How Chance and Stupidity Have Changed History

The Hinge Factor

Erik Durschmied

• Publisher: Arcade
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781628726435
• eBook ISBN: 9781628726442
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

From the Trojan Horse to a photograph snapped in Vietnam, world history has been shaped as much by chance and error as by courage and heroism. Despite impossible odds, invincible armies fall in bitter defeat to weaker opponents. How and why does this happen? What decides the fate of battle? In this fascinating book, Erik Durschmied takes us through the major conflicts of history—from Agincourt to the Civil War, from Crimea to the Gulf War—and reveals how, in war, it is the improbable and the inconceivable that determine events.Writing with the style and flair that made him an award-winning war correspondent, Durschmied explores the fistful of nails that could have won Waterloo for Napoleon; the barrel of schnapps that proved disastrous for an Austrian emperor; and the three cigars that changes the course of Antietam; and many other instances when chance decided history's path. Conflicts are decided by the caprice of weather, erroneous intelligence, unlikely heroism, strange coincidence, or individual incompetence—in short, by the unpredictable "hinge factor."Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade imprint, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in history--books about World War II, the Third Reich, Hitler and his henchmen, the JFK assassination, conspiracies, the American Civil War, the American Revolution, gladiators, Vikings, ancient Rome, medieval times, the old West, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

1

A Wooden Horse

Troy, 1184 BC

‘Do not believe this horse. Whatever it may be,

I fear the Greeks, even when bringing gifts.’

Virgil’s Aeneid, 20 BC

The year is 1184 BC.

A god descends from heaven; disguised as a swan he lies with Leda. Their love results in a daughter, Helen, a maiden so fair that every prince desires her for his wife. She chooses Menelaus, King of Sparta. One day a handsome young prince comes to visit them. He is Paris, son of King Priam of Troy, a fortified city on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean. Paris is royally received but does not reveal the purpose of his visit.

Before Paris left his native Troy, King Priam had been warned that his son would bring ruin to his country. And so it came to be. The high drama began the day Paris was visited by three goddesses, Aphrodite, Hera and Athena. They handed him a golden apple and asked him to choose the fairest among them. Hera promised to make him Lord over Asia and Europe, Athena said that she would lead him to great victory over the Greeks, and Aphrodite offered him the loveliest maiden on Earth. The Judgement of Paris went to Aphrodite, goddess of love. She told him about Helen of Sparta.

While Menelaus leaves for Crete to do war, Paris takes Helen to Troy. It is not certain if she follows for love or by force. On his return from Crete, King Menelaus calls upon all the Greek heroes to help him punish the wicked deed and lay Troy in ashes. Under the leadership of Agamemnon,¹ the Greek Army is strong. But so is Troy. King Priam has brave sons, the bravest is Hector,² who has only one equal, the champion of the Greeks, Achilles. For years on end they fight it out, and for many years victory wavers. Once again, a fierce battle rages, when Helen appears on the ramparts. Her face is so lovely that all fighting stops, only Achilles and Hector continue in single combat. Athena hands her spear to Achilles who drives it into Hector’s throat. ‘Return my body to my father,’ begs the dying Trojan hero.

‘I would that I could make myself devour your raw flesh for the evil you have brought upon me,’ replies Achilles. The Greek warrior then drags the slain Hector behind his chariot around the walls of Troy.³ Aphrodite gives Paris a poisoned arrow. Paris takes aim and shoots it into the Greek’s only vulnerable spot, his heel. Achilles dies. Then another arrow strikes Paris, and he dies.

But Troy holds out. After a siege which has lasted ten years the war has reached a stalemate. Unless the Greeks can break down the walls they will never conquer the city fortress and must accept defeat. Odysseus, the cleverest of the Greeks, devises a cunning plan: to build a wooden horse, slightly taller than the Scaean Gate. Then hide Greek warriors inside the horse, and leave it standing outside the walls of Troy. That done, the Greeks set sail, but hide their fleet behind the nearest island. To make sure the Trojans fall for his ruse, Odysseus leaves Sinon the Greek behind who convinces the Trojans that they must pull the horse into the city as a votive offering to Athena.

King Priam falls for the Greek trickery and orders the horse to be brought in. For this, the Trojans will have to break a hole into their walls. Troy’s chief priest Laocoön warns his king: ‘I fear the Greeks, even when bringing gifts.’

Priam, a ruthless potentate, is infuriated that a mere priest dares to question the will of his king. Yet Laocoön is not the only one who fears deceit. The king’s beautiful daughter, Cassandra, stands up to her father and echoes the priest’s warning. ‘Oh miserable people, poor fools, you do not understand at all your evil fate.’

The judicious counsel by the philosopher-priest nearly convinces the Trojans, when destiny takes a hand. Two serpents rush from the sea to crush Laocoön and his two sons. Fate comes to pass, a doom destined for so many prudent sages over the next three millenniums. People never listen to their prophets, rather they watch them being silenced and stride blindly forth to disaster. The Trojans remove the lintel stone from the Scaean Gate, which brings their walls tumbling down. They drag the horse to Athena’s temple and celebrate a great feast. ‘With song and great rejoicing, they brought death in, treachery and destruction.’

In the middle of the night Sinon unlocks a secret door beneath the Wooden Horse. Odysseus and his warriors steal out while the rest of the Greek host rushes in through the breach and sets the city on fire. By the time the Trojans rise from their drunken stupor, blood flows in rivulets. This is not fighting, it is butchery. Desperate men bear down on each other, killing before they are killed. Trojans take off their own armour and put on that of the dead Greeks. Greeks, believing they are being joined by their own units, pay for that error with their lives. From the rooftops, Trojan women hurl burning beams on their attackers, a palace tower crushes a great number of Greeks. But the contest is unequal, too many Trojans have already died and the Greeks smash their way into the palace. King Priam is brutally struck down in front of his wives and children. With his death the Trojans lose heart and the Greeks rape, pillage and plunder. They kill the men, hurl the children from the battlements, and carry the women into slavery. Troy dies.

Only Aeneas,⁴ Aphrodite’s son, escapes the bloodshed. He crosses the sea and the winds push his vessel onto a distant shore, at the mouth of the River Tiber. There he founds a town which is to become Rome, the city state that will eventually defeat the conquerors of Troy.

Ultimate justice shrouded in the veil of mythology.

What really took place that night, three thousand years ago, we can only guess. ‘To the gods I owe this woeful war’, proclaimed a downcast Priam.⁵

We may forget about an active participation by the gods, and turn towards more strategic, military and economic aspects. In the late nineteenth century, a German amateur archaeologist, Heinrich Schliemann, discovered ruins of what may have been Priam’s Troy, a fortified city founded by the warrior tribe of Phrygians on the Mound of Hissarlik.⁶ From its geographic location, we can assume that Greek and Trojan maritime ambitions clashed. Vital control over the Hellespont (today’s Dardanelles), the Aegean Sea, and with it, the trade routes along the Mediterranean, was at stake.

As for the ten-year siege, no siege could have possibly lasted ten continuous years; without harvesting seasonal grain, armies on both sides would have starved. Therefore, the war must have been a series of raids, and possibly actions fought by sea.

A vital factor which should not to be overlooked is the warning by the philosopher Laocoön, which, assuming that Troy was run by a despot, shows opposition to tyrannical rule, a trend carried to new summits by the greatest of Greek philosophers, Socrates, and his disciples.

Ten years passed and nothing happened. Suddenly, everything was resolved in a single instant. The Wooden Horse is certainly not a figment of fiction;⁷ ruse has always been employed during the siege of fortified places, the simplest way to put the vigilance of the defenders to sleep and breech the walls. Thus, the story of Odysseus’ Horse is something tangible, a conquest by stratagem.

Strange are the circular paths of history. The Greeks learned from the Trojans, Trojan refugees founded Rome, and the Romans conquered Greece, only to adopt its culture.

The Hinge Factor at Troy was victory by stratagem.

¹ The remains of his castle can still be seen near Corinth.

² Hector, in ancient history, is on a par with Julius Caesar and Charlemagne

³ With the death of his hero, Hector, Homer ends his Iliad, the rest comes from Virgil’s Aeneid, written a thousand years after the fall of Troy

⁴ Hero of Aeneid, written by Virgil to glorify the power of Rome.

⁵ Homer, who wrote around 850 BC, ends his Iliad with the death of Hector. The best source of the Fall of Troy comes from Virgil’s Aeneid, written a thousand years after the Trojan War, and embellished with vivid tales which had been passed down orally over the ages. Perhaps a Queen of Sparta was really abducted by the Trojans in a previous raid, which led to the punitive action by the Greeks. In the fifth century BC, Herodotus, the Father of History, tells us that the Trojans assured the Greek envoys that Queen Helen was not in Troy, but that the gods wished for war.

⁶ Located on the Asian side of the Dardanelles.

⁷ Pausanias (second century AD) in Descriptions of Greece states that the horse was a war machine or siege catapult.

2

The Loss of the True Cross

The Horns of Hattin, 4 July 1187

‘I shall not lay down my arms

until there is no more infidel on earth.’

Sultan Saladin, recorded by Beha ed-Din

Ibn Shedad, 1187¹

Spread out before the Frankish host lay a desert, hot and dry, the Plain of Baruf. To venture into it during the heat of the day would mean courting certain death for a great army of iron-clad and chain-mailed knights. Yet Guy de Lusignan, King of Jerusalem, ordered them to do just that. A tall man approached the king. He was dressed in chain mail covered by a white cloak with the embroidered crimson Cross of the Holy Quest. Around his waist, dangling from a leather belt, was his long, straight sword. The baron’s head was protected by the type of bullet shaped helmet with nasal guard worn by Crusader knights. He was a heroic figure of medieval history: Raymond III, Count of Tripoli. ‘My liege, why are you ordering your host to move into these barren lands?’

‘To succour your lady in distress.’ The king referred to a message received from the Lady Eschiva, Countess of Tripoli, besieged by the Saracens inside the walls of Raymond’s fortress of Tiberias, situated on the Lake of Galilee.

Raymond, who knew that the leader of the Turks, the Sultan Saladin, would always conform to Saracen honour and never hurt a woman of rank, also understood that the same Saladin was as smart as a desert fox. He wished for nothing more than to lure the Frankish army onto a hasty rescue mission that could only then lead to disaster. That’s why Saladin had allowed the messenger, dispatched by Lady Eschiva, to pass without hindrance. ‘Sire,’ replied Raymond, ‘if you wish to do combat with Saladin so, let this be near our fortress of Acre. If matters go ill we can count on the town to march to our rescue. On the other hand, if God is with us, we can blunt the Saracens.’

‘Blunt...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Prologue
• Preface to the 2016 Edition
• 1. A Wooden Horse: Troy, 1184 BC
• 2. The Loss of the True Cross: The Horns of Hattin, 4 July 1187
• 3. A Rabble with Bare Feet: Agincourt, 25 October 1415
• 4. A Barrel of Schnapps: Karansebes, 20 September 1788
• 5. A Fistful of Nails: Waterloo, 18 June 1815
• 6. The Fourth Order: Balaclava, 25 October 1854
• 7. Three Cigars: Antietam, 17 September 1862
• 8. Two Counts and One Prince: Königgrätz, 3 July 1866
• 9. A Fair Fight: Spioen Kop, 24 January 1900
• 10. A Slap on the Face: Tannenberg, 28 August 1914
• 11. The Sting of a Bee: Tanga, 5 November 1914
• 12. Der Halte Befehl: France, 21 May 1940
• 13. A Shark on the Loose: North Atlantic, 27 May 1941
• 14. The Sorge Enigma: Moscow, 6 December 1941
• 15. One Man’s Death: Vietnam, 31 January 1968
• 16. And the Wall Came Tumbling Down: Berlin, 9 November 1989
• 17. The Zero Factor: The Gulf, 17 January 1991
• Epilogue
• Bibliography