Dogs of War

"Cry havoc! And let slip the dogs of war" said Shakespeare's Mark Antony, predicting savage revenge for the death of Caesar, but for many the military life has had its own attractions. "Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier," said Dr Johnson in 1778, and a hundred years later Gilbert and Sullivan celebrated the popular hero and military reformer Sir Garnet Wolseley as "the very model of a modern Major-General" in The Pirates of Penzance. (The actor George Grossmith made himself up as Wolseley to sing the song, and the phrase "All Sir Garnet" became a slang term of the time for "all correct".) Wolseley himself, as a professional soldier, was clear about what was needed for success in his chosen career: "There is only one way for a young man to get on in the army. He must try and get killed in every way he possibly can!" The view would certainly have appealed to Frederick the Great, who in the 18th century addressed reluctant forces with the words, "Rascals, would you live for ever?"

In the 17th century, building the New Model Army, Oliver Cromwell described the kind of recruit he wanted. "I would rather have a plain russet-coated captain that knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows, than that which you call 'a gentleman' and is nothing else." Cromwell's captain might well have developed into a Wolseley, although armies at other times have sounded less orderly. Wellington trenchantly described his own army as "the scum of the earth", and wrote in a letter of 1810, "As Lord Chesterfield said of the generals of his day, I only hope that when the enemy reads the list of their names, he trembles as I do."

Notable commanders have sometimes gone on record with general rules for military success. Napoleon thought that "In war, three-quarters turns on personal character and relations; the balance of manpower and materials counts only for the remaining quarter." In the 1960s, Lord Montgomery, perhaps recalling the French Emperor's disastrous campaign of 1812, asserted that the first rule of the book of war was, "Do not march on Moscow." But a popular summary of the words of the great 19th-century Prussian soldier Helmuth von Moltke suggests that rules will take you only so far: "No plan survives first contact with the enemy."

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