Fate is the same for the man who holds back, the same if he fights hard.   We are all held in a single honor, the brave with the weaklings.  A man dies still if he has done nothing, as the one who has done much.
                                                -- Homer, Iliad

   Three times in the long history of Western civilization generals have carried the war right into their enemies' heartlands with such audacity,  rapidity, brutality and unpredictability that they broke  the will of the enemy forces to continue making war. 

   These three generals were barely constrained, and not altogether trusted,  by their civilian and military overseers. They fought to stop depredations on their own homelands and they fought to end the enslavement of other peoples by their enemies. Not only were they brilliant tacticians and strategists, they were able to imbue their troops with their own righteous zeal.  Victor Davis Hanson, Greek scholar and world historian, writes about these three generals, their lives, their character, and the obstacles they faced,  in his book "The Soul of Battle".

Epaminondas, in the Fourth Century BC led his yeomen-warrior hoplites in battle against the mighty, militaristic, apartheid Sparta, to end the Spartiates' constant incursions on her neighbors' land and property, and to end Sparta's shameful enslavement of an entire Greek people, the Messenes. 

Epaminondas gathered his army, and on reaching Sparta, divided it into three forces, each to cross the mountains at a different point. The goal was to avoid confrontations with the red-caped Spartiates and their militarily superior forces, but rather to move into the towns, burn the homes, loot the goods of Sparta, terrorize the citizens, and convince the proud war- glorying women of Sparta that their men could not protect their rich possessions.  Epaminondas and his men continued right on through Sparta to Messene where they armed the slaves, stayed to train them in military defense, and even helped them build a fortified city.

   Epaminondas' success broke the spell of Sparta's invincibility, encouraging other city states to resist as they had long lost the will to do. Without the coerced services of the Messene slaves held captive on their farms -- any showing resistence killed off -- and providing food, the Spartans could no longer devote their lives to military training and making war. She was still a force to be reckoned with, and Epaminondas and his army were called back to help other city states fight her off, but she was never again the terror of  Peloponnesia that she had been.

   General William Tecumseh Sherman was sick of killing poor Southern teenagers in the Confederate armies during the American Civil War. His plan was to take his Army of the West, made up of Western and Northern ranchers and farmers,  through the heart of the South, destroying the infrastructure that provided food and provisions to the Southern 
armies.. He intended to wreck devastation on the plantations of the elite aristocracy who desired this war merely to protect property, which included human beings. Sherman was determined to gut the Confederacy's ability to continue its rebellion. Neither President Lincoln nor Sherman's superior, General Grant, had much confidence that Sherman and his army would survive the March. 

   That Sherman was overwhelmingly successful was due to his masterful organization of the march, separating his troops, bypassing concentrations of enemy forces, never following a predictable path, leaving his supply lines far behind and foraging off the land. His huge army moved, on average, an astonishing ten to fifteen miles a day, all the while destroying the railroads and communications. 
   At each plantation the army found the instruments of slave torture and punishment and were thronged by the slaves offering to help in the destruction, revealing the hidden treasures of their owners, begging to go on with his army, giving lie to the Southern rhetoric that their slaves were 'like members of the family', well-cared for and content. Sherman's troops were 
outraged; what had been for them an abstraction was exposed in its brutal reality, and their confidence in the rightness of the march soared. 

   Confederate troops heard from their families of Sherman's devastation of the land, the terror of not knowing where he might turn up next, and began to lose their will to fight on, began to be anxious to return home. In that long March to the Sea, Sherman's losses were just 100 dead out of his 62,000 troops. Those troops were in better physical shape and enjoyed a 
much higher morale at the end of the march than when they began.  The Confederate Army was now demoralized and starving, leading to Lee's surrender, and that brutal war was finally brought to a close.

   Hanson's recounting of the exploits of General George S. Patton is as much a condemnation of the bureaucratic, envying pettiness of his superiors, Eisenhower, Bradley and Montgomery, and their lack of vision and effective strategic planning, as it is a paean to the General's extraordinary ability to predict enemy conditions and movements, and to move his huge U.S. Third Army swiftly, destroying the German armies he encountered and 
undermining the German population's resistence. Had his superiors listened to him and supported him, Patton's strategies would have brought the war in Europe to a close months earlier and saved the lives of thousands of American and Allied soldiers.
  When he was at last given the desperately needed fuel and limited permission to move across the Rhine, Patton allowed nothing to stop him. The German armies were now fighting a desperate defensive war. Patton could not always avoid confrontations with enemy forces, but moved his troops so swiftly that the Germans seldom knew where he was, until they heard where he had been.

   As he moved across Germany, Patton freed the slave laborers, thousands of them, from many countries. These newly freed, starving and vengeful men and women wrecked havoc on their former masters, burning entire villages, creating utter chaos and terror. Patton was ordered to stop his march on the borders of Czechoslavakia, refused permission to assist Czech freedom fighters desperate to avoid enslavement by the Russian Communist armies at 
the very moment of their salvation from their Nazi masters.

   Hanson draws similarities in the character of these three generals. They appeared in public as gruff, coarse and rough speaking, but were in fact highly literate, philosophical and religious, and exceptionally well-read. Though Patton came from a wealthy family, Epaminondas and Sherman were never successes financially. All three were close to the men they led, always 
fiercely protective of their men's well-being, and were beloved by their troops. Both Epaminondas and Patton were censured and distrusted by their superiors. Sherman was lauded in the North, but despised for generations in the South. All three were highly moral men, believers in absolute good and absolute evil, and were determined to destroy evil.

   Epaminondas died in the fullness of his prowess in battle a few years after defeating the Spartans and freeing the Messenes. Sherman lived to a ripe old age, working for a peaceful, nonvengeful reconciliation of the South. Patton died as a result of injuries incurred in a minor traffic accident just months after his astonishing victories.
   Victor Davis Hanson has written a book that needs reading during our present War on Terrorism. We live in an age more tightly bureaucratized and politically correct-driven than even during Patton's time. The enemy we fight is no less evil than the apartheid Spartans, the haughty aristocratic Southern slave-owners willing to rend our nation to keep human beings as 'goods', and certainly no less a threat to world peace and freedom than the Nazis. 
Absolute evil must once again be annihilated.

(C) 2001 Peggy Whitcomb