Practicing History_ Selected Essays - Barbara W. Tuchman [160]
Sometimes the situation calls for will that simply says, “I will not be beaten”—and here too, in extremity, it must override judgment. After the awful debacle of four battles lost one after the other on the French frontiers in August 1914, and with the French Army streaming back in chaotic retreat and the enemy invading, judgment might have raised the question whether France was not beaten. That never occurred to the commander-in-chief, General Joffre, who possessed in unsurpassed degree a quality of great importance for generals: He was unflappable. Steadiness of temperament in a general is an asset at any time, and the crown of steadiness is the calm that can be maintained amid disaster. It may be that Jofïre’s immunity to panic was lack of imagination, or he may have suffered all the time from what Stilwell called “that sinking feeling” and concealed it. We do not know because he kept no diary. Whatever the source of his imperturbability, France was fortunate to have it in the right man at the right time. Certainly it was Gallieni who saw and seized the opportunity to retrieve disaster, and Foch and Franchet d’Esperey who supplied the élan to carry it through, but it was Joffre’s ponderous, pink-cheeked, immovable assurance that held the army in being. Without him there might have been no army to make a stand at the Marne.
High on the list of a general’s essentials is what I call the “Do this” factor. It is taken from the statement which Shakespeare put in the mouth of Mark Antony: “When Caesar says, ‘Do this,’ it is performed.” This quality of command rests not only on the general’s knowledge of tactics and terrain and resources and enemy deployment in a specific situation, but on the degree of faith that his subordinates have in his knowledge. “When Stilwell told you what to do in Burma,” said an officer, “you had confidence that was the right thing to do. That is what a soldier wants to know.” If officers and men believe a general knows what he is talking about and that what he orders is the right thing to do in the circumstances, they will do it, because most people are relieved to find a superior on whose judgment they can rest. That, indeed, is the difference between most people and generals.
I come now to the second category: that is, professional ability. This encompasses the capacity to decide the objective, to plan, to organize, to direct, to draw on experience, and to deploy all the knowledge and techniques in which the professional has been trained. For me to go further into this aspect and enter on a discussion of the professional principles of generalship does not, I think, make much sense; first, because if you do not know more about them than I do, you oughtn’t to be here, and, second, because it seems to me very difficult to select absolutes. The principles depend to a great extent on time, place, and history, and the nature of the belligerents. I will only say that the bridge that joins the two categories—that connects personal leadership to professional ability—is intelligence, which is the quality De Saxe put second on his list after courage.
The kind of intelligence varies, I suppose, according to occupation: In a doctor it must be sympathetic; in a lawyer it is invariably pessimistic; in a historian it should be accurate, investigative, and synthesizing. In a military man, according to De Saxe’s fine phrase, it should be “strong and fertile in devices.” I like that; it is a requirement which you can tell has been drawn from a soldier’s experience. It closely fits, I think, the most nearly perfect, or at any rate the least-snafued, professional military performance of our time, that of the Israelis in the Six-Day War of 1967.
In that microcosm, caught for us within the visible limits of six days, the qualities of resolution and nerve, the “Do this” factor, the deployment of expert skills, and a governing