David D. Perlmutter - Visions of War: Picturing Warfare from the Stone Age to the Cyber Age

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CONTENTS

To Christie and to my parents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Although the bylined author must take responsibility (and ensuing blame) for any book, a volume of this kind is obviously a communal enterprise in several ways.

First, I want to thank those scholars with whom I began my education in visual culture and whose questions and ideas stimulated my thinking toward the present work. They include: Michael Griffin, Charles W. Haxthausen, Carolyn Marvin, Paul Messaris, Dona Schwartz, Joseph Turow, Amos Vogel, Katti Franz, William Hammond, and especially Larry Gross.

Second, I am grateful to other scholars who assisted me in this project specifically. They include: Hannah Gourgey, David Grove, Anne Jett, Lawrence Keeley, Thomas Kehoe, Thomas Knieper, Matthew Lalumia, Joyce Marcus, William Murnane, Paul Taon, P. Willey, Ken Zagacki, and Larry Zimmerman. Special thanks is given to Paul Bahn and Harvey Bricker for their critiques of the work on primitive and prehistoric imagery.

Third, I want to express gratitude to those who helped in obtaining some of the images for this book. Of this long list, one name stands out: Madame Yvonne Vertut, who allowed me to reproduce her late husbands magnificent pictures of the prehistoric cave paintings.

I am grateful to the series of assistants I had during the long tenure of the writing of this book and to other graduate students who read and reacted to the manuscript: Hattie Baker, Bonnie Bauman, Angie DelCambre, Jie Lin, Jane Perrone, and Caroline Zhang.

At St. Martins Press, solicitude and apologies are extended to my patient and long-suffering editor, Michael Denneny, his assistant, Christina Prestia, and to Sarah Delson for designing the cover.

George and Meredith Friedman were godfather and godmother of this project: they made it possible for me to submit the proposal to St. Martins. Also, I am indebted to Captain Scott Belgarde, U.S. Army Reserve, for his careful verification of facts dealing with both ancient and modern military technologies and tactics.

Finally, and perhaps most important, this book was a family project. My parents raised me in a home of books, and I grew up infused with the appreciation that the past is present and that history guides our every thought and footstep. Crucially, my wife, Christie, devoted three years of her life to the books research, organization, and editing.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

INTRODUCTION

The idea for this book began with a single picture of war that is fascinating to me. It is a small, sepia-toned photograph, probably taken in the summer of 1920. There are four objects in the image: three officers of the Royal Hellenic Army and a tent. Below them is flat, dusty ground, and above, a colorless sky. The man seated in the center is short, no more than five feet eight inches, thin but well built; he has a neatly trimmed mustache and is noticeably balding. He is my maternal grandfather, and my family has noted the resemblance between us. But there is one aspect of the image that marks it as of interest to the historian of visual culture as well as to a descendant of the man: he is smiling. Actually, he is grinning, his legs casually pitched forward, his arms dangling loosely. In contrast, flanking him are two other officers assuming stiff, Napoleonic poses, complete with hands tucked into tightly buttoned tunics. My grandfather, then, is subverting the millennia-old genre of the war image known as the commander portrait, where gravitas and a dignified stance are as important as level epaulettes and gleaming boots.

As with many pictures of war and warriors, the origins of this photographs composition are cloudy. In other portraits, my grandfather cuts a fine, commanding pose. The man I knew as papou was no antimilitary radical; he rose to the rank of colonel before retiring. He was also perhaps the most decorated soldier in the Greek army during World War I. He won the croix de guerre, the French medal of valor, rarely bestowed upon a foreigner, especially on a battlefield distant from the western front. He fought again in 1920 in the failed war of liberation in Anatolia against the Turks. (The Turks also call it a war of liberation, but from the Greeks.) He was a hero to every veteran who spoke of him. In the ruinous anabasis to the Ionian Sea, he was the last to leave the dock, making sure every enlisted man was aboard the evacuation ships; yet he also had issued the injunction that he would personally shoot any soldier who committed atrocities against Turkish civilians. He was, in a word, a warrior, but as the photograph shows, he was willing, on occasion, to reject the ritualized peacockishness of so much of military affairs.

This incidental, obscure picture of war suggests wider principles. People within any culture and era have expectations about what is appropriate in the visual images they create or view. To understand the place of any image within a system of images, and any culturally specific system within an array of varying historical traditions, we must inspect both the details and the big picture. One photograph can represent a genre; a deviation from the code of the genre (for example, a grinning officer seated between two stiffly erect comrades) calls attention to the norms of war imagery that can be studied and compared. The problems for us are to penetrate the veil of time, culture, and circumstance; to identify what is familiar and appreciate what is different; and to understand the minds behind the canvases and film. How can we see what someone else meant?

This quandary is instructively exposed in another picture from a war fought between Greeks and Central Asians, but created some 2000 years before my grandfather fought his battles. It is from the Alexander Mosaic, found in a villa at Pompeii. Historian Michael Wood deems it one of the greatest of all war pictures showing the chaos and terror of combat. Although hard fighting continued, when the Persian troops learned that their king had abandoned them, they began to scatter as well. In the pursuit, Darius chariot, baggage, tents, and family were captured.

The picture, then, is a compression of a moment rather than the recording of a geographic fact: no written account describes Alexander and Darius in such proximity. In truth, the two kings probably never came within shouting distance. Here, the figure of a blond and bronzed young King Alexander on horseback is at left; directly in front and behind him are two generals, most likely his favorites Hephaestion and Antigonos. On the right, in a chariot, is Darius. The confidence of Alexanders stance and the uncertainty captured in the eyes of Darius IIexalted ruler of all Egypt, the Levant, the Middle East, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, and Iranare unmistakable. We do not need to be literate in ancient history to see who is victor and who is in flight.

According to another interpretation, though, Darius representation is more apologia than castigation. While the chariot driver steadily forges the team ahead, the king reaches out, ignoring Alexander, toward a young Persian noble who has fallen in front of the Macedonian charge. If the point of the picture was to praise Alexander, why was Darius gracious gesture highlighted? The image may have been copied from a painting created in the service of Alexanders successors, his generals. Some of these men were not interested in contributing to a full visual hagiography of their former masterafter all, they had killed his children and carved up his realm upon his death. Part of those territories included the Persian heartland. Perhaps this noble Darius, forced to depart the field against his will, was a nod toward better relations with Persian subjects in the new order. Clearly, how we understand the image is a mixture of innate inference and cultural-historical knowledge. Darius expression, pose, and gestures reach across the millennia; the why and wherefore can only be understood through extravisual scholarship.