Wars in Civilized Societies

Historical Perspectives of War

A historical perspective, taught until recently in schools, has depicted kings and their wars as glorious markers in the progress of civilization.

Some have classified wars: Revolutions, uprisings, wars of independence, and civil wars were internal wars. External wars occurred between states and had different features: conquests such as by Alexander the Great and Napoleon Bonaparte; invasions by barbarians such as the Goths and Vandals; religious wars such as the Crusades and the Thirty Years' War; colonial wars, such as between Britain and India and the Anglo-Zulu wars.

Military history has examined tactics used to wage wars: from chariots in the early empires to infantry and phalanx in Roman times, followed by cavalry in the times of the knights, then archery, muskets, artillery, fortifications and sieges, trench warfare, machine guns, tanks, blitzkriegs, and nuclear weapons.

Another specialty has involved customs and rituals of fighting: contests between champions, mutual agreement on battlefield, prohibition of use of [Page 803]feathers on arrows (decreasing their accuracy), preservation of prisoners, not harming noncombatants, and so on.

The legal approach has attempted to define just and unjust wars, lawfulness and lawlessness of acts of war, and more recently, atrocities, violations of human rights, terrorism, and genocide.

Though biographies of kings and generals have been plentiful, history has acknowledged the ordinary soldier only recently. Historian John Keegan described their motivations in different periods of history. At the battle of Agincourt in 1415, ordinary soldiers were mostly serfs and peasants, and their motivations were loot and taking prisoners for ransom—their only hopes of improving their stations in life. In 1815 at the battle of Waterloo, soldiers' main motivations were the danger of surrender, loyalty to officers, and a sense of honor. In the World War I battle of Somme in 1916, line after line of men rose from their trenches to be machine-gunned down. Their motivation was a sense of mission, patriotism, credulity, obedience, group conformity, and inevitability. World War II studies indicated that soldiers fought for love—initially their family, community, and country. In combat, they were motivated by love of their comrades and their leader.

The recent discipline of traumatology was spawned largely by wars, though recognition of trauma and grief in war goes back a long way. They were described already in the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh and in Homer's Iliad.

In modern history, grief and trauma were called nostalgia in the U.S. Civil War. In World War I, they were called shell shock and cardiac neuroses. In that war, mental breakdown in huge numbers was recognized for the first time. World War I also spawned for the first time stories such as All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque and Memories of an Infantry Officer by Siegfried Sassoon that depicted not glory, but the devastation and pointlessness of war.

War trauma was repressed, then rediscovered in World War II, where it was called combat exhaustion, and was repressed and rediscovered again after the Vietnam War, this time called posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). That is still the mainstream diagnosis in traumatology.

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