A revisionist history at war with the facts

SOCRATES served as an Athenian hoplite or infantryman in the Peloponnesian Wars. Tradition suggests it was with some distinction. When he came to formulate the philosophy that changed the world, however, he drew no applicable lessons from his battlefield experiences.

Xenophon was the most martially inclined of Socrates’ students and openly admired the Spartans’ soldierly qualities. They habitually underfed their boys because learning to steal food would make them better foragers when they took the field. If they were caught, of course, the hungry boys were dishonored and severely punished.

Xenophon told Socrates and his circle the story of a starving young Spartan who stole a pet fox. As he hurried off to cook the thing, he encountered a group of adults and hid the beast beneath his cloak. While he talked with the older men, the concealed fox tore and bit at his flesh until, finally, the boy collapsed bleeding and died of his wounds. What did the philosopher make of the tale, Xenophon wondered. A skeptical Socrates is supposed to have replied that, while he could understand a Spartan being so averse to dishonor that he would endure fatal torment without complaint, it was hard to believe anybody would be hungry enough to eat a fox.

It’s precisely the opportunity to catch a glimpse of real personalities, actual decisions, genuine foibles and their consequences glinting across time that makes the reading of good military history a perennial pleasure. Working through a wise and learned analyst’s reading of a war or a commander’s career also can be a profitable -- if not deeply philosophical -- exercise.

Sadly, there is neither pleasure nor profit to be had from Bill Fawcett’s “How to Lose a Battle,” which is about as dreary an exercise in avarice as the American publishing industry is likely to serve up -- this month. In form, at least, it’s a promising book: There are 37 chapters on 36 battles (Gettysburg gets two), stretching from Alexander’s defeat of Darius III at Arbela in 331 BC to Dien Bien Phu in 1954. The editor’s conceit is that each chapter briefly analyzes a battle and distills the reasons it was lost.

In historically competent hands, it might be an instructive exercise, entertaining if written with a certain wit and bite. Neither quality is in evidence here, nor is the evidence of competence more than spotty, at best. One of Fawcett’s several online biographies identifies him as a “book packager” whose “Bill Fawcett & Associates has packaged over 250 major titles.” That explains a great deal about this volume, as does the entry on the editor’s first nonfiction work, “Making Contact, a UFO Contact Handbook,” which is described as “a serious” guide to “locating and communicating with extraterrestrials.”

Now there’s a heck of a package.

The problem Fawcett and the various “associates” contributing to this “package” have is that history consists of facts and their defensible interpretation. “How to Lose a Battle” is filled with what we terrestrials call “mistakes.” To take just one example, here’s the opening to the editor/packager’s own chapter on the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836:

“In 1835 Santa Anna, one of the generals who had led the Mexican people in throwing out the French, was elected president and almost immediately abolished the constitution, making himself a dictator. Like their neighbors to the north, many Mexicans felt strongly about their freedom and constitution. Within a year, the dictator Santa Anna Perez de Lebron.... “

Where to start?

Let’s see -- Santa Anna’s name was Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna and he was elected president in 1833, not 1835. He tried two years of liberal reforms before bowing to the outrage of large landowners and the Catholic Church and recentralizing power in Mexico City; he did not instantly make himself a dictator. He was not elected because he expelled the French. Fawcett has confused him with Benito Juarez, who overthrew the French-imposed Emperor Maximilian in 1867, 34 years later. Santa Anna did defeat a French punitive expedition at Veracruz during the so-called Pastry War, but that was in 1838, which is two years after the fight at San Jacinto.

Some lines later, Fawcett writes, “Now, if there was one part of all Mexico that was still willing to revolt against Santa Anna, it was Texas.... The abolition of the constitution angered most Mexicans, and the ‘Texicans’ more than most.”

Actually, the American immigrants into Tejas initially supported Santa Anna’s assumption of dictatorial powers because they believed he’d give them their own state government. When he didn’t, and imprisoned their emissary, Stephen F. Austin, their other grievances, especially Mexico’s refusal to allow them to engage in the slave trade, began to loom very large.

Similar errors run throughout this book: Gen. Jean Humbert, who commanded the French invasion of Ireland’s County Mayo in 1798, was not “polite” but rather famously rough as one of the peasant generals who had risen through the ranks of the revolutionary army. The British troops he defeated at Castlebar were not a complacent garrison but an ill-organized yeomanry and militia. The British failure to execute Eamon de Valera along with the other leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising was not “inept” but a consequence of careful political calculation. The New York-born De Valera was an American citizen, and London was fearful of the effect on U.S. public opinion. Sinn Fein was not the “political wing of the IRA.” Its existence predated creation of the IRA. The author of this entry, Brian Thomsen, has conflated the original Sinn Fein with the contemporary “Provisional Sinn Fein” headed by Gerry Adams.

One could go on, but the point is made.

Another of Fawcett’s biographical entries says he also produces board, video and role-playing games, as well as science fiction. It’s good to hear that he has something to fall back on, as he seems unlikely to feed a family working as a historian. It’s impossible to judge the prospects -- or credentials -- of his contributors/associates, since their biographies do not appear anywhere in the book. Suffice to say that William R. Forstchen, who wrote a long and rather eccentric chapter on Gettysburg, takes the opportunity to inform readers that he is both the author of a multivolume “alternative history” of the battle and a former “member of the 20th Maine Volunteer Infantry reenactment regiment.” (They are the people who dress in costumes and pretend to be fighting the Civil War.)

This is a distasteful book and readers should avoid it -- both for their own good and as a lesson to its publishers, who should know better. If you’re inclined toward military history this summer, go find a copy of Sir John Keegan’s “The Face of Battle.” Its unequaled account of the ordinary combat soldier’s lot through the ages focuses the mind precisely where it ought to be in these unhappy times.