The March of the Barbarians

Harold Lamb

Description

An account of four generations of Mongol leaders, from Genghis Khan, through his sons, grandsons, and great-grandsons. The book is arranged into a series of narratives, which are grouped dynastically and chronologically covering the span of the Thirteenth Century, and dealing with the process by which the Mongols came to dominate Central Asia and spread outwards to come into contact with Europe, the Indian sub-continent, and China. 

Sujets

• Gengis Khan
• History
• Military
• Genghis Khan
• Gengis Kan
• Histoire
• Medieval

Informations

• Publié par: Rare Treasure Editions
• Date de parution: 12 mai 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781773238517
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

The March of the Barbarians
by Harold Lamb

Firstpublished in 1940
Thisedition published by Rare Treasures
Victoria,BC Canada with branch offices in the Czech Republic and Germany
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All rightsreserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted inany form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, includingphotocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrievalsystem, except in the case of excerpts by a reviewer, who may quotebrief passages in a review.
Front Endpaper

THE MARCH
OF THE
BARBARIANS



by HAROLD LAMB

Introduction
T he march of the Barbarians—the advance of ruthlessmight and power across the face of continents unprepared—theinevitable progress of trained and hardened armies of conquestovercoming, by the strength of their superior arms and tacticsand by the singleness of their world-dominating purpose,every purely defensive army and fortress in their paths. Todaymost of us think of the march of such armies as manifesting a newstrategy, a new and terrible kind of warfare, striking at thesoftened defenses of an enlightened age—a mode of modern mechanicalonrush, the lightning drive which need strike but once.
We who have a continuing faith in democracy see the rise ofdictator powers not as a revolution in the sense of an upheaval ofgrowth, but as a turning back—a retrogression, with nothing ofprogression in it—to the absolute, one-man rule of past despots.At the same time, we shrink at the thought that a backward movementof such tremendous import can be served by “new” andlightning methods of making war. We forget that the world morethan once has seen a dictator, the speed and devastation of whoseattacks, the deception and breadth of whose strategic concept,the psychological deliberateness and suasion of whose softeningpreparatory measures were every bit as fierce, as broad, as subtleas any that the last two years have unfolded before us.
When I write that we are inclined to forget these things I must except one class of readers. I must except the large number ofreaders, nonmilitary and military alike, in America and in otherlands, who are familiar with the works of Mr Harold Lamb. Forthe military reader, and that means the average Army officer andmany an intelligent soldier of lower rank where Mr Lamb’s Genghis-Khan and Tamerlane are concerned, these earlier books ofhis have done more to re-create the Mongol blitzkrieg than anynumber of serious staff studies or heavier historical treatisespossibly could. This, of course, is because his vigorous, drivingstyle, particularly suited to his field of writing, has made themasters of Mongol warfare sweep so vividly again for us across thecontinents of Asia and Europe.
Until the invasion of Poland in 1939, it seems probable, mostnonmilitary readers of Genghis-Khan and Tamerlane rememberedrather the destruction and the slaughter of those Great Khakhansthan the efficiency of the means they used to conquer the breadthof the world. The military reader, on the other hand, upon becomingfamiliar with the extreme rigor of the Mongol training,their extraordinary control of huge armies through long periodsof widespread campaign and combat, and the high esprit of hundredsof thousands bound by a single oath and a single aim—andabove all the lightning speed with which the Mongol armies wereaccustomed to strike—has at once realized that these things arenot peculiar to barbarian armies but are utterly essential to thearmy of any great nation, whatever its ideals of government. Forin trial by combat no degree of high idealism ever availed a knightif his body were soft, his lance short and of unseasoned wood, hismount slow and feeble, and his armor of untempered metal.
Here, in The March of the Barbarians , where Mr Lamb recountsfor us the lives of not only the most striking of the Mongol leaders,Genghis-Khan and Tamerlane, but those also of all the otherGreat Khans, he enables us to see even more clearly than beforehow little actually new there is in the warfare of the armies led byAdolf Hitler. The German people hail their leader as a militarygenius. Yet a full acquaintance, such as Mr Lamb affords us,with the supreme Mongol commanders of seven hundred yearsago makes him look indeed like an imitator, and not yet can we judge whether the imitation is first- or second-rate. For not yethave his armies been faced, except locally in the Dunkirk withdrawal,with much more than a third-rate opposition. And hisarmies have far, far indeed to go before they will have conqueredthe equivalent of the vast conquests that the lightning warfare ofthe Great Khans of Asia succeeded beyond all other armies ofhistory in achieving.
In another place Mr Lamb has brought out the remarkableparallel between the tough barbarian armies of seven centuriesago and the hardened forces we have been watching for morethan a year as they have thrust, either by fighting or without it,into one country of Europe after another. In an article on “TheMongol Method of War,” [1] he has pointed out that the Germans“were the first to analyze the Mongol campaigns from a militarypoint of view. An early account was published in 1865, followedby a study of the Mongol attack upon Poland, Silesia, Bohemia,and Moravia. While the military brains of the HohenzollernReich (the Bernhardi-Moltke-Schlieffen group) developed thedoctrine that a nation by hardening itself to war can make its owndestiny and force its own political will on weaker neighbors, thesetechnical studies of Mongol military achievements were in thehands of German readers.” The other armies of Europe, continuesMr Lamb, appear not to have made any such complete study of themethods of Genghis-Khan. It is true, however, that in his book Great Captains Unveiled , published in 1927, Captain B. H. LiddellHart wrote an interesting study on the Mongol warfare methods.This book was prescribed for study by all General Staff officerswhen the first Experimental Mechanized Force of the BritishArmy was formed. And in commenting on it, the Chief of theImperial General Staff declared that “for our mental foundationwe could not do better than study” the operations of the Mongols.
In the article of Mr Lamb referred to above, he goes on to saythat the great majority of Americans knew even less about theMongols than did the other armies of the world with the exceptionof the German. Here, however, I would take slight issue with MrLamb, for the reasons I have given earlier in this introduction. His own books themselves are too well known by readers withinevery component of our own military forces for this last statementof his to be strictly accurate.
In the article I have referred to, Mr Lamb goes on to show thatthe Mongol, like the German, method of attack had as its aim thedestruction of resistance before it can be organized. “The fivepreparatory steps to this were: (1) thorough and complete informationof the enemy, (2) intimidation of the enemy, (3) sabotageof the enemy’s strength, (4) deception, as to the nature of theattack, and (5) surprise as to the time of the attack.” And nostudent or practitioner of strategy and tactics will dispute MrLamb’s conclusions:

Even a brief study of the Mongol invasion brings home to us severallessons, forgotten in the West during the long era of industrializationand prevailing peace.
First, the Europeans have no monopoly of military genius. Asia canproduce strategists of the highest caliber.
Second, that Asia has, in the past, understood the operation of the“new” total war that destroys resistance.
Third, that Asiatics can match the fighting power of Europeans, ifgiven an equality in weapon power . . . .
Also, that the volunteer armies of a high-spirited citizenry with littletraining may go down to sudden defeat before the attack of a highlytrained military machine.
And finally, there is no defense against the lightning attack on land except an equally efficient military organization .
The observing military man of this present age of invasion addsstill another somewhat technical but nevertheless vital conclusionto these principal findings of Mr Lamb’s. The tactics of the Mongolleaders were thoroughly flexible. This flexibility was not alonethat which was due to their superb horsemanship. Mastery of thehorse gave them their far-reaching mobility just as mastery of themotor gives such mobility today. Mastery of the horse gave themalso the ability to crash against a foe of inferior training and equipmentwith the utmost degree of surprise and shock of weight andforce—gained today by mastery of mechanized weapons. ButMongol generals, like German generals, sometimes met with defenses against which shock tactics were of no avail, defenses thatno horse, as today no tank, could possibly surmount. It was insuch situations that the full flexibility of their military methods wasmost apparent. For unhesitatingly did they dismount and tacklethe barriers before them—often the walls of a fortified city—onfoot, just as today the soldier on foot, supported by weapons ofground and air, must be relied upon to break through any defenseof genuine strength, thus to permit a further stroke of“lightning” warfare to be delivered.
Here, in this present book, the reader interested in militarymatters—and what reader is not, these days?—can observe thepreparatory measure of the Mongols, the lightning strokes thatfollowed these measures whenever such strokes were needed, andthe flexibility of all the Mongol means and methods of combat.These he can observe not only in the great campaigns of Genghis-Khanand Tamerlane, but in those of all the other Mongol rulerswhose armies harried such millions of square miles to east and westso many centuries ago.
There was, for example, Mangu, grandson of Genghis, and thefourth in the succession of Great Khans. Mangu, sitting on histhrone at Kara-korum, exercised an even greater control of theworld’s surface than did his grandfather, Genghis. In what todaywould a