(^132) Chapter Four
tionships provided a passable substitute for the customary patterns of
traditional social groupings—the very groupings which were every
where dissolving or were at least called into question by the spread of
impersonal market relations. Hence, the artificial community of well-
drilled platoons and companies could and did very swiftly replace the
customary hierarchies of prowess and status that had given European
society its form and its capacity for local self-defense in the days when
knighthood had been in flower.
Social bonds among soldiers were strengthened further by the fact
that from the age of Louis XIV standing armies encouraged long-term
enlistment and reenlistment. Once assigned to a particular unit, a
soldier might therefore spend many years in the ranks, sharing experi
ences with long-time comrades who disappeared more often through
death than from choice. This allowed sentiments of group solidarity to
become firmly fixed, and transformed small army units into effective
primary communities.
As suggested above, the breakdown of primary communities as a
basis for military action was what had precipitated the initial Italian
venture into mercenary soldiering in the fourteenth century. Two
centuries afterwards, European drillmasters managed to create artifi
cial primary communities in the ranks of all technically proficient
armies, thanks to the remarkable way in which a few weeks of drill
created sentiments of solidarity, even among previously isolated indi
viduals. The emotional tone thus aroused within the ranks of Euro
pean armies in turn relieved the psychological strains and stresses that
had made military management so difficult in the centuries of transi
tion from one kind of primary community to the new one.
Well-drilled armies were usually quite insulated from the larger
social context in which they found themselves. New recruits, coming
directly from villages, could be fitted into the artificial community of
the company and platoon with minimal psychological adjustment. For
drill swiftly and dependably transformed obedience and deference
defined by custom into obedience and deference defined by regula
tions. Armies were, therefore, readily renewable, and preserved
“old-fashioned,” i.e., rural, values and attitudes within an ever more
drastically urbanized, monetized, commercialized, and bureaucrati
cally rationalized world.
Such a combination of opposites, or seeming opposites, created
more effective instruments of policy than the world had ever seen
before. Conformity to rules laid down from above became normal, not
only because men feared harsh punishments for infractions of disci-
brent
(Brent)
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