Page 75 - Conflitti Militari e Popolazioni Civili - Tomo I

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MILITARY CONFLICTS AND CIVIL POPuLATIONS

PIERO DEL NEGRO *

in Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift juxtaposes and, in fact, contrasts two war
scenes, which seem relevant not only to the twenties of the 18 century, when the work
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was created, but a very, very long time frame, even if it will cost me the due effort to
provide explanations and chronological articulation, as i shall endeavor to achieve in
these notes, which just fall within the subject of the 34 Congress of the International
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Military History Commission. On one hand [we have] an arid list of weapons and war-
time phases, a detached nomenclature of military technology, a war which may be re-
ferred to as “objective” or “rational”, a war fostered and led by princes, generals and
bureaucrats in uniforms barely following consolidated patterns of warfare and number
of soldiers deployed (many soldiers, horses, battleships, pieces of ordnance, etc), a war
celebrated in the history of power starting from big rupestrian inscriptions left to us by
Achaemenidians, the King of Kings of Persia, a war depicted in the modern times and,
above all, by war painters, who followed their sovereigns and commanders of armies
and fleets: “cannons, culverin, muskets, rifles, pistols, cannonballs, gunpowder, sabers,
bayonets, battles, sieges, retreats, attacks, landmines, countermines, bombardments and
battleships.”
On the other hand, [we witness] an ever pressing sequence of “war disasters,” cap-
tured by some of the ever-lasting engravings of the Protestant Reform period such as
the Four Knights of the Apocalypse by Albrecht Dürer or by the bloodcurdling cycles
of Jacques Callot, one century later, and Francisco Goya, three centuries later, or by
Pablo Picasso’s Guernica at a time closer to us. A war that one suffers personally from
rather than a war experienced by the people, especially, without uniform, a war that was
described “subjectively” among some of the most famous novels of the 18 century by
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people who participated as subordinates or in marginal roles, in short, without having
any understanding of big battles such as the War of Waterloo narrated by Stendhal in
Certosa di Parma [Charterhouse of Parma] from Fabrizio del Dongo’s standpoint or
Austerlitz War immortalized in Tolstoy’s War and Peace through the narrations of Pierre
Bezuchov or wars as backgrounds to the picaresque events of subordinates, who can be
acknowledged in Ruzante’s and Simplicissimus’ masks, in short, a war as it is seen by
“those at the bottom” or from outside: “the moaning of those dying, blown-up limbs,
smoke, uproars, confusion, fighters crushed under the hooves of horses, escape and pur-
suit, victory, fields covered by the dead bodies defenseless against the voracity of dogs,
wolves and scavengers, plunderage, stripping, rape, fire and destruction”. 1

∗ Professor of Military History at University of Padua. Member of the CIHM Board. Member of the Italian
Military History Commission.
1 Jonathan Swift, Viaggi di Gulliver in vari paesi lontani del mondo, [Gulliver’s travels to the remot-
est lands of the World] Milan, Rizzoli, 1975 [1 ed. 1726], p. 439.
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