Nike's apostle.(Ripples of Battle: How Wars of the Past Still Determine How We Fight, How We Live, and How We Think)(Book Review)

Ripples of Battle: How Wars of the Past Still Determine How We Fight, How We Live, and How We Think, by Victor Davis Hanson (Doubleday, 278 pp., $27.50)

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON is the only modern writer I know with the sensibility of an ancient Greek: He, like Homer, is implacable. In his remarkable Carnage and Culture (2001), a mind-opening work, we are with Herodotus--an artist of gentler effects than the Iliad, because of his philosophical distance. With Ripples of Battle, though, we are there: on that concentrated and all but indescribable, except by Homer, plain between Troy and the cobalt sea.

Herodotus taught his lesson throughout his History, but especially in Book VII: Free men are better warriors, and usually win against warriors who are essentially slaves. Hanson explains the same thing, a bit more analytically for us slow learners and sentimental multiculturalists: Hellas over the mass armies of Darius and Xerxes, Rome over Carthage, which it (N.B.) annihilated, Europe over Islam and the Sultan (Poitiers, Lepanto), Cortez over Montezuma and the Aztecs (Mexico City), the U.S. over Japan. This scenario echoes through Western literature. Milton's Satan and his hordes appear as the sultan and his; the heroic Christ defeats them, with heroic power, and it helps that, like the West, He has artillery and Satan does not.

Herodotus, one of Hanson's models, relates a conversation between Demaratus the Greek and Xerxes in the Persian camp before Salamis. The great king asks Demaratus how he thinks the Persians will do.

 
   "My Lord," Demaratus replied, "is it a 
   true answer you would like, or merely an 
   agreeable one?" 
 
      "Tell me the truth," said the King, 
   "and I promise that you will not suffer by 
   it." ... 
 
      "[The Greeks] fighting singly ... are 
   as good as any, but fighting together they 
   are the best soldiers in the world. They 
   are free, but not entirely free; for they 
   have a master, and that master is Law, 
   which they fear much more than your 
   subjects fear you. Whatever this master 
   commands, they do; and his command 
   never varies: It is never to retreat in battle, 
   however great the odds, and always to 
   stand firm, and to conquer or die. If, my 
   Lord, you think what I have said is nonsense, 
   very well; I am willing henceforward 
   to hold my tongue." 
 
      Xerxes broke out laughing at Demaratus' 
   answer, and good-humoredly 
   let him go. 

Free men freely obey the laws because they have a voice in making them. They tell the truth to their superiors without fear. They are inventive, contentious. They are property owners. Xerxes had to assure Demaratus that he would not, at very least, have his tongue cut out, and what he heard was probably the first truth he had heard in years. Similarly, as Hanson shows in Carnage, disaster awaited the Japanese navy at Midway because Yamamoto's admirals could not tell him that his plans for the battle stank: Yamamoto was the Emperor's deputy.

With Ripples of War we are up close--in the battles, as in the Iliad. The theme is battle itself and its ramifying effects; Hanson's mind is part of the sub-zero cold world of the late Bronze Age, the Age of Achilles, around 1250 B.C. You yourself may not be ready for this Arctic chill. It is said that Cheney likes to talk with Hanson.