by David A. Bell

My recent TNR essay on military history--which itself grew out of a discussion on this blog last fall [starting five posts down the page]--seems to have touched a nerve of sorts. I cannot remember receiving so many interesting and thoughtful e-mails about a piece of writing. I doubt this was due to the piece itself, which was brief, but simply to the large public interest in military history, and the feeling that it is ignored in American universities. The mail has prompted some further thoughts. In the essay, I speculated on the reasons why American universities have slighted military history, and spent some time discussing the fact that relatively few social scientists have considered military conflict a phenomenon that deserves sustained analysis. But as several correspondents pointed out, a big reason for this neglect is that military history indeed does confound our expectations of "social science," because it is the domain, par excellence, of chance and unpredictability. Social scientists like to identify large-scale patterns of change, and explain them in terms reminiscent of natural "laws." They like their social phenomena regular and predictable, and loathe the possibility that everything might have turned out differently because of trivial, essentially random factors. Of course, the chaos of battles and the vagaries of military intelligence offer the best examples of fields where tiny events can have potentially vast consequences. Imagine if the Union had not intercepted crucial Confederate orders before the battle of Antietam. Might the Confederates then have won a decisive victory there? And had they done so, at this crucial battle, might the South have won the Civil War? And had this happened, might subsequent world history itself have fallen into very different patterns? Speculation like this challenges the notion that we can explain history, or social change, by reference to anything akin to natural laws, and so it makes social scientists and historians very uncomfortable. Still, even professional historians cannot always resist asking "what if?" My friend John Merriman, at Yale, has edited a fascinating collection of essays that explores various counterfactual scenarios. Harvard's Niall Ferguson has edited another, asking what might have happened had Britain stayed out of World War I, and so on. President Bush's favorite historian, Andrew Roberts, has edited yet a third. In these books, the only truly silly piece is David Frum's egregious speculation, in the Roberts volume, on what might have happened after 9/11 had the Florida chads turned out differently in 2000. Frum ludicrously imagines a President Gore debating with his advisors about whether a strongly-worded message to the U.N. Security Council about the Taliban is too harsh a response to the terrorist attacks. In the end, though, the notion of the same story having multiple, radically different possible endings is more congenial to literature than to social science. And so it is no coincidence that some of the most genuinely thoughtful treatments of "what if?" questions have come from novelists rather than academics. Indeed, by now the genre of "alternate history" fiction has become quite well established (see this website, for example). Novelists as distinguished as Kingsley Amis have tried their hands at it (his The Alteration takes place in a modern Britain that had never experienced the Reformation, and Russian Hide-and-Seek in a Britain conquered by Russia after World War II). The genre has its acknowledged classics, such as Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle, about an America occupied by the Axis powers, or Ray Bradbury's story "A Sound of Thunder," about a time traveler stepping on the wrong insect in the distant past, and so altering the shape of American politics in the present. Many of the most successful efforts have, not surprisingly, followed Dick in exploring the consequences of an Axis victory in WWII. Robert Harris's excellent Fatherland, set in a modern Germany still ruled by Nazis, is probably the best known, although to my mind Len Deighton's SS-GB, set during the war itself, in Nazi-occupied London, is even better. My favorite titles, though, come from the prolific American author Harry Turtledove, originally a historian of the Byzantine Empire, who has devoted the most sustained attention to the "what if?" question I mentioned above, about the Battle of Antietam. Indeed, he has now written no fewer than ten novels, totaling well over 6000 pages, that explore the consequences of a Civil War Confederate victory. In the eleventh installment, due this summer, he has gotten up to the end of an alternate World War II in which the North finds itself at war once again with the South--which has succumbed to fascism and is carrying out genocide against African-Americans. Turtledove is not a memorable stylist. He is brilliant, however, at braiding together the stories of large numbers of ordinary characters over long time periods, and showing the effects of contingency and freakish chance on the scale of individual lives, as well as in national histories. Thus a character we originally meet as a frustrated sergeant denied promotion in World War I emerges, several volumes later, as the Confederate Hitler. A former slave who takes part in a failed rebellion against the Confederacy spends years in hiding, only to be sent to his death in an extermination camp. Although a little hard to get into because of the large cast of characters, the books quickly become addictive. At the conclusion of volume ten, The Grapple, North and South were racing each other to build atomic weapons. Stay tuned.