In late 1926, British military historian and strategist Captain Basil Henry Liddell Hart published a work titled, A Greater than Napoleon, Scipio Africanus. Throughout the nineteenth century, Napoleon was lauded as the penultimate tactician who informed successive generations on the value of military maneuvers, maxims, and lessons in leadership. However, in the aftermath of World War One, and the tragedy surrounding the war of attrition that laid waste to an entire generation of young men throughout Europe, Hart found something more appealing in the Roman general renowned for his successful campaign against Carthage in the Second Punic War (218–201BC). “The author makes the bold claim that the campaigns of Scipio, despite the lapse of time,” the editors at London’s Daily Telegraph commented, “contain more lessons for modern soldiers than such recent campaigns of Napoleon or [Helmuth von] Moltke.” The heart of Hart’s premise was simple. “Scipio more than any other great captain realized that interplay of military, economic, and political forces which goes to the shaping of strategy; and the fact that he was a loyal servant of a republic instead of a despot like Napoleon or Frederick [the Great] makes the study of his methods the more interesting to the modern student of war.”[1] 

Right: Captain B.H. Liddell Hart. In the Public Domain. 

The Glasgow Herald noted that Hart, a veteran of the Great War, “belongs to the newest school of military criticism, and of the tenets of that school he is a vigorous and able exponent.” Shell shocked, gassed, and survivor of the 1 July 1916 Battle of the Somme offensive in France, which resulted in 19,000 dead British soldiers (59,000 casualities) – the single largest battlefield loss in one day in that empire’s history – Hart returned to duty after the war to offer fresh perspectives at the Royal Army Education Corps before retiring due to lingering effects on his health from chemical weapons. His 1926 work on Scipio (his second), completed just prior to his retirement from service, helped launch a career that would go on to influence a new generation of military theorists. “A clever, informing, and well-written study of the work and attributes of one of the great soldiers in the world’s history,” the Scottish newspaper praised, “this is unquestionably a sample of real military literature.” Moreover, the Glasgow Herald commented on Hart’s work by using the term ‘grand strategy,’ which was rarely used in Napoleon’s time, but became more common in the late-nineteenth century. “Captain Liddell Hart, like some other moderns, divides war into tactics logistical strategy (the strategy of the text-books), and grand strategy,” the editors summarized, “which is supposed to include all the material and psychological forces that may come into operation as the result of the movement of armed masses. The suggestion is that, although Napoleon was unrivalled as a logistical strategist, Scipio by his political foresight and diplomatic ‘flair’ excelled him in the realm of grand strategy.” In Hart’s time, Napoleon’s political and diplomatic abilities, and use of revanchist history throughout Europe to his advantage, were less appreciated than there are in contemporary times, but he did have a point concerning the Roman general’s ability to maximize his potential with the limited powers available to him. Adding Alexander the Great to this analysis, Hart wrote:     

Alexander certainly preceded Scipio as the first grand strategist, but without arguing the question how far his moral and economic action was fortuitous rather than marked by the exquisite calculation of Scipio’s, his task was much simpler, and as a despot he had none of Scipio' s internal obstacles to surmount. It is, above all, because of the close parallel with modern conditions, political and organic, that Scipio’s grand strategy is so living a study for us today… In the comparison of Scipio with Napoleon, if the latter’s superiority in logistical strategy is recognised, we have to set against this both his tactical and his grand strategical inferiority. As a grand strategist Napoleon’s claims are marred not only by his failure to realise the aim of grand strategy – a prosperous and secure peace, – but by his several blunders over the psychology of his opponents, over the political and economic effects of his actions, and in the extravagant later use of his forces and resources. Finally, let us point out that while Alexander had the military foundations laid by Philip to build on, while Hannibal built on Hamilcar, Caesar on Marius, Napoleon on Carnot – Scipio had to rebuild on disaster.[2]

Left: Cover of Scipio Africanus: Greater than Napoleon written by Captain B.H. Liddell Hart in 1926.

In the introduction of his A Greater than Napoleon, Scipio Africanus, Hart noted that the most recent biography of Scipio appeared in 1807, and asserted exactly what reviewers had gleaned. “The reason for this book is that,” he wrote, “apart from the romance of Scipio’s personality and his political importance as the founder of Rome’s world-dominion, his military work has a greater value to modern students of war than that of any other great captain of the past. A bold claim, and yet its truth will, I hope, be substantiated in the following pages.” He was equally bold in dismissing antiquated concepts from the Napoleonic era  and late nineteenth century that he believed led to the disaster that befell Europe during WWI. “For the study of tactical methods the campaigns of Napoleon or of 1870, even of 1914-1918 perhaps,” Hart argued, “are as dead as those of the third century B.C. But the art of generalship does not age, and it is because Scipio’s battles are richer in stratagems and ruses – many still feasible today – than those of any other commander in history that they are an unfailing object-lesson to soldiers.” It was a valorous assertion, but came from a man who not only survived the horrors of war, but turned his attention and concertedly studied that which nearly sent him to the Elysian Fields: 

Strategically Scipio is still more “modern.” The present is a time of disillusionment, when we are realising that slaughter is not synonymous with victory, that the “destruction of the enemy’s main armed forces on the battlefield” is at best but a means to the end, and not an end in itself, as the purblind apostles of Clausewitz had deceived themselves – and the world, unhappily. In the future, even more than in the past, the need is to study and understand the interplay of the military, economic, and political forces, which are inseparable in strategy. Because Scipio more than any other great captain understood and combined these forces in his strategy, despite the very “modern” handicap of being the servant of a republic – not, like Alexander, Frederick, Napoleon, a despot, – the study of his life is peculiarly apposite today… The road to failure is the road to fame – such apparently must be the verdict on posterity’s estimate of the world’s greatest figures. The flash of the meteor impresses the human imagination more than the remoter splendour of the star, fixed immutably in the high heavens. Is it that final swoop earthwards, the unearthly radiance ending in the common dust, that, by its evidence of the tangible or the finite, gives to the meteor a more human appeal? So with the luminaries of the human system, provided that the ultimate fall has a dramatic note, the memory of spectacular failure eclipses that of enduring success. Again, it may be that the completeness of his course lends individual emphasis to the great failure, throwing his work into clearer relief, whereas the man whose efforts are crowned with permanent success builds a stepping-stone by which others may advance still farther, and so merges his own fame in that of his successors.[3]

[1] “A Study of Scipio.” The Daily Telegraph, London, 28 Sept. 1926; Caption B.H. Liddell Hart, A Greater than Napoleon, Scipio Africanus (Edinburgh and London, W. Blackwood, 1930).

[2] “A Maker of Rome, Scipio Africanus”. The Glasgow Herald, 16 Dec. 1926; Hart, A Greater than Napoleon, Scipio Africanus, 269 –71. See: John Masefield, The Battle of the Somme (London: Heinemann, 1919), 33: “The men who went against those two places [Ovillers and La Boisselle, 2 July] did not ‘dodge death,’ as the phrase goes, they walked and stumbled across a dark lane which was death. There was a sort of belt of darkness, or cloud, in front of those two ruins, and in that cloud death crashed and whirred and glittered and was devilish.” Peter Liddle, The 1916 Battle of the Somme: A Reappraisal (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 2001) 150. (Reprint from Pen and Sword Books, 1992).

[3] Hart, A Greater than Napoleon, Scipio Africanus, viii–1.