Alexander : a history of the origin and growth of the art of war from ...

II.EARLY HISTORY OF WAR.The first reliable history of war is found in the Bible ; the next comes fromHomer, Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon. All ancient historians areproperly military historians. During the Middle Ages chronicles were kept,but no history was written, and war as an art was at a low ebb. It was theFrench Revolution which first developed the national sentiment and the studyof war as a science. The world's wars may for our uses be conveniently dividedinto Ancient Wars, Middle Age Wars, Modern Wars, Recent Wars. The erasof Alexander, Hannibal, Csesar, Gustavus, Frederick and Napoleon containthe names of nearly all the great captains. — Man is a fighting animal. Hisclub was the first hand-to-hand weapon ; his slung-stone the early long-rangearm. The organization of armies came about in a perfectly simple manner,just as the first stockade around a barbarian village was the origin of the stupendouswalls of Babylon. The beginning of all military devices was in theEast ; they have been perfected in the West. The character of all Orientalwars was that of huge raids, accompanied by extravagant cruelties and devastation.Entirely unmethodical, they contain no lessons for us to-day.The first reliable history of war may be said to have cometo us from the Jews. The historical books of the Bible giveus the earliest Avritten glimpse into very ancient methods ofwarfare, as the Egyptian monuments give us the pictorial.This narrative was followed by the Iliad, which portrays thecondition of war twelve hundred years before Christ. Herodotus(f 418 B. C.) next appeared, and by his faithfuldescription of the Persian wars justly earned the title ofFather of History ; and following him closely came Thucydides(f 384 B. c), who narrated the gTcat political and interesting,though in instruction meagre, military events of thePeloponnesian War. Xenophon (f 360 B. C.) gi'aphically,if sometimes imaginatively, described the deeds of the elder