This may be less a review and more of a rant...
Watching some Perun videos about the trench war in the Ukraine (and the "Verdun" of Bakhmut) got me to finally start reading my copy of Alistair Horne's The Price of Glory...and it's hard reading. I'm 25 pages in, and it's driving me up the wall.
So, for a bit of context: this book was first published in the early 1960s, and the revised edition that I'm reading was published in 1993. In his introduction, Horne states that in the intervening time, nothing really made him revise more than a couple of lines here and there...and it really should have done.
The amount of information that comes across as received wisdom (much of it from Basil Liddell Hart) is pretty staggering. More than once I've gone to the back of the book for his source notes to track down a direct quote to find no primary source for it.
For example, Grandmaison. Horne's depiction of Grandmaison is of a lunatic obsessed with the bayonet who had an "attack at all costs and regardless of the circumstances" approach. According to Horne, Grandmaison had no understanding of modern firepower. Now, Horne can read French - he has French language sources in his bibliography. However, he didn't actually bother reading any Grandmaison to chase down the source and see if the quotes were accurate.
If he had (speaking as the one who translated Training of the Infantry for Offensive Combat), he would have realized that Grandmaison understood the power of modern small arms quite well - he considered the ground in front of enemy field fortifications to be unsurvivable for any extended length of time. Infantry had to attack not because attacking was the only thing they were supposed to do, but because it was the only thing they could do that would stop the enemy from shooting them to pieces. The casualties would be costly in the attack, yes, but they would be total if the unit didn't attack.
Then there's the depiction of the pre-war French army. This is an army that Horne depicts as not having howitzers because they were considered unnecessary, and wearing the famous red pants to intimidate the enemy - AKA, completely disconnected from the reality of modern warfare. HOWEVER...both of these were issues the French army had been trying to solve for years before the war. The military notes in the RUSI Journal have announcements of French army uniform changes to get rid of the red trousers, followed by announcements that the trousers are actually being kept, every few months (it was, in fact, the French army fighting their personal Battle of Verdun against the French bureaucracy to put their soldiers in uniforms that didn't scream "Please shoot me!" to the enemy). And one of the excised chapters of the first volume of Joffre's memoirs covers his struggles to get heavy howitzers for the French army. The French army was not disconnected from reality here - they were trying to modernize in the face of a government bureaucracy that was dysfunctional to the point of lunacy.
And then there's Horne's treatment of Joffre, which is character assassination...and one that doesn't survive Horne's own text. He literally declares that Joffre was taciturn because, unlike Haig, there was nothing inside his head. He presents Joffre as being somebody who was not a military thinker at all...and then credits Joffre with calculating the timing just right for the counter-attack at the Marne that turned the battle. There is a massive contradiction here. Now, Joffre made his fair share of mistakes, but the bumbling idiot that Horne makes him out to be could not have saved France at the Marne the way that Joffre did. The degree to which Horne twists himself into a pretzel to try to reconcile these (and fails to do so) is pretty staggering.
But the thing that I find absolutely unforgivable is Horne's treatment of the German war planning. Now, in fairness, most of the German war planning documents were thought to be lost until Terence Zuber unearthed them in the late 90s and early aughts. Historians had to reconstruct it from what the German official history and German generals had said after the war. So, up to 1958, Anglophone historians faced a massive question mark as to what the German war plans had actually been, and generals like von Kuhl trying to excuse the failure of the Marne campaign were taken at face value.
...BUT...
Started this one a while back. Forgot to finish it. Remembered it the day before St. Paddy's. Forgot to finish it again. Here it is now.
Ah, Brennan Lee Mulligan. I love ya man, but you've gotta fact check your sources. But Mr. Mulligan is not alone in this mistaken belief. It's surprisingly widespread on the Internet, especially among neopagan circles (mark your r/badhistory bingo cards), and tends to pop up every year around St. Patrick's day. And following the laws of the Internet, at least one person must use it to promote enlightened centrism. It generally goes as follows: There haven't been snakes in Ireland since the ice age, so St. Patrick couldn't have driven them out. Some druids used a snake as a symbol. Thus, the story is actually a metaphor for a pagan genocide. (Believe it or not, this theory pretty much only exists on the Internet, and not even the most disreputable of historians has seriously suggested it).
In this case, as in so many, the simplest answer is also the correct one. People across the ancient world encountered phenomena which they didn't understand, so they gave it a mythical reason. Why do the seasons change? Because Hades keeps Persephone away from Demeter. Why does the sun go down? Because Ra has to sail his barge underground every night. Irish people looked around at the rest of Europe, they realized that they alone had no snakes, so they came up with a fun story about why that was.
If you forget everything else about this post, remember this: Saint Patrick was largely mythological. This isn't intended as an insult, it's a statement of fact, which most historians and Catholic theologians readily agree with. He took the place of a folk hero, doing wonderful things with a nice little message tacked on for the kiddos. Most of the wild myths attributed to him were written centuries after his death, by people who'd never met him, and bear more resemblance to epic sagas than Church documents. Saint Patrick lived in the fifth century. THe snake story first popped up in the eleventh century. Being as respectful as I can to all religions involved: the idea that St. Patrick wandered around around like a Gaelic Gandalf, defeating druids in magic duels is completely ahistorical. Not to mention, it doesn't fit with the beliefs of either religion. Jesus is generally on the whole "no violence" side of things, so it doesn't really make sense that he'd be handing out a staff of the magi to a level 3 cleric.
“[Patrick’s] ‘biographers’—two monks named Tirechán and Muirchu, as well as many later hagiographers—mythologized Patrick into someone he never was: a man who fought with druids, used shamrocks to teach the trinity, and drove the snakes from Ireland. In truth, many druids became priests of the new religion, Patrick surely didn’t need shamrocks to teach a people who already had tripartite gods, and Ireland never had any snakes in the first place!”
Source: The Story We Carry in Our Bones: Irish History for Americans, Juliene Osborn-McKnight
The blatant lies spread about Patrick to make him seen more violent were actually caused by... the Catholic Church? Well, that's a real headfucker, huh? So, yeah. In a tale as old as time, making stories exciting makes people more likely to listen. And since it's the Catholic Church, adding sex appeal is off the table, so violence it is!
Patrick didn't really do shit. He wasn't the first missionary in (that'd be Palladius). He wasn't the one to finish the job of Christianizing Ireland (that would take generations more work). He's a blank slate, and is very easy to project stories onto, so people did so.
But OK. For the sake of argument, we'll reject the idea that it's a fun myth, and treat it as if there's an actual underlying meaning. Even then, it wouldn't make any sense for Patrick to have driven the pagans out of Ireland, because they never left. Again, Patrick was a folk hero. Christianization efforts in Ireland had started decades before he was ever born, and continued for centuries after his death. He certainly played a role in those efforts, but the idea that he singlehandedly rocked up and started the multi-century Irish Jesus party is a myth.
So, where did the druids go? As mentioned previously, they just... went into Christianity. Fey became angels or devils, gods became saints, magic wells of healing became Jesus™ brand magic wells of healing. Many druidic traditions tended to be much more loose. They didn't view these new Christians as a competing religion, just a different means to the same end. We have evidence of strong pagan culture lasting hundreds of years after Patrick's death. Many druids never even really got driven out. It wasn't hard to convince them to "convert", because many druidic beliefs were pretty easy to meld with Catholicism. It's actually a rather nice change from the rest of history, where humans (mostly) decided to not massacre one another over petty differences.
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