Motivation in War: The Experience of Common Soldiers in Old-Regime Europe, by Ilya Berkovich

Abstract

Why do soldiers fight? Where the armies of Europe’s ancien régime were concerned, the existing scholarship is clear on this point. Life in an eighteenth-century army was apparently harsh and tightly controlled. Common soldiers were exhaustively drilled until they became a cog in a machine (a redolent image of the Enlightenment), leaving no scope for individuality or initiative. They were required to obey their superiors at all costs, or face arbitrary martial law. If they tried to flee the enemy or desert, they could expect to be executed. In a rare example of consensus between military and cultural history, Foucault described a similar state of affairs: the disciplinary regime of the military was a testing ground for forms of social power that would later be applied to total institutions such as the prison, the factory or the school. Ilya Berkovich’s new book takes issue with this interpretation. Building on more recent research on militaries across Europe, and using an impressively broad range of quantitative and qualitative sources in several languages, he presents a very different picture of armies in this period. Soldiers did not just enlist because they were desperate, tricked or coerced: they were attracted by the prospect of a good bounty, regular pay and food, and promises of travel, adventure and social advancement. Life in the army could certainly be tough, but common soldiers did not live lives of oppression, at the mercy of their superiors: there was space for negotiation and even answering back. Military law was not utterly arbitrary: drawing parallels with the current historiography of crime, Berkovich suggests that soldiers were able to use it to their own ends, and that their lives were often governed by a common culture of honour that they willingly signed up to. Finally, this was not ‘the age of the deserter’ (p. 57) and deserters were not systematically executed: desertion rates were variable, serial bounty-jumpers inflate the statistics, methods of apprehending deserters were ineffective and punishments varied in severity.