ATTILA: AN ARMY TOO DIVERSE?

Many people, who consider themselves to be savants on the subject of war, battle, combat strategy, and the small yet telling circumstances and events that changed the tide of battle from defeat to victory, have nevertheless failed to give Attila his due. Surely, he belongs among the top ten “generals” of all time. As with King David of Israel, Alexander the Great, Hannibal, and Julius Caesar, he not only devised strategy (however informally) but led his men to battle. His sword was not ceremonial but wielded on the field of battle with bloody vengeance.

When these people, who are presently known generally as Huns, first appeared in southern Asia in present day Russia, as well as the new Republics formed to the south from the old U.S.S.R., after its dissolution, they were a very distinct people, according to appearance, from all the other resident tribes which bordered upon the lands of Scythia. They were shorter in height, possessed broad, thick shoulders, and thick necks. Their faces were swarthy and described by a Roman (Priscus) as “lumpish.” They had eyes which were likened by this same Roman to “pin holes.” They scarred a son’s face at birth, not with the intention of making them fierce-looking (which seems to be common amongst warriors), but to teach them even before their first milk that they must learn to deal with wounds. One must focus first upon killing the enemy. There will be time enough after the battle, if one survived, to tend to wounds.

Accordiing to historian Arthur Koestler in his THE THIRTEENTH TRIBE, these Huns wore their hair in long, never-cut fashion, unwashed, but sometimes colored a reddish shade, not given to baths, and using a sort of “howl” when attacking on horseback. As a matter of fact, the Huns rarely if ever changed clothes, letting the clothing wear and/or rot off. This, too, if accurate, might have been a strategy for victory, as it would be another sort of “weapon” of war to use against the enemy. One should not overlook uncleanliness as a tool of war. However, one supposes that over time, developing some relationships with Rome and Constantinople, they may have improved somewhat in the matter of toilet care and clothing.

To continue on this subject so as to demonstrate the use of uncleanliness and the utility it provides of a psychological kind, I recall a description in a text I puchased years ago, relating to prison life in Leavenworth FCI. There was an unruly inmate in his cell. I cannot recall with certainty but he may have set a mattress on fire or caused a flood besides making a noise nuisance. At any rate the decision was made to send correction officers into his cell to subdue him. According to the text, the matter was very distasteful, as the inmate was naked, armed, and had smeared his own refuse all over his body. Consider the edge that such a warrior might present if multiplied by tens of thousands.

The Huns were not the only fierce warriors in the area bordering Scythia (and everywhere else they resided), but they did appear on the scene with advantages. Not only did they appear fierce (and ugly), but they were outstanding horsemen. They seemed to exist upon spoils of warfare, eschewing farming and herding in any sort of settled fashion. For them, as a strategy for living well, their taking from others was the most sensible approach, so long as others went to the trouble of producing food and craftswork, as well as collected & tended herds. For at this time the Huns chief source of wealth were two: 1) newly born sons and 2) other peoples’s property.

Attila arrived on the scene as the leader prior to 445 A.D. He was aided by his brother, Bleda, who was himself formidable, and they formed a sort tandem leadership. Sometime after 445, Attila murdered Bleda. The Huns fought with all the other tribal groups, either subjecting them or causing them to flee either to the west and north or into the Roman Empire’s boundary. By 445 A.D. Attila was the undisputed leader of not only the Huns, but united all the non-Hunnish tribes in his “area of influence” under him. Generally, they paid tribute and existed in a sort of feudal relationship with Attila’s Huns. Toward the end of Attila’s rule, the Western Roman Empire at Rome had been reduced to virtually a slave state. It seems likely that many rich Romans may have transferred their property, as well as themselves, to the far western reaches of the Empire, such as it now was.

I suspect that Attila may have heard rumors of wealth there. That may have been his primary motivation for leading his armies westward.

Tribute was highly prized by Attila. He generally remained at peace with other kingdoms, including the Roman Empire–East and West, so long as they met Attila’s demands for tribute. The immense accumulation of wealth also allowed Attila to bestow generous gifts to key people among his Huns, as well as the various tribal leaders, whose people he has subdued. Attila and the Huns did not seem too interested in cultural trappings, as was to be found in other adjacent kingdoms. He certainly seemed to “dig” power. Wealth was an aspect of power. He almost certainly preferred the pleasure of seeing the mighty kings of the world paying him tribute than the gold and silver, per se. This was a taste of sadism, which would suffice until he road again into battle.

Yet, over time, even the fierceness of the Huns may have begun a slow, barely noticeable waning. With conquest as the Hun’s motivation and the gaining of spoils the “fruit” of and justification for conquest–a sort of “body count” (or “booty” count), a softening of the Hun spirit must have occurred and been noticeable particularly to the older warriors. This may have weighed on Attila’s mind.

After all, Attila himself could look about and see that his army included a lot of Germanic and Slavic warriors. He had taken a wife from one of the Germanic tribes, after first killing her father, who was a tribal king. There were marriages between the Aristocratic women of the Eastern Roman Empire. Among his ordinary Hun troops, there must have been many occasions when Germanic or Slavic women were taken as one of their wives, especially as the general wealth of the Huns under Attila increased and “trickled down.” After all, when a man feels that he has the money he will take a wife, If he has considerable money, he takes more than one.

However such things unfold, it does have the effect of slowly changing a people. By the standards of Rome both Slavic and Germanic tribes might well seem to be ”barbarians.” Yet, by this time much of the Roman fighting soldiers were of Germanic descent. Rome, itself, had changed by its diversity from the early days of the Roman Republic. Change may be good or bad, according to the eyes of the beholder. The only thing certain is that it is no more the way it was.

Consider: “But as Gibbon showed, and as Roman historians themselves recounted at the time, all this changed during the period of the Empire–and because of the Empire. In the course of building a vast multi-ethnic and multi-cultural empire the old Roman stock was wasted on the battlefield, and citizenship came to be extended by degrees to include not only freed slaves but the majority of the peoples of the conquered cities, however alien these were in blood and values. Roman armies had to be filled with mercenaries, and not only did Rome die for want of Roman stock, but it also died for want of the spirit of loyalty and sense of common values that cannot be found in multi-cultural societies.”   [THE TEUTON AND THE ROMAN, abridged & condensed from Charles Kingsley's by R. Peterson, p.8]

Note: This is a truth certain and has been utilized as strategy even in our time, as seen in America’s immigration policy and its negation, as well. Policy is the necessary fruit of some degree of premeditation. Likewise, the destruction of policy or the substitution of re-interpreted, antithetical policy is premeditated. It bespeaks enemies within, whether by means of a “Trojan horse” or “home grown” or a combination of the two. The peril is that these enemies rule.

The strength of the Western Roman army had passsed into German hands, but the strength of Attila remained with his Huns. Oddly enough, the “show down” between the West Roman Empire and the Hunnish Empire of Attila occurred much to the west of both. In the Hun “rainbow coalition” of forces were East Goths, Slavs, and a batch of other non-Hunnish people. These people generally admired Attila as a great warrior, and felt that they would be participating in a great victory with much spoil. It had been so in the past.

What sent them west?  To the south were inviting riches but they were in the possession of a rather powerful kingdoms. The Eastern Roman Empire was still a force to be reckoned with. Further south beyond rugged mountains were Assyrians and their allies, who sometimes put pressure themselves in northerly martial salients, which were exploratory in nature.

The paying of tribute by these kingdoms had more appeal to Attila. The west was possessed by Germanic tribes with whom Attila had many skirmishes and pitched battles. Although the East Goths were substantially annexed, subdued and tribute-paying tribes, they were not all paying. Some were trouble-makers from Attila’s point of view–even cheeky. Attila had a fierce temper. He may have been angered by Goths further west, and the issue had become personal. Even the greatest generals are subject to vain imagings.

From Attila’s point of view the Goths were just a batch of squabbling tribes, as likely as not to fiercely fight one another as anyone else. He may have had considerable experience manipulating this tribal trait. If so, it would have lent to him considerable confidence that he could recruit and use German against German.

The Tribes of Israel had often fought amongst themselves. For some people, it is almost a trait and marker.

Consider: “Germanic Angles and Saxons and Jutes, Danes and Norsemen pressed on the borders of the decaying, no longer truly Roman, empire, and conquered and settled the British Isles. Germanic Francs conquered Gaul, and thereby changed its name to France. Germanic Burgundians established a separate realm west of the Rhine, which later became incorporated into France. And Germanic Goths destroyed Rome, and held Italy for a while, before their place was taken by the Germanic Lombards in the north, and by Germanic Normans, as a thin ruling nobility, in the south….But one weakness particularly worked against the Germanic peoples of that day, as it has done through the generations down to this present century. Although loyal to their own individual nations, the Germanic peoples could never seem to develop a sense of racial loyalty that would span petty national jealousies. Conquering the vast multi-ethnic population of latter-day Rome and the Western part of the once-powerful Roman empire, the Germanic victors were themselves eventually destroyed by their willingness to fight each other.

“When the Goths lost Italy, it was because of the persistent readiness of German nations to war against each other….”   [THE TEUTON AND THE ROMAN, supra, p.9]

I believe that Attila saw that trait in the Goths, just as Tiglath-pileser of Assyria saw it among the Israelites, when he invaded the Northern Kingdom “in the days of Pekah,” taking away Reubenites, Gadites, the half-tribe of Manasseh, as well as the tribes of “Asher, Issachar, and Zebulun, and distributed them in and on the borders of Assyria, where he built cities.”  [MISSING LINKS DISCOVERED IN ASSYRIAN TABLETS, E. Raymond Capt, p.67] There were other Assyrian kings and Babylonian, too, who saw this weakness. Would the Israelite people ever have been defeated if they were united and walked in ways pleasing to the Most High? No likely. The same might have obtained for the East Goths, and certainly for all the Goths.

What the Goths were like is often issued as fancy in the guise of thoughtful speculation. “Their language has been happily preserved to us in Ulfilas’ translation of the Scriptures. For these Goths, the greater number of them at least, were by this time Christians, or very nearly such…He had translated the Bible for them, and had constructed a Gothic alphabet for that purpose. He had omitted, however (prudently as he considered) the books of Kings, with their histories of the Jewish (sic) wars. The Goths, he held, were only too fond of fighting already, and ‘needed in that matter the bit, rather than the spur.’”  [THE TEUTON AND THE ROMAN, supra, p.37]

I personally suspect that the real reason that Bishop Ulfilas omitted the Book of Kings is that the Roman Catholic Church realised that the parallel between Goth and Israelite would not be missed. This ignorance would serve the interests of those who desired this vast pool of people to focus their religious faith to the shaping hand of Rome. Nor is this cover up limited to Rome, but is common today, which is why one sees the Israelites described as “Jews.” This is strikingly dishonest practice which calls into question the ethical and moral grounding of all religious figures who do so.

There is no anti-Christian burden born by the critic of the Roman Catholic Church. Plotting was no more uncommon in Rome then, than it is today in the “high politics” of the Federal American Empire. Consider:

“And what if he discovered (or thought that he discovered) that the Catholic Clergy, with Pope John at their head, were in the very same plot for bringing in the Emperor of Constantinople, on the grounds of religion; because he was persecuting the Arian Goths at Constantinople, and therefore would help them to persecute them in Italy?…”  [THE TEUTON AND THE ROMAN, supra,p79]

Around 450-451 A.D. Attila found himself in a puzzling state of mind. He had an urge to punish the Eastern Roman Empire at Constantinople and at the same time an urging from Honoria, Valentinian’s sister, to save her at Rome. Although the Roman adventure was temptingly easy, relatively, it could wait. Almost by impulse, Attila headed west, instead. I say that only because I don’t know the real reason. Yet, surely there were reasons.

Attila’s army flooded into Gaul. With him were many Germanic warriors. As they headed westward, the alarum must have gone forth, carried by hundreds of couriers, rallying the various Germanic tribes to this new threat. One can imagine some housewife demanding: “Thoric! Where are you going? You promised to cure the hides, fix the roof, salt the venison,” and on and on. And he replying: “I go fight Attila!”

Be that as it may, the forces gathered for the great test. Consider:

“At the great battle of Chalons, in the year AD 451, he (Attila) fought it out: Hun, Slav, Tartar, and Finn, backed by Gepid and Herule, East Goth and Lombard, against West Goth, Frank and Burgund, Roman and the Bretons of Armorica. Aetius shewed himself that day, as always, a general–the Marlborough of his time–and conquered. Attila and his hordes rolled away eastward, and into Italy for Rome.

“That is the Hunnenschlacht; ‘a battle,’ as Jornandes calls it, atrox, mulitplex, immane, pertinax. Antiquity, he says, tells of nothing like it. No man who had lost that sight could say that he had seen aught worth seeing.–A fight gigantic, supernatural in vastness and horror, and the legends which still hang about the place. You may see one of them in von Kaulbach’s immortal design–the ghosts of the Huns and the ghosts of the Germans rising from their graves on the battlenight in every year, to fight it over again in the clouds, while the country far and wide trembles at their ghostly hurrah. No wonder men remember that Hunnenschlacht. Many consider that it saved Europe; that it was one of the decisive battles of the world.”   [THE TEUTON AND THE ROMAN, supra,p.51]

Perhaps this is a bit romantic and overstated, yet it was the beginning of the end of Hunnish westward salients. There have been many massive battles fought in world history. “Who’s the number one warrior” has been as big an issue for men throughout history, as it is today in college and professional sports. You got to be a “football hero” to get a date with a “beautiful doll,” probably had its dim birth as a concept in the conquering warriors of old who took whatever woman they wanted. The modern version is merely a “gallantized guise” for the “spoils of war.”

One version of the unexpected death of Attila involved a “taken” wife. Maybe it is true. There certainly would be justice accorded him from his “spoil” personally, as well as being a symbol of justice due the endless number of women who fate was to be a spoil of war. Consider:

“But Attila was not ruined…Over and above his innumerable wives, he seized a beautiful German girl whose father he had killed. When his people came in the morning, the girl sat weeping; but Etzel, the scourge, lay dead in a pool of gore. She said that he had burst a blood-vessel. The Teutons whispered among themselves, that like a free-born Teuton, she had slain her tyrant…”  [THE TEUTON AND THE ROMAN, supra, p.52]

Given the alleged appearance of the Huns, it doesn’t seem reasonable that a Goth would be physically attracted to him. Still, he may have had “animal magnetism” which would completely undue the average woman–Goth or otherwise. If the German lass has a cruel or brutal father, Attila might be a welcomed relief. One doesn’t know. Still, on average I believe that it is unlikely that she would have had feelings for this man, who, afterall, killed her father. Faking tears of remorse and mourning may have been a precaution against sudden and merciless death at the hands of his lieutenants. Mourning becomes a woman in these circumstances.

Without the great, fierce Attila leading them, the days of grand sovereignty by the Huns over their coerced allies were numbered. He must have been a truly great general, possessed of some of the instinctual and inductively acquired battle savvy that Alexander the Great had. Was he ever tutored by Hunnish scholars, so to speak, on the art of war? No one knows. Given the culture, there seems to be limits to the possibilities. I would guess that he was a great athlete, as was Alexander the Great. No one will ever teach the battle schemes of Attila at some military college or other. He may even be held in derision. Yet, through the force of his personality and warriorship, he became a great historical figure, and briefly united under him fierce, quarrelsome and disparate tribes of people, who somehow fought as a team successfully. This is rare. That it ended soon after his death signifies the extraordinary power he wielded.

And the end? Consider: “And then the hordes broke up. Ardarich raised the Teuton Gepids and Ostrogoths. The Teutons who had followed Attila, turned on their Tartar conquerors, the only people who had ever subdued German men, and then only by force of overpowering numbers. At Netad, upon the great plain between the Drave and the Danube, they fought the second Hunnenschlacht, and the Germans conquered. Thirty thousand Huns fell on that dreadful day, and the rest streamed away into the heart of Asia, into the infinite unknown deserts from whence the foul miscreants had streamed forth, and left the Teutons masters of the world. The battle of Netad; that, and not Chalons, to my mind, was the saving battle of Europe.

“So Rome was saved; but only for a few years. The decadent Valentinian rewarded Aetius for defending Europe, by stabbing with his own hand in his own palace, the hero of Chalons;…”  [THE TEUTON AND THE ROMAN. supra, p.52]

The figure in ”thirty thousand Huns fell” seems almost Biblical.

Many men love war. The thing they love in times kills not only them, perhaps, but their people’s prosperity certainly. Men such as Alexander the Great and Attila start their conquering ways on the backs of their own fierce warriors. In time deaths take a toll on the original human stock which provided the great leader his victories. Substitutions must be made which are as close as possible to the originals. As this is not possible, the quality of the fighting force loses, as cohersive spirit is lost. Different people from different cultures will not think alike. In times this will result in increasing dysfunction. Internal disputes will mount. The great leader will have to spend much more time making peace within his array of soldiers, then in preparing thoughtfully where he is going next and why he is doing it and what good results should flow from the decision. In short thinking ahead becomes secondary to bandaging internal disputes. This is true then, and it is true now.

Must people are not aware that in Vietnam, the incidents of “fragging” was 100% black American troops dropping a grenade (or similar deadly weapon) into a white 2nd lieutenant’s tent (or that of 1st lieutenant, captain’s, or major’s). No doubt white sargeants were killed the same way. Others may have been shot “accidentily” or otherwise, out in the field or jungle. In the brigs racial strife was common, resulting in more than one pitched battle within these confines. Was the defeat of the U.S. effort in Vietnam doomed by the military’s diversity? Will the well-trained U.S. force which is a citadel of diversity prevail in Iraq? Hard to say. In Vietnam the enemy was homogeneous, and the U.S. lost. In Iraq the enemy is more diverse, including Kurds and other ethnic groups. This was why it was difficult to rule by anyone other than a “strongman” such as Saddam Hussein. When the U.S. then killed the agent of stability there, Saddam, and substituted a “democracy,” instability was the new king.

If the U.S. can find another Attila to place over the Iraqi citizens, none will dare to complain. Attila was a man who knew how to deal with diversity. America is led by people who imagine thay do. John Lennon is their songbird. Help! I need somebody!

Downnlaced, 2008.