War is bad. Probably you already knew that. But it’s odd, looking back through the bloody 20^th century, to reflect on how our distaste for it is inextricably bound up with the scale of the slaughter in recent times. In fact it wasn’t any better being bayoneted, speared or whacked with a stone axe in a very small-scale combat. As George Macdonald Fraser put it in his wonderful memoir of Burma in the later stages of World War II “the size and importance of an action is no yardstick of its personal unpleasantness.”

I’m reminded of this truth in contemplating the “Noble Train of Artillery”, captured British guns and supplies that arrived at Washington’s headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts on January 27, 1776, and made a signal difference to the Revolutionary War in New England, forcing the British to evacuate Boston early that spring. It was an amazing feat of logistics, and endurance, by Colonel Henry Knox and a very determined band of men, to take the captured weapons and munitions from Fort Ticonderoga in New York through the winter mud, snow and sleet to Massachusetts.

According to Google Maps, it’s only 223 miles and could be driven in four hours 14 minutes. But of course there weren’t Google Maps back then, or cars, or paved roads. They had to disassemble the guns, haul the bits and pieces on sleds, load them into makeshift boats, refloat them when the sank (which a “gundalow” carrying the whole lot did in Lake George, fortunately in very shallow water), thicken river ice by pouring water on top of it, and generally not give up when cold, wet, dirty, frustrated, discouraged, hungry and miserable.

The total load weighed about 60 tons, and consisted of 43 big iron or brass cannons, six “cohorns” (small tactical mortars), eight big mortars, and two primitive howitzers. In the world wars, with their thousand-gun barrages, it would have been considered a feeble battery even if composed of 20^th-century weapons. Back then it altered the regional balance of power.

Thus the American Revolutionary War was tiny by our standards. Total American battle deaths were under 7,000 and the British total was even smaller. (The French was larger, around 10,000, but mostly at sea.) Somehow the Dutch lost 500, on the American side. Mind you, disease claimed an enormously higher proportion of combatants back then, accounting for about 90% of all military deaths. Even so, total losses by all parties were smaller than either side lost in the 1916 Battle of the Somme alone. Yet each of those deaths could be as disagreeable as any that happened on the Somme. Indeed, in Washington Square in Philadelphia are the unidentified remains of thousands of American soldiers who died of disease and wounds, many doubtless horribly.

They were also enormously important. The scale of a battle is no yardstick of its significance either. Those 50,000 or so who died on the American side helped change world history vastly for the better. So, indeed, did those exhausted hungry men with freezing wet feet who helped Henry Knox get those vital cannons to Washington in January 1776.

January 26 was a bad day for General Charles George “Chinese” Gordon. The Mahdi’s forces cut off his head as a trophy and threw his desecrated corpse into a well in 1885.

It happened in Sudan, where Gordon had served as a civilian administrator and made himself very unpopular by the culturally imperialist practice of suppressing the slave trade. He also managed to defuse a serious revolt through negotiations. (Before that, he had earned one of his nicknames by leading the “Ever Victorious Army” of mostly Chinese soldiers with European officers that helped put down the Taiping Rebellion and earned him the Imperial Yellow Jacket as well as the Order of the Bath.)

Exhausted by his long efforts to impose peace, order and liberty, Gordon had returned to England, though he found time to travel to Palestine and argue that Golgotha was not situated where generally claimed. But with another revolt in Sudan, led by one Mohammed Ahmed who claimed to be the “Mahdi” (the chap Iran’s former president hourly expected to emerge from a well and smite the infidels) Gordon was persuaded to go back and assume the governor-generalship.

After evacuating women, children and the sick, Gordon fortified Khartoum against the Mahdi’s forces, rather annoying the British government which wanted the whole business to go away. The siege began on March 18, and as the defenders held out heroically month after month the British government finally had to do something less inglorious than abandon the Sudanese to Islamism. So they sent a relief column with rather feeble instructions not to rescue or resupply Gordon. It arrived on January 28 to find the city had fallen two days earlier and so had Gordon. And about 10,000 civilians and members of the garrison slaughtered by the Mahdi’s forces.

The would-be Mahdi died soon afterward without redeeming anyone or anything visibly, and the British eventually reconquered Sudan in 1898.

It didn’t help very much, as slavery still exists there. But at least they tried. And for all his faults, Gordon embodied much that was best about the spirit of Victorian England including a strong benevolent as well as courageous and effective streak even in its imperialism

The self-proclaimed Mahdi can make no such claim.

Can we just stay in Rome for a bit? It’s not so bad. The Romans had indoor toilets, aqueducts that carried over a million cubic metres of water a day into Rome alone, built roads that were still in use in the 19^th century, and constructed buildings and ships bigger than anyone would manage until the Victorians, most of which were better-looking besides.

Of course eventually their government got too big, interventionist and spendthrift. But we can hardly heckle them on that score, now can we?

Anyway, in yesterday’s item we stabbed Caligula to death then waved him around as a cautionary example of a vainglorious insane vicious tyrant. Well, today we’re going to replace him with Claudius.

I find Claudius hard to assess because my main impression of him comes from the TV version of Robert Graves’ revisionist novel I, Claudius. Traditionally Claudius was seen as a crippled, stammering, drooling half-wit. Which seems to be why he was originally put on the throne by a devious group of conspirators who made the Borgias look like a church study group, as an easy-to-manipulate front chump. It didn’t help that he was the first emperor chosen by the Praetorian Guard instead of the Senate.

Graves tried to change this impression and did a brilliant job, especially with the brilliant, engaging Derek Jacobi playing him on TV. Graves, and Jacobi, depicted him as being instead wily and humane, playing the fool to escape assassination during the reigns of Tiberius and Caligula and, indeed, after becoming emperor himself. If so, it didn’t work indefinitely; after 13 years as emperor he was duly assassinated at the behest of his villainous 4^th wife Agrippina in order to inflict her mad evil son Nero on Rome as emperor (see my piece on Caligula for the strange service such rulers perform once safely assassinated or, in Nero’s case, forced to commit suicide to avoid that fate.)

Derek Jacobi is almost impossible not to like on screen. But one actor does not an emperor make. In real life Claudius almost certainly was a great deal smarter than people thought, which admittedly wouldn’t be hard. That he was assassinated in the end proves nothing; in his situation it was pretty much bound to happen sooner or later and he staved it off longer than expected. Especially if, as he had as a young man, you wrote a history of Rome’s Civil Wars that told much of the unpleasant truth about many powerful people’s recent ancestors. But he was also widely viewed as capricious, sometimes cruel and easily dominated by the women in his life. And while he appears to have been a reasonably competent administrator he was also meddlesome.

One final public note: It was Claudius who added southern Britain to the Roman Emperor, actually conquering the territory Julius Caesar had briefly annoyed. He also bagged Thrace, Judea, Mauretania and other areas, not single-handedly of course nor without some efforts by his predecessors. And as someone who feels that the Roman Empire was on balance an enormous force for good in the world I have to applaud that aspect of his life. He also affirmed the legal rights of Jews throughout the Empire; many rulers have done much worse.

It’s hard to be sure what sort of man he was or what sort of emperor. But I’d sure like to believe Graves’ story and Jacobi’s presentation. It’s such an inspiring tale of a decent underdog in a setting where such people tended to die quick horrible deaths. So I hope it was more or less true.

On this day in history, Caligula bit the dust. We owe him a debt of gratitude.

You might not think so. You might think the conspirators who stabbed him in an underground corridor and pretty much anywhere else you could fit a blade on Jan. 24 back in 41 A.D. were absolutely right to do so. And you’d be absolutely right to think it.

Caligula had an impressive pedigree, son of the beloved Germanicus very possibly murdered by his jealous uncle, the Emperor Tiberius. Court intrigue swirled thick and fast in Imperial Rome, including Tiberius eventually choosing Caligula as his successor. But whatever his other vices or virtues, Tiberius certainly blundered horribly in this instance.

Caligula was wretched, rotten, tyrannical, and demented. We’re not entirely sure how much of the calumny about him is true, including Suetonius’s famous story that he planned to make his horse a consul (not a senator, as often claimed).

Suetonius is a highly entertaining writer. But his acid pen, and accusations that would today be regarded as homophobic against virtually every emperor, are very possibly propaganda or even a reflection of his own unbalanced mind. Still, enough was certainly wrong with Caligula, from having suspected rivals or opponents executed or assassinated to planning to proclaim himself a god, that he had to go, suddenly and hard.

The conspirators were hoping his death would restore the Roman republic, in which they were entirely frustrated. But they were removing a hideous tyrant. So what’s with my call for gratitude toward Caligula?

Very simply, he furnished an unforgettable example of bad rule: not just rapacious or cruel, but paranoid, vicious and apparently utterly mad and depraved. We study Rome, or used to, in the belief that it offered pointed lessons for our own day. Among these was the hair-raising minatory example of the tyrants Caligula and Nero, whose policy and character flaws seemed united in ways that would rightly echo down through the ages.

Perhaps all is now forgotten, as we discard history on the grounds that progress has rendered us immune to the failings of the past and vastly above its virtues. If so it’s not just a shame, it’s dangerous blindness.

We do not want a new Caligula. And the old one, by his various excesses, furnished us a useful warning against that sort of ruler. So stab him to death… then tip your helmet to him.

On this day, Jan. 23, back in 1879, the British garrison at Rorke’s Drift did not surrender and were not massacred. It’s quite extraordinary.

Now you might object that on all kinds of days in history a British garrison neither surrendered nor got massacred. Indeed, the success of the British empire might suggest that such events were rare. But the Jan. 23 1879 incident was remarkable because this time, at least, it sure seemed likely.

The Zulus had just won a dramatic victory at Isandlwana in the first major battle of the Anglo-Zulu war, with some 20,000 warriors overwhelming and killing about three-quarters of an invading British column 1,800 strong. Admittedly the odds seem lopsided, but even so it was an unusual event.

As Rorke’s Drift showed. Between three and four thousand Zulus from Isandlwana, some carrying captured modern weapons, headed for Rorke’s Drift to finish off the small garrison there, slightly over 150 soldiers of whom some three dozen were hospital patients. For very nearly 12 hours the Zulus sought to storm the small enclosure and its tiny garrison. And they failed.

When dawn came and the garrison saw that the besiegers had gone away, they had less than 1,000 rounds of ammunition left of 20,000. But they had lost 17 killed and 15 wounded against approximately 350 dead attackers and perhaps 500 wounded.

The battle gets considerable attention in Victor Davis Hanson’s brilliant Carnage and Culture, a look at 2,500 years of lopsided conflict between West and non-West in which the strange dynamism of open societies, including not just technically proficient, analytic combat free of ritual limitations but also their soldiers’ superficially baffling capacity to maintain discipline while improvising in the field, with junior officers taking the initiative when orders are unclear or unsuited to the tactical situation, has consistently resulted in casualty ratios around 10:1, from Xerxes’ invasion of Persia to Vietnam and beyond.

Seen in this context, the outcome at Rorke’s Drift is not as extraordinary as it seems. Or perhaps all the more so, for being typical of such encounters. As John Quincy Adams memorably said, “liberty is power”. Not licence, not anarchy, and not the weird “liberty” of people who live in highly structured, coercive societies that resist outsiders with brittle ferocity.

Genuinely free individuals, to whom self-government is inherently two-fold, in that they can sustain free governments because they govern themselves.

The Zulus at Rorke’s Drift were brave, honourable and admirable in many ways. But lacking the West’s particular, peculiar flexible resilience, they were unable to overwhelm a garrison one twentieth their size.

It’s quite extraordinary.

When is a Parliament not a Parliament? I can think of all kinds of times and ways, all bad. But here’s a good one: When it’s a constitutional convention. For instance on Jan. 22, 1689 in England.

It was an auspicious meeting in any event, because it was caused by the departure of the hapless yet belligerent James II (OK, James VII to pointlessly pointed Scots nationalists; and yes, we’re talking England not Britain here because there was no United Kingdom yet.) But it was also very confused.

No one was quite sure how Parliament should or could meet without a royal summons, nor whether James had abdicated, otherwise abandoned the throne, or merely fled before the armies of his nephew and son-in-law William III. However they were pretty sure that in theory they shouldn’t meet like this: an assembly of the Lords Temporal and Spiritual, basically the House of Lords, joined by surviving members of the House of Commons elected in 1681 and promptly dispersed by Charles II because it was determined to exclude his brother James on grounds of flagrant Catholicism. (He then governed for four years without a parliament because he was secretly getting subsidies from the French King Louis XIV.)

Now this was awkward because a different parliament had been elected in 1685, under James. But that Parliament had been chosen in an election so influenced by the King as to be widely considered illegitimate, despite which it turned against James due to his pig-headed refusal even to try to seem reasonable. So what you had was a gathering in 1689, the “Convention Parliament,” that had very dubious formal legitimacy.

On the other hand, it had very strong popular legitimacy. The nation was sick of Stuarts, wanted William III as king, he wanted to be a Constitutional monarch, his Protestant wife Mary (and her equally Protestant sister Anne) were unwilling to be given the crown instead of William, and everybody wanted an end to the trouble. So the Parliament had unlimited power to make a reasonable Constitutional settlement and none at all to make an unreasonable one. It stood for the body politic, but only so long as it acted like it.

It did. It declared William and Mary joint rulers with William alone holding regal power, on the basis of their accepting a Declaration of Right that was, ten months later, recast in statute form as the Bill of Rights. Under another Parliament. Sort of. The Convention Parliament converted itself to a regular one, effective February 13, 1689, realizing they could not go on meeting like that. And that one sat for less than a year before fresh elections were held to get back to normal.

Liberty under law requires the forms of law. But when they break down, sovereignty devolves to the people. And as they can’t all meet in one place, some sort of constituent assembly has to convene itself and rely on popular acceptance for its legitimacy.

1688-89 was such a time. Among other things, the fleeing king/ex-king James had petulantly thrown the Great Seal of the Realm into the River Thames on the apparent formalistic theory that nothing could actually be done without it. He was that kind of guy. So Parliament had to assume the mantle of a popular convention long enough to settle things down so that it no longer needed that ill-fitting garment.

The American colonists deduced from this gathering, and much else in British history and constitutional theory, that formal conventions were a good way to make fundamental law, not least because they were not making rules they would then be implementing but rules they would then be living under. It has been expressed that the makers and ratifiers of the American Constitution, meeting in precisely such a way, were forging a shield not a sword. The British, and Canadians, decided Parliament could do it in emergencies.

In 1688-89 it proved equal to the task. But I think it would have been better to move the other way, especially when making fundamental law as we did in 1867 and as Tony Blair did, haphazardly, by creating a Scottish Parliament. Indeed, I think it’s high time we adopted something very much along those lines to fix our own Constitution. Not a convention, but a document sent by Parliament to the people for their ratification or rejection.

It was not easy for Parliament to speak for the English nation in 1689. And I do not think ours can do so any longer, especially after what it did to us in 1982. Should a sudden crisis force it to do so, we have no other mechanism and must hope MPs can rise to the occasion. But I would not ask them to do so if I had a choice, despite the example of 1689.

On January 21, 1793, Louis XVI was guillotined for treason. How nice.

I don’t mean it was nice that a man had his head cut off. And while I don’t think Louis was a very good king, I also can’t see him as a traitor. His response to the French Revolution was inept and indecisive, though I’m not sure there was anything he could have done. And I have little use for the French monarchy, though far less for the Revolutionary regime and Terror that followed.

My focus here, as his presumably was toward the end, was the actual guillotine. Symbol of bloody political madness, it was actually created with the specific goal of being humane and egalitarian. You see, prior to 1789 there was an enormous difference between the way nobles and commoners were executed. The former had their heads whapped off by trained swordsmen while the latter were burned, broken on the wheel (which is even worse than it sounds), or hanged, sometimes using the slow strangulation method where the drop doesn’t break your neck.

I’m not sure how true that last sentence actually is. I bet much of the time executions of the humble were carried out in a “let’s get this over with” spirit, or of mercy in extremis, and were pretty quick. Moreover, the trained executioners didn’t always get it right; it could take several hacks and be a messy and horrible business.

Anyway, along came a French physician and member of the National Assembly with the revolutionary idea of punishing everyone the same way for the same offences, including those bringing capital punishment, and doing it with a machine for simple decapitation. Ah, the spirit of progress. No more human touch. Now it’s push button remove bean.

Joseph-Ignace Guillotin did not actually design the device that bears his name, though he was on the committee that approved it. (As for the urban legend that he was guillotined, it was another doctor named Guillotin; the “real” Guillotine’s family petitioned the French government to rename the horrible thing and, when turned down, changed their own name. But J.I. Guillotin died of old age in 1814 and is buried in the famous Père-Lachaise Cemetery.) But it was approved and widely used.

Is it really nice? I’m not so sure. I mean, there aren’t a lot of great ways to be put to death. And I feel about the guillotine rather as I do about the electric chair, that it’s a classic example of the illusion of technique, that some mathematically precise science can transform everything about life for the better including the sudden deliberate ending of it.

Honestly, suppose you are about to be executed, either for something you really did or because Robespierre somehow got you in his demented clutches. Is the main thing about it the physical pain you will endure in the final minute or two? What about the psychological misery of contemplating the guillotine rising up, merciless and inexorable, just waiting to dispatch you mechanically, one more unit to be processed?

For me I expect and hope it would be the loss of all the life that would otherwise have awaited me. I’m not saying I want to be burned at the stake. Death by fiery heat strikes me as almost unutterably hideous, which is probably why hell is depicted as fire that inflicts all that pain without mercifully ending. I figure a quick hanging, a firing squad or an ax to the back of the head is about as good as it gets.

Incidentally, there’s a memorable scene in C.S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength where the inventor of an even more scientific execution machine is put into his own creation and his final thought is that in his calculations of blood pressure he had underestimated the terror. But again, to me, a major problem with the guillotine is precisely it’s impersonal technical quality. If you’re going to kill me I’d prefer that it be personal. (And yes, that Lewis scene fittingly takes place within NICE, the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments – if you want to know more, read the trilogy.)

Death is necessarily personal because life is. To be dispatched efficiently, painlessly, seems to me in an odd way a denial of humanity. Certainly the French Revolution didn’t use the guillotine in a spirit of mercy or in a way that enhanced human dignity.

They really might just as well have exiled Louis XVI. As a rallying point for counterrevolution he would I expect have been as useless as he was a king; he made a better symbol than he ever did a monarch. But if that was too much to ask, I feel that using a good old-fashioned ax would actually have been much more humane and fitting.

January 20 marks a grim anniversary. In 1942 senior Nazi officials met in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to plan the administrative details of the Holocaust. As they would.

I say that not just because they were vicious anti-Semites, though of course they were. There’s this weird kind of fringe debate about exactly how much Hitler knew about the “Final Solution” given the lack of paper trail involving him. But obviously in a system as highly personalized as that of Nazi Germany nothing this major could happen without the knowledge and sanction of the Fuhrer.

Especially given the resources involved. Ever since Hannah Arendt we have been very aware of the bureaucratic banality of certain kinds of evil including this one; Adolf Eichmann, who was of course at Wannsee, was a classic case in point. Millions of human beings were deported, starved, gassed, cremated and dumped to the accompaniment of forms in triplicate.

The Holocaust was also bureaucratically massive. Attila may have been able to wreak havoc in a fairly ad hoc manner. But in the 20^th century to administer a state, wage a total war, and seek to exterminate an entire people, and many others besides, requires endless planning, committees, technical debates, formulas, protocols and carbon paper.

It also requires, of course, the complicity of vast numbers of people. There’s just no way to do it secretly. And while many may have been only indirectly involved, and afraid to say anything, quit their job or otherwise remove themselves, it’s such a ghastly venture that almost all of them had blood as well as ink on their hands.

Savagery in hot blood is bad enough. But to carry it out in this chilly, detached, systematic way is surely far worse. Yet it was the only way to do it in 1942.

So they did.