its purpose for both sides, demonstrated yet again that war on a large scale must engage
public feeling, and could promote social chaos and even revolution. When one examines
the armies of nineteenth-century Europe, armies struggling to manage the rush of tech-
nical innovation that the routinized process of innovation thrust at them for decision, one
is considering institutional pillars of the political and social order as well as instruments
of foreign policy. That claim, by the way, is as valid for many countries in the twenty-
first century as it was in the nineteenth.
Historian Brian Holden Reid claims, ‘what is undeniable is that warfare between 1 815
and 1 8 75 was transformed in scale, impact and destructiveness’ (Reid, 2002: 24). One
can extend this and argue that warfare between 1 8 75 and 1914 similarly was transformed,
though in that latter period there was relatively little actual experience of warfare
involving the European great powers to test the claims of rival theories. If one discounts
the near-continuous practice of colonial warfare in those years, only Britain and Russia
waged war against a modern enemy, though in the British case the Boers were a notably
irregular modern foe, albeit a well-armed, highly motivated and tactically skilful one.
Chapter 7 explains how the character and conduct of warfare assuredly was transformed
between 1914 and 191 8. Unsurprisingly, in each of those periods – 1 8 15–75, 1 8 75–1914
and 1914–1 8 – the dominant consequence of technological innovation and industrial-
ization was a dramatic increase in firepower. For a long while it was the firepower of
the infantry which had the most significance, but from the 1 8 90s the firepower of artillery
began to catch up, and eventually surpass, the tactical potency of infantry weapons.
However, at least as important as the dramatic increases in weapons’ lethality were two
vivid demonstrations of the potency of popular passion for the expansion of warfare.
The first example was provided by the evolution of the American Civil War from
what began as a limited struggle – on the Southern side to persuade the Union to allow
the secessionist states a divorce by mutual consent, and on the Northern to coerce the
South into returning. By 1 8 64 not only had both belligerents mobilized their publics
and their industries, in the Confederate case creating new industries, but Union armies
broke with long tradition and deliberately waged war directly upon the enemy’s society.
President Lincoln’s Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation of 22 September 1 8 62 was
a policy initiative which struck at the heart of the Southern social order. In 1 8 64, General
Ulysses S. Grant ordered his trusted cavalry commander General Philip S. Sheridan to
lay waste the Shenandoah Valley, a breadbasket of the Confederacy. Sheridan was
ordered to ‘[t]ake all provisions, forage and stock wanted for the use of your command.
Such as cannot be consumed, destroy’ (Reid, 2002: 165). But the most famous, or
notorious, example of the waging of war upon enemy society was General William T.
Sherman’s ‘march to the sea’ – from Atlanta to Savannah – through Georgia, and then
north through the Carolinas, from November 1 8 64 to April 1 8 65. Sherman deliberately
wrought all the material damage of which his army of increasingly ideologically
motivated Western veterans was capable. Most emphatically, these cases of purposeful
frightfulness were contrary to the traditional lore of war.
There was a second example which can be seen as a sign of the times, and was viewed
as such by many soldiers of the period, including Field Marshal Moltke: the popular
resistance to the Prussian invasion and occupation of France. To their surprise and anger,
the Prussians and their German allies discovered that although they had won the war
against the regular French Army by trapping the main bodies of incompetently handled
64 War, peace and international relations