Front Lines. Miguel Martinez

      The fact that many of the texts I discuss in this book have remained hidden in the archive for so long speaks to canonical inertias in a discipline that has nonetheless striven to incorporate a varied array of texts that had been traditionally stripped of meaning and value. But more important, it reveals the scholarly unease, the humanistic unwillingness to understand war as an inextricable part of culture in the early modern age—and perhaps in other periods of human history. As Fernand Braudel argued, “War is not simply the antithesis of civilization” but a constitutive part of it.¹⁶ This is far from arguing, as some conservative military historians do, that war is “the father of us all” or an ahistorical “tragic, nearly inevitable aspect of human existence.”¹⁷ Nor is it a celebration of the cultural productivity of violence. Quite the opposite: this argument is instead meant to stress the need for historians to account for “the cultural location of war.”¹⁸ It is an attempt to recover the ways in which the common people have tried to understand and give meaning—multiple and conflicted meanings—to the apparently meaningless irrationality of war. War is a discursive phenomenon with its own logic as much as it is an illogical, unutterable calamity, and many of its dimensions can only be understood by paying attention to the texts written by those who experienced it firsthand. Every war story participates in previous narrative structures, ideas, and ideological framing held in common, and the texts written by serving soldiers are not exempt from these preexisting discursive frames.¹⁹ They are not more transparent, real, or authentic than any other textual product; they are not free from the cultural mediations that organize experience, a concept memorably scrutinized by Joan Scott.²⁰ But “for those who experience war first hand,” Adam McKeown rightly points out, “the tortured process of negotiating a set of conflicted and deeply personal relations to war through another set of conflicted discourses about war in order to arrive at a meaningful narrative is especially pronounced.”²¹

      In dialogue with Foucault’s “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” the French historian Arlette Farge insists on the need to recover the things said (les choses dites) about the wars of the past as a means to avoid the interpretation of war as an eternal fatality, as some kind of recurring damnation alien to the rationality of human action: “To study war and its moments as sayable articulated events is the best way to show the reasons why they have been possible, and thus, how those events could have escaped that possibility.” Moreover, to study the things said about war, the discursive formation the soldiers themselves called “las cosas de guerra” (the matters of war), will help us “to understand its recurrence, not to rejoice on its evolution, but to realize that other scenarios have been possible, with different rationalities and passions. Always keeping in mind that in any case, what has happened could have not taken place.”²²

      The recovery of the eyewitness’s gaze, the perspective of the killer and the survivor, the victor and the defeated, allows us to restore the contingency of imperial war and history. The soldiers’ specialized languages shaped a down-to-earth representation of war that avoids some of the most common traps of modern discourse on violence, such as its association with the sublime or the transcendental, sometimes even theological, understanding of the causes of armed conflict. Providence or God’s corrective punishments had little to do with the killing of men by men. Writers from the field very often identified the commanders or imperial officials that were responsible for wrong strategic decisions and offered alternative courses of action that could have avoided defeat, captivity, or carnage. Against its apparent excess, inevitability, and irrationality, war is a thoroughly human affair, and those who conduct it, from the emperor to the lowest pikeman, are entirely human. This is why the multiple voices of the early modern common soldiery, from the epic intonation of the victorious hero to the autobiographical whisper of the defeated captive or the mutinous political rumor of the returning veteran, invite us to engage with Farge’s ultimately ethical proposal of historicization.²³

      In a fleeting moment of the Iliad, we hear the best soldier of all time, Achilles, playing his lyre and singing about “men’s deeds of renown” to his dear comrade Patroclus.²⁴ In this intriguing mise-en-abyme the bard and his hero become ambiguously conflated. The greatest poet of antiquity seems to dress up for a moment, however short-lived, in warrior guise, and the coarse warrior poses briefly as the persuasive epic poet. The move would be imitated and taken further by Homer’s most daring competitor. In book 9 of the Aeneid, in the roar of battle, Turnus sneaks into the Trojan camp just before Pandarus closes the gates to their Latin enemies. Among the scores of fleeing Trojans that Turnus viciously kills—Alcander, Halius, Prytanis, Noëmon, Lynceus, and others—we are told about a certain Cretheus, “friend of the Muses, the Muses’ comrade.” Like all of the Aeneid’s secondary characters, this soldier is granted a fugitive moment of glory in Virgil’s war tale. Uniquely among all of Turnus’s victims, however, Virgil takes the time to give a fully developed portrait of Cretheus as devoted poet, “always dear to his heart the song and lyre,” and always singing “of cavalry, weapons, wars and the men who fight them.”²⁵ The close parallelism between this verse (“arma uirum pugnasque canebat”) and the Aeneid’s proposition (“Arma uirumque cano”) forces the reader to make the connection: Cretheus, the soldier-poet, unmistakably resembles Virgil himself.

      Unlike his compatriots and predecessors Naevius and Ennius, the founders of Roman epic, Virgil never served as a soldier.²⁶ Yet for Pedro Mexía, one of the most widely read authors of sixteenth-century Spain, the poet was the best example of “how those who are born to humble parents and lineages should follow the example of men who from lowly beginnings rose to great status.”²⁷ The son of a tinker, as Mexía read in Suetonius, this figure of Virgil was particularly well suited for our Icarian soldiers who, against all expectations about their kind, rose above their status in daring literary flight to write the songs of their lives and travails. This book tells the story of the Spanish historical counterparts of Virgil’s fictional Cretheus, the frontline comrades of the Muses who wrote about weapons, wars, and the men who fought them.