Marine Corps, or glory or any other abstraction. They fight for one another. (391)
There were two factors, unique to classical Greek battle, that tended to create exceptional ties among soldiers, so much so that it is no exaggeration to say that such bonds among hoplites in the phalanx were stronger than any other among infantrymen in the long history of Western land warfare. First, the armament and tactics of the ancient phalanx were ideally suited to ideas of loyalty and friendship; fighting together in column, rather than spread along a line, drew all in close physical proximity with each other: a man’s moment of bravery or lapse into cowardice was manifest to all who fought in rows and files to his rear, front, and side:
Those who, standing their ground and closing ranks together,
endure the onset at close quarters and fight in the front,
they lose fewer men. They also protect the army behind them.
Once they flinch, the spirit of the whole army falls apart.
And no man could count over and tell all the number of evils,
all that can come to a man, once he gives way to disgrace.
(Tyrtaios 11.11–16)
Similarly, as Thucydides remarked, the nature of hoplite equipment—especially the shield—dictated that each became dependent on the man to his right for the protection of his own right side. Soldiers not only were drawn up in dense ranks before battle, but were also expected to stay put there in close formation once battle commenced. Indeed, there must often have been actual touching, bumping, tripping, and pushing among men as each sought protective cover throughout the battle, as each hoplite sought not to see or hear his friends as much as to “feel” those at his side. Plutarch reminds us that hoplites carried their helmets and corselets for themselves, but “they carry the shield for the men of the entire line.” (Mor. 241 F 16) Any who failed to hold his assigned place and so offer cover to the man on his left was quickly found out and exposed as a coward.
Important, too, was the lack of any combat specialization among heavy infantry. All were armed alike with spear and shield, and thus there was no possibility of resentment toward the more talented or favored who were given specialized tasks or weapons, as happens in modern battle, often with more prestige and less exposure to combat. In Greek battle there were no machine gunners, spotters, point men, radio operators, riflemen, flamethrowers, or any of the myriad other classifications of modern foot soldiers. Instead, the knowledge that all men of the hoplite class were uniformly armed eliminated rivalry and resentment, giving all a wondrous sense of superiority as a group over those outside the phalanx, the clearly inferior and often landless light-armed skirmishers who lacked heavy armor.
The peculiar nature of space and time on the Greek battlefield ensured that the men on the line would not, could not, leave each other once they met the enemy. Unlike battles of later times, where combat could continue on through miles of separate engagements and skirmishes, where reserves could rush in, ignorant of the prior fighting of comrades (themselves strangers) that took place hours or even days earlier, and where men could break into small groups to find greater safety in both advance and retreat, the hoplites always met the enemy as a group, at the same time, and at roughly the same place. While this resulted in a brutal concentration of killing within a confined space, there was nevertheless always the realization that victory or defeat was due only to the men at one’s side, and only within the clash at hand—a factor encouraging exceptional unity among all who made up the phalanx. Indeed, Kellet, as he looked back on nineteenth- and twentieth-century battle in his study of combat motivation, remarked that close-order formations such as the line and square contained powerful coercive properties, both social and physical; men trusted each other to stand firm because, if they did not, the consequences could be terrible. (137)
And there has perhaps never been any formation quite so “close-ordered” as the Greek phalanx. We can understand why Themistocles’ purported last words to his men before the battle at Salamis with the Persians became so popular with later Athenians. He reportedly had seen some gamecocks fighting and, in an effort to incite his men forward, drew inspiration from that scene: “These animals,” he said to the troops, “do not suffer such misery because of their fatherland nor their native gods nor out of respect for their ancestral heroes; nor is it because of glory or freedom or even their children. Rather, they do it simply because of the desire that each one might not become inferior to, or give way, before another.” (Ael. VH 2.28)
The second and more important consideration is the peculiar nature of the ties among the men of the phalanx: unlike most modern armies, the bonds between hoplites on the line did not originate within military service or in weeks of shared drill in boot camp; they were natural extensions of already long-standing peacetime friendships and kinships. So far as we know, hoplites in nearly all city-states were deployed in their phalanxes by tribe, and most likely were of course well acquainted with those of their own town or deme. Men who knew each other through political, religious, and ceremonial associations and who may have been related strengthened these existing bonds as they fought side by side in the phalanx. Each subdivision of the phalanx fought to protect men who had known each other from boyhood and so were less likely to throw away their shields and thereby endanger friends and relatives.
There are numerous unambiguous references throughout Greek literature to show that individual contingents of the phalanx were drawn up on the basis of tribal affiliation, and that men were also well aware of those soldiers in the ranks who came from their own community. (E.g., Lys. 16.15; 13.79; Thuc. 6.98.4; 6.101.5; Arist. Ath. Pol. 42.1) We won’t be mistaken, then, to suppose that each time the phalanx marched out, men knew exactly their own assigned place within the formation as well as the relatives and friends who served in front, behind, and at their side. Cimon, for example, on his return from exile, joined his Athenian comrades moments before the battle of Tanagra; immediately he took up his place among the men of his tribe, men who were apparently waiting for him with arms and armor in hand. (Plut. Cim. 17; Frontin. Str. 4.1) Even after a prolonged absence, he knew exactly where to line up in the phalanx. Oman writes of the similar organization of the medieval Swiss phalanx: “There was no need to waste days in the weary work of organization, when every man stood among his kinsmen and neighbors under the pennant of his own town, valley, or guild.” (2.256)
According to Plutarch (Arist. 5), Aristides and Themistocles fought close to each other in the hard-pressed center of the Athenian battle line which bore the brunt of the Persian attack at Marathon. This proximity in a great battle occurred, he tells us, because they belonged to the tribes Leontis and Antiochis, respectively—the two contingents that composed the middle of the Athenian phalanx. Men of rank fought as ordinary hoplites alongside men they had known for years. And the same seems to be true outside of Athens. When the Athenians captured the muster rolls of the Syracusans in Sicily in 415, they were thereby able to learn the number and nature of the enemy force, since these lists of their hoplite soldiers were arranged by the tribal affiliations. (Thuc. 6.66) The importance of these tribal associations in most Greek city-states is also evident from extant casualty lists on stone and scattered references in literature to the battle dead. For example, Epameinondas was said to have been reluctant to re-form his phalanx of Thebans after a costly battle for fear that his men would lose heart when they noticed the sizable gaps in the ranks. (Polyaen. Strat. 2.3.11) Apparently, it was customary that decimated columns were not immediately reconstituted, but instead men simply moved over a spot to take the place of the deceased—most likely friends or family whose loss was noted by all around. Since armies in the classical period were not large by modern standards, it was likely that each man knew the members of his tribal contingent, if not the members of the entire phalanx. Individual deaths thus affected the group as a whole. Xenophon relates the sad story of the Spartans who had suffered a reverse at the hands of their Arcadian adversaries; the defeated became even more despondent after the battle “because they had heard the names of the dead who were brave and nearly all their most distinguished men.” (Hell. 7.4.25) Apparently most Spartans within the phalanx knew all the men who had fallen. Elsewhere, we hear of particularly severe losses of an individual tribe (e.g., Lys. 16.15), which suggests that its members must have been at a point in the battle line which suffered a localized collapse or was simply overwhelmed by a concentration of superior numbers. Casualty notices, routinely drawn up by tribe, indicate that after the battle it was the responsibility of each tribe to collect their own dead and turn in an accounting to the city. From Athens and other Greek city-states—Mantineia, Corinth, and Argos—we have inscriptions on stone where the deceased are cataloged by tribal affiliation. (E.g., IG I2 929, 931, 943; Paus. 1.32.3; and cf. Pritchett 4.138–243) It seems likely that men who were recorded for posterity according to their tribal associations also fought in those contingents within the phalanx.
Evidence of the camaraderie among tribesmen and even those of the same deme can be found in a few passages from the Attic orators. A speech attributed to the great Athenian orator Lysias suggests that men of the same deme testified to the number of battles a man of their locale had actually fought (20.23); each of these men must have shared a rather intrusive mutual interest. In another speech Lysias says quite clearly that those of the same deme gathered together before marching out on campaign. (16.14) Isaeus, too—another of the Attic orators (and teacher of Demosthenes)—seems to confirm this very picture that those in the phalanx knew not only their tribesmen who fought next to them during the actual battle, but also their neighbors throughout the ranks; his speaker reminds the audience that he “had seen service in both his tribe and deme during the campaigns of that period.” (2.42) From Theophrastus comes the well-known story of the coward who calls out to his tribesmen and demesmen to see how he had brought back a casualty to camp (25.3); apparently he knew these men intimately and valued their praise highly. At Sparta those who shared the common mess were probably also stationed alongside each other in the phalanx so that those close peacetime ties might also carry over into battle. (Plut. Lyc. 12.3; Polyaen. Strat. 2.3.11; Xen. Cyr. 2.1.28) And at Leuktra both Sphodrias and his young son fell together in the general massacre on the right wing around King Kleombrotos—yet another indication that close relatives fought side by side. (Xen. Hell. 6.4.14) Centuries later, the first-century A.D. Roman military writer Onasander looked back at the history of Greek warfare and concluded that men fought best when “brother is in rank beside brother, friend beside friend, lover beside lover.” (24)
These uncommonly strong bonds among hoplites were merely the normal relationships of nearly all fighters in the phalanxes of most Greek city-states; they do not presuppose any unusual specialized training or concerted effort to form an elite corps. Occasionally we hear of select contingents at Syracuse, Thebes, and various states in the Peloponnese, and we can only assume that the morale and ties among those men were even more extraordinary. (E.g., cf. Pritchett 2.221–24) Throughout Greece there is also evidence that homosexual friendships were a contributing factor to unit morale. At Sparta, for example, the separation of the sexes at an early age, together with attitudes peculiar to other Greeks on the role of women, resulted in overtly homosexual relationships centering on life in the barracks. No doubt such strong ties extended to the battlefield and must help explain Spartan heroism, most notably in glorious defeats from Thermopylai (480) to Leuktra (371), where men chose annihilation rather than the shame of flight. Yet, the most extreme example was not among the Dorians but rather in Thebes. There the Sacred Band, composed of 150 homosexual couples (something unknown even at Sparta), for some fifty years fought heroically in the city’s most desperate battles and were wiped out to a man at Chaironeia (338); Philip was struck by the appearance of the huddled masses of their paired corpses. (Plut. Pel. 18–19; Mor. 761a–d; Xen. Symp. 8.32)
The peer pressure among friends and family within the Greek phalanx grew out of a pride that all men shared in facing danger together. Battle in this manner essentially eliminated rear-unit troops who never enter into actual fighting, those “fighters” who are often looked down upon by modern soldiers and the source of constant dissension throughout the army as a whole: “The code of being a man is here explicit. The rear-echelon soldier is resented and despised because of his misuse of army authority and his failure to share a community and sentiment.” (Stouffer 135) That bond forged through shared combat is evident even today: years after the end of the Second World War, American veterans of the armored divisions of the Third Army could still recall with undisguised pride, “I rolled with Patton.” Their spirit is hauntingly similar to the old Athenian hoplite veterans of the running (novel) charge at Marathon. Much later, to remind a younger audience of that legendary shared battle experience, they needed to say simply, “We ran.” (Ar. Ach. 700)