BMCR 2008.11.32, Keith Yellin, Battle Exhortation: The Rhetoric

Keith Yellin, Battle Exhortation: The Rhetoric of Combat Leadership.
Studies in Rhetoric/Communication.  Columbia, S.C.:  University of
South Carolina Press, 2008.  Pp. x, 191.  ISBN 9781570037351.  $34.95.


Reviewed by Gregory S. Aldrete, University of Wisconsin-Green Bay
([email protected])
Word count:  2476 words
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This installment in the Studies in Rhetoric/Communication series by the
University of South Carolina Press is a study of the speeches that
commanders have given to their troops on the eve of battle. In what is
a very short book, Keith Yellin ambitiously attempts to analyze
pre-battle orations across a vast span of time, cultures, and contexts,
ranging from 5th century B.C. Greek hoplites to near-contemporary
examples of American officers in Iraq.  The source materials that he
draws upon are similarly diverse, and include firmly historically
documented exhortations such as the printed D-Day message distributed
by Eisenhower to the invasion troops, fictional speeches in works of
literature such as Henry V's speeches in Shakespeare, and even satiric
ones such as that delivered by Bill Murray to a group of recruits in
the comedic film Stripes. Yellin's book is a welcome addition to the
fields of military history and rhetoric in that it laudably calls
attention to a potentially rich subject that, as Yellin notes, has been
underexplored by scholars in these fields. The book makes some useful
observations, but the generally uncritical nature of Yellin's use of
the primary sources at times undercuts the reliability of his
conclusions. Coupled with the sometimes superficial level of analysis
(dictated by the wide-ranging scope of his inquiry combined with the
brevity of the book), this results in a work that is predominantly more
of a suggestion of directions for future inquiry than a definitive
study of the topic.

The book is organized into four chapters, the first three of which
examine general aspects of pre-battle oration while the fourth focuses
more narrowly on American military exhortations over the last
half-decade.

Chapter One, "Bracing for Combat," asserts that the habit of commanders
attempting to inspire their troops prior to combat is a universal and
timeless phenomenon.  This argument is made by citing scattered
examples of such orations, including, from the pre-modern period, Moses
to the Hebrews in the Old Testament, Agamemnon to the Greeks in the
Iliad, Caesar to his legionaries in de Bello Gallico, Cortes to the
conquistadors in Bernal Diaz de Castillo's account, and Elizabeth I's
Tilbury speech before the Spanish Armada. While the basic point that
officers often address the troops before battle is likely true, it
might have been more compelling if so many of the examples employed had
not been fictitious or of dubious accuracy.  This chapter next very
briefly surveys the treatment of this topic by rhetoricians and
military theorists from Quintilian and Vegetius to the present, and
emphasizes that while the subject of morale has drawn considerable
attention, this specific context has been relatively neglected.  Yellin
cites a useful typology of rhetorical appeals identified by the 17th
century military theorist Raimondo Montecuccoli ranging from "Our cause
is just" to "Death ends all suffering."

The chapter ends with a case study of a "defining exemplar" which
illustrates various types of battle exhortation, the battle of Mantinea
as described by Thucydides.  Not content with Thucydides, however,
Yellin includes a lengthy imaginative reconstruction of what a
hypothetical "Spartan regimental commander" might have said and done to
rally his troops at various points as the battle unfolded. This example
is used to illustrate that there are various types of exhortation that
may occur before and during a battle, including not just verbal
encouragement from the top down, but horizontally among the men
themselves.  While the individual points derived from this case study
may be valid, a methodology which relies on an imaginative recreation
and a historical account of questionable accuracy is problematic.
Yellin does admit that there are serious questions about the historical
reliability of the pre-battle speeches described by ancient authors
such as Thucydides, but asserts that the accuracy of any given speech
is irrelevant because the generals would have been familiar with a
standard set of rhetorical tropes for battle orations from their own
study of earlier authors and so would have crafted their own actual
pre-battle speeches to resemble the (probably) fictitious ones that
they had read.  While it is certainly true that there were most likely
similarities among and repeated imagery in ancient battle speeches,
this circular argument is not very reassuring if one desires to know
what a particular general said on a specific occasion.  After a brief
discussion of this issue, Yellin rather cavalierly dismisses any doubts
about the reliability of these accounts with the assertion "because
historical narratives have often proven trustworthy, we should be slow
to dismiss historical speeches out of hand."  (p.22)  Even in
rhetorical terms, this is a rather weak argument, but it is all we get
in the way of source criticism.

Chapter Two, "Indoctrination," focuses on four examples of battle
exhortation: the famous admonition of a Spartan mother to her son to
return "with your shield or on it" recorded by Plutarch, Henry V's
Harfleur and Agincourt orations in Shakespeare, George C. Scott's
rendition of Patton's address to his troops in the movie Patton, and
Bill Murray's speech to a group of unpromising recruits in Stripes.
Yellin argues that these examples both further illustrate the standard
tropes of battle oration and demonstrate that the audience for such
speeches includes not only soldiers but society in general.  He asserts
that battle speeches are such a widely-known phenomenon that the
general public has been socialized to immediately recognize this form
of discourse and to be familiar with its conventions. At least for
modern American society, this conclusion seems sound if unremarkable.
As the author himself briefly notes, however, the form and substance of
these sorts of rhetorical appeals are probably most familiar to a
modern American audience from the context of competitive team sports,
where the coach's pre-game speech and the rituals of team bonding are
widely known both from personal experience and innumerable depictions
in the media.

Chapter Three, "Tensions," which investigates a set of factors that
must be successfully mediated in order to produce the most effective
battlefield exhortation, contains some of the more subtle and
interesting ideas of the book.  For instance, Yellin considers how an
officer must walk a fine line between appearing too aloof from the
troops he commands and being overly familiar with them. Using a variety
of historical examples, Yellin illustrates how where an officer falls
on this spectrum can greatly affect the manner in which the soldiers
respond to his rhetorical appeals and whether these exhortations
succeed or fail. Similarly, using Julius Caesar as an exemplar, he
analyzes the tension that commanders must negotiate between driving the
troops hard and judiciously indulging them, and how this relationship
influences when inspirational appeals are made and what form they take.
Other tensions examined include mediating the level of violence of
soldiers and appeals which manipulate the concept of one's reputation.
Overall this is one of the best parts of the book, largely because it
focuses on a few specific topics and explores them thoroughly.

The final chapter, "Evolutions," somewhat misleadingly promises to
analyze the effects of "environment and audience" on battle
exhortation.  By "environment," however, Yellin does not mean the
physical setting, but rather the psychological situation.  Similarly by
"audience," he is referring more to the mental state and attitudes of
the soldiers than to truly disparate groups of people.  In this
chapter, he limits his examples to the United States military from W.W.
II to the present.  As a study of changes within the American armed
forces over the last several decades and how these have affected the
sort of appeals that officers can make of their men, this is an
effective and interesting chapter.  By restricting his focus to a
specific military over a short time period, Yellin achieves a depth of
analysis and degree of conviction in this chapter that are lacking in
some of the earlier ones. Yellin is himself a former U.S. Marine Corps
captain and is clearly on his home ground in this chapter. Unlike in
the first two chapters, Yellin here also makes use of examples of
failed as well as successful battle exhortations, and, as is often the
case, the negative examples are more revealing than the positive ones.
This chapter does the best job of flipping around the discourse and
examining the reception of battle oration among those whom are its
target.  Such an analysis is no doubt easier to provide in this section
because its contemporary focus means that the soldiers' reactions can
be more readily obtained, but at least some attention given to the
reception that the speeches cited in the first two chapters received
among their audiences would have been welcome.

One major issue that is almost entirely ignored but that would have
been fundamental to the effectiveness of battle exhortation is how
physical, environmental factors would have played a significant role in
dictating how, or even if, a commander could indulge in the sort of
battle exhortation that this book studies.  For a great many of the
examples given, there are serious practical questions as to how many of
the troops at any given oration could actually have heard the general's
inspiring words.  Over the last few decades, John Keegan's "face of
battle" concept has enjoyed considerable popularity among military
historians, with its call for an emphasis on the experience of the
average soldier and on how physical, environmental, and psychological
factors affect the outcomes of battles.  Yellin makes a single stray
reference to Keegan concerning his comments on commanders' speeches,
but the book would benefit from applying a Keeganesque analysis to
pre-battle orations.

Certainly movies set in the ancient, medieval, and pre-modern worlds
have accustomed us to the scene of a heroic commander firing up the
assembled troops with a rousing oration, and on the surface, many
primary source accounts appear to support this impression.  There is no
doubt that it is an appealing image, but it may well represent more of
an idealized fantasy than a practical reality.  Consider an ancient
army of 20,000 or more soldiers gathered together to hear their
general's speech.  Assuming that the men were not muttering among
themselves, could even the most quietly attentive hoplite or legionary
situated somewhere in the middle of these massed ranks have really
heard anything but intermittent snatches of his general's words over
the incessant background noise of the clinking and jangling of the
men's armor and weapons as they shifted uncomfortably in their full
battle equipment, the stamping and snorting of hundreds or thousands of
nervous horses, the flapping and cracking of banners and flags
overhead, and any ambient sounds produced by the environment or the
weather such as wind, rain, rustling leaves, running water, waves
breaking, and so on?  Finally, how many of his men could the general
reach with his unamplified voice?  The usual limit on projecting
coherent complex speech with the human voice is around 100 yards in the
direction in which a speaker is facing. Even in an ideal situation with
no wind, what percentage of the notional 20,000 soldiers could have
been within the range of their general's voice? Of course the general
might have delivered multiple versions of his speech to different
segments of his army and summaries of his words might have been passed
from man to man or throughout the army by the officers, but the popular
image of the ancient general exciting his troops with his words just
before yelling "charge" and rushing forward is simply not practicable.
Although Yellin several times mentions environmental constraints on
battle orations, he never properly discusses them, and throughout the
book seems to assume that the soldiers in the pre-modern examples that
he discusses all really heard their commander's carefully composed
words.

Another criticism, which is really an issue of semantics, is that while
the book claims to be a study of a universal phenomenon and includes a
great many generalizing statements about soldiers, commanders, and
their attitudes toward combat, the book in reality more narrowly
focuses on the western military tradition and a set of attitudes and
assumptions shared by civilizations within the western cultural
tradition. Other than a brief reference to Zulus dancing and chanting
and one quotation from a native American serving with Custer's scouts,
the examples are all drawn from armies and situations within the
history of western civilization.  As a study of battle oration
specifically within the western tradition, the book is fine, but if the
book intends to make a more universal argument (as it seems to claim),
Yellin needs to draw upon a broader range of texts and examples
including non-western militaries and battles.  Such an analysis
incorporating, for example, speeches given to Japanese samurai drawing
upon the Bushido code, or the words of Native American military leaders
might provide interesting contrasts with and/or supplements to the list
of possible motivational appeals that Yellin discusses.

I am reviewing this book for an audience of classicists, and there are
a few issues that are probably of more concern to this group than for
other readers at whom this book is targeted. The fairly uncritical use
of ancient primary sources and the casual acceptance of ancient
pre-battle speeches as being representative of what was actually said
on those occasions have already been mentioned.  Admittedly there is no
way around this gap in the sources, but there should be more
recognition that an exhortation that Julius Caesar gave to his
legionaries before a battle would not have been the same as the version
of that speech which he wrote down much later for dissemination to a
completely different audience for totally distinct rhetorical purposes.
Also, in a few instances, the translations from ancient texts contain
some unfortunate word choices.  For example, there are repeated
mentions of ancient Greek "knights," which surely conjures up
misleading mental images of heavily armored medieval horsemen to a
general audience unfamiliar with ancient Greek warfare.  Similarly,
there are numerous references to Spartan hoplites finding inspiration
by hearing, above the roar of battle, the distant, reassuring sound of
"the pipes." This inevitably evokes images of bagpipes rather than
flutes, an impression which is not helped by immediately following this
passage with an account of a W.W. I  Scots Fusilier whose
disintegrating unit rallied when they likewise heard the sound of "the
pipes."

Yellin's book offers the generalization that in many cultures across a
long span of time verbal exhortation has been a standard aspect of
preparing soldiers for battle, and for encouraging them once engaged in
combat. While the book emphasizes such broad similarities, conversely,
its most enlightening insights are often made when it observes specific
differences in rhetorical discourse that take place within a narrower
context, as in the last chapter.  Its most important contribution is to
draw deserved attention to battle exhortation as a historically and
culturally significant form of communication that has been relatively
neglected by military historians and that has often been marginalized
within the study of rhetoric.