First Salute - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [118]
Ending a war is a difficult and delicate business. Even intelligent rulers, when they exist, often find themselves unable to terminate a war, should they want to. Each side must become convinced at the same time and with equal certainty that its war aim is either not achievable or not worth the cost or damage to the state. The certainty must be equal, for if one side perceives a slight advantage or disadvantage it will not offer terms acceptable to the other. In the Hundred Years’ War that dragged France and England through the 14th century, both sides would have liked to quit but could not, for fear of losing power and status; hate and mistrust fed by the war prevented them from talking. In the ghastly toll and futility of 1914–18, no end could be negotiated short of victory for one side or the other, because each felt it must bring home to its people some compensating gain in the form of territory or a seaport or industrial resource to justify the terrible cost. To come home emptyhanded might mean a revolt against the rulers at home—or at least the loss of their position and place in society, as the Kaiser and the Hohenzollerns were thrown out in 1918. Common soldiers are not rulers and do not have to worry about losing thrones or office so why, when in hunger and rags, do they go on? The answer is a complex of many factors: because they have absorbed a sense of the goal, because giving up in desertion or mutiny carries the ultimate penalty, because of comradeship, because if they leave the army they would have nowhere to go and no way to go home. For rulers to stop short of the declared war aim, thus acknowledging their own as well as their party’s and their nation’s incapacity, is as problematic as the camel’s passage through the needle’s eye. Short of absolute defeat, would the leaders of the American cause have given up their fight for liberty and independence or the British King and ministers have given up their imperial control? “Forbid it, Almighty God!” would have been the answer, and so each side in America fought on for the gleam of that successful battle and the “decisive stroke.”
Clinton, with uncharacteristic optimism, wrote to the government after the capture of Charleston, “A few works if properly reinforced will give us all between this and Hudson river.” In London, Germain caught the gleam, stating, “One more campaign would reduce all the southern provinces.” No matter how the fortunes of war fluctuated, he continued to believe that suppression of the rebellion would be easy, a happy assumption of British strategists based on their total lack of acquaintance with Americans. They could not believe that farmers and woodsmen untrained as soldiers—“these country clowns,” as a Hessian officer spoke of them at Trenton—could ever stand up to the well-drilled British and German professionals. They forgot the extra weapon that is possessed by those who are fighting for a cause. Training is usually the criterion of military effectiveness, but not this time.
The American fighting style of firing from concealment behind walls and trees while wearing dull-colored homespun or fringed Indian tunics, in total contrast to the spit and polish of the brightly uniformed European armies who advanced in solid ranks to shoot and be shot at, was the major cause of the persistent British underestimation of the rebels. The very first opening fight at Lexington, when redcoats were killed all along the road back to Boston by the bullets of minutemen skulking behind stone walls, instead of in the decent well-drilled order of the soldiers of the King of France (or, alternatively, of the Duke of York) in the nursery rhyme who with 40,000 men marched up the hill and then marched down again, fixed the image of peasants, not to say savages— unfit to meet the infantry of Europe. When, not long after Lexington, the British marched up Bunker (Breed’s) Hill and