Now I'm going to walk you through a set of progresses. And again, I'm making it far too simple. I'm making it much more linear than it actually is. But I'm going to talk about different traditions in battle. And how these reflected the kinds of changes we talked about last lesson. We're going to start with the war of the square. We're going to move to the war of the line. And then we're going to talk about industrialized war. Obviously, there's a great deal of variation in this. And, again, the progress is not so simple or so linear. But just to give you a rough idea of how can, we can understand the social organization of massive death. Which is at the heart of battle. Now, for much of history, battles really consisted of individual soldiers fighting each other. Individual warriors fighting each other. And in a sense, the organization of that violence, wasn't that important. If you read Homer, for example. The accounts of the battles are usually between one individual warrior and another individual warrior. Without a real sense of how these units come together. It's still very much about a human being against another human being. Very soon though, at around the 7th or 6th century BC, we begin to see the development of something we will call the phalanx. This is essentially a solid mass of men, a square. And it can be different sizes, different levels of, of rows or different levels of ranks. It can be anywhere between two, three hundred, or five hundred. Or even up to 1000 men. And you essentially want to think of it as a square with a lot of very, very pointy spears coming out in one end. And what you're going to do is you're essentially meet on a. Again, it's very important that it be a flat battlefield. Otherwise, you're not going to be able to get these kinds of aggregations together. And there's lots of debates about whether they walked into battle, whether they ran into battle. What they actually, the individual tactics were. But it was fairly simple. One group, one phalanx, one square. Would run or walk or meet the other and they would essentially clash. These front lines would clash with support from the back who were pushing them. Depending on the size of the sphere, maybe the second or the third or the fourth level be able to still hit the front. And what you wanted, was again you didn't expect that you were going to able to kill all the enemy. The key to victory was to disrupt the unity of this front right here. Once that started cracking and these soldiers would become individual warriors. Then the organized square could proceed them. The important thing about this, is that it didn't no longer depended on the bravery or the strength of the individual. But the capacity of the collective to be brave. For the, the capacity of the collective to generate strength. Now this is antithetical to the individual war hero. Imagine Achilles again, from Homer, being willing to be part of this square. Being willing not to move from that line. Being willing to absorb the kind of pain and no engage in individual glory. This is a different kind of war. Now what you're saying is, it's not who has the bravest individuals. It's not who has the strongest or even the best warriors. It is about which side can impose more discipline. Okay? There is an increased focus on order and on discipline. Which side can assure this continuation of its unity? Of its organization? And we see a classic example of this in Marathon, in 499 BC. Where it proves that this form of strategy could defeat much larger armies, without the same level of discipline. Again, our accounts of Marathon are largely biased towards the Greeks. And, you know, what we know about it, there's a lot of question marks. But, we can establish roughly that the Persians had at least 25,000 men. Perhaps many more. The Greeks only had a fraction of that, let's say about 10,000 men. And, it is the first classic example, of a maneuver of turning an enemy's flank and allowing for encirclement and its subsequent destruction. But the key thing is not so much the brilliance of the generalship, although that played a, a role. As the kind of discipline that is exercised by the Greek phalanx. As it is going into the battlefield, realizing that they are outnumbered,. As it is able to move in particular ways in order to be able to flank the Persians. And then destroy that unity of the Persians where they become individual soldiers running, desperately in order to reach their troops. [BLANK_AUDIO]
