评论 - 战斗的魅力：战争如何获胜和失败的历史

https://www.military-history.org/books/review-the-allure-of-battle-a-history-of-how-wars-have-been-won-and-lost.htm

标识

图书奖/书籍

2019 年 10 月 24 日6 分钟阅读

作者：Cathal J Nolan

牛津大学出版社出版

战斗的魅力：战争如何获胜和失败的历史

Cathal J. Nolan

牛津大学出版社，20 英镑（hbk）

“决战”在战争史上有多重要？这是卡塔尔·诺兰 (Cathal Nolan) 在对 2,000 多年军事历史的权威调查中提出的核心问题。

他的论点是有争议的和令人信服的。他告诉我们，政治和军事领导人一直关注“决战”的想法，因为它似乎提供了轻松、廉价、明确的胜利。但这是一种错觉。

事实证明，这一概念在弱国或联盟的领导人中尤其具有吸引力，因为在这些国家中，当务之急是避免与更强大的敌人进行长期的消耗战。

“战斗的魅力”就是速战速决的魅力：突如其来的闪电战，快速的机动战，伟大统帅的无所不能的才华，在血与铁的战场上歼灭敌人，随后是胜利者的和平. 诺兰认为，这是坎尼、阿金库尔、布伦海姆、滑铁卢和葛底斯堡的海市蜃楼。

海市蜃楼？看起来是这样：因为“决战”很少是这样的。

致命的吸引力

这个概念从历史写作的一开始就得到了推广。希腊历史学家希罗多德（Herodotus）——有时被称为“历史之父”——从他对波斯战争的记述开始了这一切，其中重点是像马拉松、萨拉米斯和普拉塔亚这样的激战胜利。

罗马历史学家强调了这一教训，主要是因为他们发现激烈的激战难以抗拒——与更为平淡无奇的攻城战形成鲜明对比，更不用说沉闷的军事后勤计算了。

但是向下钻取，“决战”化为海市蜃楼，因为它通常决定不了多少。以汉尼拔战胜罗马人的最伟大胜利坎尼战役为例，这场战役在现代军事学院中被广泛推崇为战术杰作。可能是这样。但那到底是什么？

第二次布匿战争是一场持续 16 年的消耗战，以迦太基人的灾难性失败告终。这是为什么？因为，诺兰提醒我们，罗马人享有非凡的“战略深度”。他们的社会制度基于广泛的共同公民身份，使数十万意大利人成为利益相关者。而汉尼拔指挥着一支雇佣军。

反过来，一个坎尼就可以结束汉尼拔的战役。另一方面，罗马人本可以忍受连续的坎尼并继续战斗。结果，他们选择了避免战斗，并在长期的阵地和围攻战中消耗敌人。

Take another example: the famous triplet of English victories in the Hundred Years War: Crécy (1346), Poitiers (1356), and Agincourt (1415). It is not that these battles had no impact: it is that the impact was temporary and limited; it was never ‘decisive’.

Agincourt, in particular, has been blown out of all proportion in British popular history (thanks in large part to the proto-nationalist propaganda of Shakespeare’s Henry V). In world-historical terms, this small-scale collision in a muddy field in northern France does not register. The French went on to win the Hundred Years War a generation later.

In part, this was because French resources of wealth and manpower were far greater than English. But it was also because the English succumbed to what Nolan calls ‘victor’s disease’ – a conservative clinging to a tried-and-tested military system because it had delivered victory in the past, even as the world changes and modernisation is called for.

The French monarchy created a modern centralised state, cut a deal with the traditional nobility, and enrolled new social groups in a struggle for national unity and independence. It was symbolised by artillery and a new class of infantry. The English castles fell to French cannon, and the old English array of ‘bill and bow’ was shot away by hand-gunners and crossbowmen at Formigny (1450) and Castillon (1453).

Nolan’s point is that the Hundred Years War was a long war of attrition, and it was won by the state with greater military resources, once that state had created an efficient, flexible, innovatory organisation.

THE COST OF DELUSION

Come forward to the last 250 years of military history – and this is Nolan’s main focus in The Allure of Battle – and we have carnage piled upon carnage in deference to a delusion: the pursuit of ‘decisive battle’. He explains it thus:

[The book’s] goal is to help correct distorted public memory of battle’s place in modern war, to start to replace popular images of the decisive battle with sombre appreciation of larger material and national commitments in wars decided by prolonged fighting that killed many hundreds of thousands in the 18th century, millions in the 19th, and tens of millions in the 20th. In these modern wars, fought on ever more massive scales to increasingly total ends by whatever means industrial technology and science provided, attrition nearly always proved the path to victory and defeat.

Modern history is the main focus of the book. Nolan charts the ‘return’ of the great captains, with modern commanders like Marlborough, Frederick, and Napoleon seen as reincarnations of figures of Classical antiquity like Alexander, Hannibal, and Caesar.

He critiques the focus on ‘decisive battles’, emphasising the role of organisation, logistics, economic output, manpower reserves, and siege warfare. He again draws attention to the limited significance of spectacles like Blenheim, Leuthen, and Austerlitz.

Marlborough’s ten-year long campaign in the War of the Spanish Succession was dominated by positional warfare, and it was sheer military exhaustion that finally brought Louis XIV to the negotiating table. Frederick may have been a strategic and tactical genius, but his victories were made possible by the fact that he had turned Prussia into ‘the Sparta of Europe’. Napoleon won at Austerlitz in 1805, but the French Empire crumbled to nothing between 1812 and 1814.

Napoleon at Austerlitz, his greatest victory. But he still lost in the end. Just how decisive are ‘decisive battles’?

Nolan repeatedly finds fault with lopsided readings of the historical evidence. On the one hand, the exceptional Blitzkrieg campaigns of the German Wars of Unification – Austria defeated in six weeks, France in six months, the outcome signposted by the battlefield triumphs of Sadowa (1866) and Sedan (1870) respectively – came to be regarded as models. On the other, the lessons of the Crimea and the American Civil War – wars of attrition that culminated in long sieges – were sidelined.

This lopsidedness infected especially the political and military leaderships of Germany and Japan in the first half of the 20th century. The Schlieff en Plan – designed to knock France out of the war in six weeks in 1914 – was one consequence. It failed, of course, and locked Germany into a four-year war of attrition on two fronts.

Hitler was more successful in 1939-1941, but even the stunning victories of his Panzer divisions in the first two years of the Second World War could not alter the global balance of power. His initial victories merely increased the size and resources of the Third Reich, enabling it to withstand the war of attrition subsequently imposed on it for longer, but without altering the inevitable outcome.

The leadership of Imperial Japan was equally seduced by ‘the allure of battle’. But, of course, war against an alliance of Nationalist China, the British Empire, and the United States meant a mincing machine of men and matériel – an attritional war of mass – that Japan could not possibly win.

LESSONS UNLEARNED

The consequences for the world were catastrophic: 15 million dead in the First World War, 60 million dead in the Second, with the people of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan among those who paid the highest price.

And now, have the lessons been learned? It would seem not. We have the so-called ‘War on Terror’, launched by George Bush and Tony Blair, who mixed dodgy dossiers and ‘short war’ optimism as they projected a quarter of a million Western troops into the Middle East. The result has been two decades of mayhem that have transformed Islamic jihadism into a global force.

The ‘allure of battle’ endures. Nolan gives the last word to opposing commanders on one of the world’s current fault-lines: Kashmir.

In September 2015, Indian Army Chief General Dalbir Singh Suhag declared that his forces were fully prepared for the ‘swift , short nature of future wars’. Pakistan Army Chief General Raheel Sharif boasted back: ‘Our armed forces stand fully capable to defeat all sorts of external aggression… short or long.’ So the illusion abides. So the next war looms.

There are quibbles. The historical analysis can be shallow when we stray from the safe ground of military history. Nolan seems to take Europe’s 16th- and 17th-century ‘wars of religion’ at face value, for example, apparently without any appreciation that these were revolutionary conflicts that pitted a ‘middling sort’ of Protestant radicals against the old feudal elites.

But such matters are quibbles: they have no bearing on the core argument, the energy and vigour with which it is presented, and the sharpness of the critique of so much traditional military history.

In short, anyone interested in the longue durée of military history should read this book. The effect is likely to be a thorough intellectual shakedown. It may be a long haul – 600 pages – but it never flags, and it is one of those books that is guaranteed to have a permanent impact on the way you think about history.

Review by Neil Faulkner

This article appeared in the November issue of Military History Matters. To find out more about receiving the latest cutting-edge military history research and analysis delivered to your door, click here.

投稿：戰爭不是劇本：從香蕉湯到尿袋人生

作者：合艾 - 3月 29, 2026

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投稿：戰爭不是劇本：從香蕉湯到尿袋人生