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Victory
Victory
The Triumph and Tragedy of Just War
C IA N O’ D R I S C O L L
1
1
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Preface
This book has its origins in a workshop I attended at Saint Andrews University
several years ago. The workshop, which was a very enjoyable occasion, involved
several just war theorists working onjus post bellum issues. When the conversa-
tion got bogged down in definitional disputes over how to define the ‘end’ or ‘end-
ings’ of war, I suggested that we, as just war scholars, should perhaps think about
using the more direct language of victory/defeat in its stead. While I will be the
first to admit that my proposal, naïve as it was, was not especially interesting in its
own right, the response it elicited surprised me. As I recall it, all the just war
scholars in the room were convinced—emphatically so—that it was a verybad
idea. I am accustomed to people disagreeing with me, but the unusual occurrence
of so many academics agreeing with one another tweaked my curiosity. Why did
they think it would be such a bad idea to connect just war theorizing to the dis-
course of victory, which is, after all, integral to how people think about warfare?
What reasons might just war theorists have for their scepticism via-à-vis victory,
and do they withstand scrutiny? Finally, what, if anything, might an analysis of
these reasons tell us about victory, but also about the idea of just war itself? This
book evolved as an attempt to address these questions.
I have gone back and forth over the past few years with respect to how to
position myself in the resulting text. Specifically, I have agonized over whether I
should write in the first person or adopt a more detached tone. While I saw no
reason to interject myself into the discussion too strongly, I also believed it would
be disingenuous to adopt a pretence of scientific objectivity. In the end, I settled
on what I hope is a happy middle-ground. Following Michael Walzer’s lead, I
decided to use the terms ‘we’ and ‘our’ throughout the text in a bid to suggest that
I am writing as a scholar interested in the ethics of war, an interest that I presume
the reader shares with me.
My use of ‘we’ and ‘our’ also indicates the extent to which I was reliant on the
help and support of others in the writing of this book. The book has taken nearly
ten years to write, and I have leaned heavily on friends and colleagues during this
time. As is customary, I will take this opportunity to express my gratitude. I must
begin with Nick Rengger, who sadly passed away this year. It was Nick’s invitation
that brought me to St Andrews for the workshop mentioned above, and he has
been a kind and supportive friend and colleague ever since I first met him all
those years ago, when I was still a doctoral student. Nick’s work on the just war
tradition has been a source of inspiration for me, and, like many others, I take
vi Preface
some comfort in the fact that I can still hear his voice whenever I read his books
and essays.
Toni Erskine and Ian Clark supervised my PhD and have continued supervising
me ever since. I could not have asked for better mentors than Toni and Ian, and
I am happy to think that the ties of friendship bind us now. I admire them both,
not just as scholars, but as people. I have known Chris Brown and Tony Lang
almost as long as I have known Toni and Ian. Both have been extraordinarily gen-
erous with their time and advice over the past few years. I wish I could write with
as much humour as Chris, and I wish Tony hadn’t voted for Ralph Nader in 2000.
I have also been boosted by the support of my fellow just war scholars. James
Turner Johnson has also been exceptionally kind to me down the years, and I am
so grateful for his interest in my work. I especially enjoyed the praise he bestowed
on an earlier draft of this book: ‘You know, Cian, I initially thought this victory
stuff wasbull, but you might just be onto something.’ This meant a lot. John Kelsay,
‘Flash’ to his friends, is a kind and thoughtful man to whom I’ve often turned for
advice. It helps that we share a passion for sports teams that have seen better days.
Daniel Brunstetter is a dear friend, a great travel-companion, and a scholar I look
up to. Amy Eckert and Valerie Morkevius make ISA panels more fun than they
really ought to be. Their recent books on (respectively) private military compan
ies and realist ethics set a high bar for the rest of us. Daniel Schwartz was a source
of advice on all things Neo-Scholastic. Larry May took the time to read a very
early draft of this work, and Stephen Neff offered me encouragement just when I
needed it most.
Several people went the extra mile in terms of helping me prepare this book.
Luke Glanville, Gregory Reichberg, Rory Cox, Chris Finlay, and James Pattison
commented on full drafts of the text. Greg, James, and Chris have all recently
published excellent monographs of their own, and I am excited for the forthcom-
ing books that Luke and Rory are currently completing. Brent Steele has been a
great source of support, good humour, hugs, and beer since my graduate days.
Ken Booth has been a great source of grudge and critique—this book is in many
ways a response to his ideas on just war. Eric Heinze, Seb Kaempf, Neil Renic, and
David Karp have joined me on numerous panels devoted to contemporary just
war theory and I have learned a great deal from them. I am grateful to Elke
Schwartz, Janina Dill, and Rhiannon Neilsen for their advice on the tone and
structure of the book, and to Harry Gould for detailed (and prudent!) commen-
tary on early drafts of several chapters. Dan Bulley deserves a special mention for
helping me pull together the proposal for this book at a time when I had my
doubts. His encouragement meant a lot to me—it’s just a shame that it was too
rude to repeat here. Jim Brassett assisted with comedy, Mathias Thaler with vio-
lence. Nick Vaughan-Williams was encouraging of this project from the start, and
Liane Hartnett helped me finish it. She generously read multiple drafts of every
chapter. I look forward to doing the same for her own forthcoming book.
Preface vii
I owe my colleagues at Glasgow an apology for gloating about how much I was
enjoying my study-leave while they were busy teaching. As well as being great
friends, Kelly Kollman and Andy Judge made that period of study-leave possible
for me by arranging my cover. I am very grateful for this. Ty Solomon, Sophia
Dingli, and Beatrice Heuser commented on full drafts of this book. Going above
and beyond what I would expect of departmental colleagues, their friendship has
been a real boon for me. Other colleagues at Glasgow have offered feedback on
specific chapters. Some have even endured me reading tricky paragraphs at them.
Karen Wright, Georgios Karyotis, Chris Claassen, Mo Hume, Naomi Head, Alvise
Favotto, Chris Berry, Craig Smith, Carl Knight, Ana Langer, Philip Habel, and
Myrto Tsakatika all deserve special mention. Brian Girvin has taken time out of
‘retirement’ to help me fix the wonkier parts of my argument. I also benefited
from the expert mentoring of Lauren McLaren and Jane Duckett and the sup-
portive management of Chris Carman. Additionally, I have benefited greatly
down the years from the vibrant (and collegial) research culture fostered by our
IR and Political Theory research groups and also by the Glasgow Global Security
Network. I feel lucky to have landed in such a great department. It would be
remiss of me not to mention Alasdair Young. Alasdair left Glasgow for Georgia
Tech some years back, but his influence is still discernible in Glasgow, most not
ably in the high standards he set for professionalism and integrity.
Andy Hom, another former colleague, has also contributed greatly to this
book. He was a post-doctoral fellow at Glasgow when I was just starting out on
this project. His critical questioning, willingness to talk an idea out, eagerness to
tell me how wrong I am, and enduring interest in all things ‘theory’ have been a
source of both pain and pleasure for me. He wouldn’t have it any other way. He
has read several drafts of this book and it is better for his input. Phil O’Brien,
whose contribution to War Studies at Glasgow was immense, is a great friend,
and the first person I call when I need advice on how to approach a chapter and
what brand of lounge-pants to buy. Working closely with Andy, Phil, and Kurt
Mills, I was fortunate to receive an ESRC grant (ES/L013363/1) which provided
me the time to eke out the hard yards on this book. This grant afforded me the
opportunity to chat about long-bows with Matthew Strickland, Peter Jackson, and
Stuart Airlie, and to work with the hugely talented Andee Wallace, Louis Bujnoch,
and Gavin Stewart. Later in the life of the project, I received generous support
from the Independent Social Research Foundation. The ISRF mid-career fellow-
ship programme granted me the break from teaching and e-mail that I needed to
finish this book.
I also benefited from the opportunity to present elements of this book at different
universities. I received helpful feedback from colleagues at: Warwick University,
Edinburgh University, the University of Limerick, the University of Southern
Denmark, CalTech, Florida State University, Johns Hopkins SAIS at Bologna,
Georgetown University, the University of Dundee, the University of Bath, the
viii Preface
University of California at Irvine, Oxford University, Utah State University, Kiel

University, and St Andrews University.
Dominic Byatt at OUP has been fantastic to work with. Not only has he shown
belief in this project from the very beginning, he has also become a trusted source
of music tips. I am in his debt on both counts. I am also very appreciative of the
care that Olivia Wells and her team at OUP have put into making this book a real-
ity. Céline Louasli was especially helpful. She showed great patience in guiding
me through the permissions process and preparing the manuscript for produc-
tion. Together, Dominic, Olivia, and Céline have made what might have been a
stressful process an enjoyable experience.
I am also very thankful to the following publishers for granting me permission
to reproduce material from the following texts. An excerpt from Hans-Georg
Gadamer’sTruth and Method, translated by Joel Weinsheimer and D. G. Marshall
(London: Continuum, 2004) is used by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing
Inc. Cambridge University Press granted me permission to reproduce excerpts
from: Beatrice Heuser, The Evolution of Strategy: Thinking War from Antiquity to
the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Taylor & Francis
granted me permission to reproduce excerpts from: Ken Booth, ‘Ten Flaws of Just
Wars’, International Journal of Human Rights 4:3–4 (2000): 314–24. Elements of
the argument presented here have appeared in an essay I published in the European
Journal of International Relations. I am grateful to the editors of both the journal
and this press for permitting me to revisit this material.
I am very grateful for the support of my friends, several of whom have taken an
interest in this book. Alex Allen, Tom Bowser, and Steven Rice have a welcome
way of getting me to think about things other than work—chiefly: rugby, red
kites, and the relative merits of AC Jimbo and Barry Glendenning. Halle O’Neal
has a filthy mouth and never ceases to make me laugh. As well as introducing me
to the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, Jen Bagelman helped me work out what the
book was all about and helped me find the confidence to pursue it. I can’t thank
her enough. Billy and Aileen Chapman, Ammon Cheskin, Steve Paterson, Dave
Featherstone, and Lorenzo Ranalli have helped make Glasgow home for me. Fred
Cartmel did more than anybody else to help me settle into working life at the
university. We became firm friends when I arrived in Glasgow and I am so sad-
dened by his passing earlier this year. ‘What time’s lunch, mate?’ Kieran and Julie
Curran, Jon and Talia Dudley, Kieran McGourty, Karen Dolphin, Andrew
O’Malley, and Bernadette Sexton are always on hand for a catch-up, a pint, an
adventure, a protracted WhatsApp chat, and the occasional rave on a family farm.
My greatest debt is of course to my family. My sister, Aoife, my brother,
Cormac, and their partners, Eamon and Janet, make sure that I look forward to
every trip I make back to Limerick. I hope they know how much I appreciate
them. I also hope that someday Cormac will let me beat him at football, and that
Aoife will do her fair share of the washing-up. Hope springs eternal. My nephews
Preface ix
Tom and Felix are always on hand to remind me that I look silly, have an outsized
head, and smell bad. They are growing up so fast that the day is swiftly approach-
ing when I will no longer fancy wrestling them. It is, however, my parents, Peter
and Jacinta, to whom I owe the most. They have worked hard to ensure that,
alongside Aoife and Cormac, I have always had the opportunity to do whatever
makes me happy. They have supported me in everything I’ve done, encouraged
me every step of the way, and always been on hand to keep me updated with the
latest scores in Munster matches. The pride they take in what I do is humbling.
They light the way for me. This book is dedicated to them.
Contents
Introduction: The Very Object of (Just) War? 1

1. Beneath Every History, Another History 19
2. Making a Desert and Calling It Peace 36
3. The Smell of Napalm in the Morning 54
4. The Usual Definition of Just Wars 71
5. The Right of Conquest 90
6. Mission Accomplished 108
7. The Disease of Victory 126
Conclusion: The Art of Losing 145
Bibliography 153
Index 171
Introduction
The Very Object of (Just) War?
In war there can be no substitute for victory.

General Douglas MacArthur1
Introduction
Committing one’s country to war is a grave decision. Governments often have to

make tough calls, but none are quite so painful as those that involve sending sol-
diers into harm’s way, to kill and be killed. The idea of ‘just war’ informs how we
approach and reflect on these decisions. It signifies the belief that while war is
always a wretched enterprise it may in certain circumstances, and subject to cer-
tain restrictions, be justified. The idea of just war has, of course, been subject to
extensive refinement down the centuries. Even so, scholars have had little to say
about what has historically been regarded as the very object of warfare: victory.
What accounts for this oversight? I suggest in this book that the principal reason
just war theorists have avoided talking about victory is because it raises awkward
questions that risk unwelcome answers. What does victory mean in the context of
a just war? What would winning a just war look like and can it ever be worth the
suffering it causes? Cutting against the grain, I intend to argue that the fact that
victory raises these questions is a reason, not for ignoring it, but for engaging it.
In raising these questions, it reveals hard truths about the idea of just war itself. It
forces us, on the one hand, to confront the fact that ‘just war is just war’, and, on
the other, to see in that realization a case, not for disavowing the task of just war
theory, but for committing ourselves to it with a deeper awareness of its tragic
dimension.2
1 General Douglas MacArthur, ‘Farewell Address to Congress, 19 April 1951’. Available at: www.
americanrhetoric.com/speeches/douglasmacarthurfarewelladdress.htm. Accessed: 18 January 2019.
2 Ken Booth, ‘Ten Flaws of Just Wars’, International Journal of Human Rights 4:3–4 (2000), pp. 316–17.
Victory: The Triumph and Tragedy of Just War. Cian O’Driscoll, Oxford University Press (2020). © Cian O’Driscoll.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198832911.001.0001
2 Victory
Just War
The idea of just war rests on the dual claim that war may sometimes be justified
and that it is possible to discern between just and unjust uses of force. This way of
thinking about war has a long history. Scholars usually trace its origins to early
Christian political theology, though there is evidence to suggest that its roots
extend deeper, into antiquity.3 Over time it coalesced around three discrete but
interlocking sets of principles bearing on the conditions that justify the recourse
to war (jus ad bellum), the limits that constrain the conduct of war (jus in bello),
and the desiderata that should guide its conclusion (jus post bellum). Scholars
sometimes quibble over the relative weighting assigned to different principles, but
this should not obscure the fact that there is considerable consensus regarding the
identity of these principles. Most scholars agree that jus ad bellum inquiries
necessarily revolve around the principles of just cause, proper authority, right
intention, aim of peace, last resort, and reasonable chance of success; that jus in
bello concerns pivot on the principles of discrimination (i.e., non-combatant
immunity) and proportionality; and that the task of jus post bellum analysis is to
parse the responsibilities of both the victors and the vanquished in the aftermath
of armed conflict. There is, I trust, no need to gloss these principles here, save to
note that they are best understood, not as criteria for a checklist, but as open-
ended questions that may be usefully employed to structure and guide our ethical
evaluation of warfare.4
The central proposition of just war theory is, therefore, that war can and should
be subjected to moral scrutiny. The aim of this scrutiny is not to identify which
wars are just and which are unjust. As Oliver O’Donovan has argued, ‘Major his-
torical events cannot be justified or criticised in one mouthful; they are concaten
ations and agglomerations of many separate actions and many varied results.’5
3 The key texts on the history of the tradition are: James Turner Johnson, Ideology, Reason, and the
Limitation of War: Religious and Secular Concepts, 1200–1740 (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1975); James Turner Johnson, Just War Tradition and the Restraint of War (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1981); Alex J. Bellamy, Just Wars: From Cicero to Iraq (Cambridge: Polity, 2006); and
Frederick H. Russell, Just War in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). On
the move to look beyond the tradition’s putative roots in Christian thought: Rory Cox, ‘Expanding the
History of Just War: The Ethics of War in Ancient Egypt’, International Studies Quarterly 61:2 (2017):
371–84; Gregory A. Raymond, ‘The Greco-Roman Roots of the Just War Tradition’, in Howard M.
Hensel (ed.), The Prism of Just War: Asian and Western Perspectives on the Legitimate Use of Military
Force (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010): 7–29; Cian O’Driscoll, ‘Rewriting the Just War Tradition: Just War in
Classical Greek Political Thought and Practice’, International Studies Quarterly 29:1 (2015): 1–10; and
Cian O’Driscoll, ‘Keeping Tradition Alive: Just War and Historical Imagination’, Journal of Global
Security Studies 3:2 (2018): 234–47.
4 Chris Brown calls them ‘aids to judgement’. Chris Brown, ‘Just War and Political Judgement’, in
Anthony F. Lang, Jr., Cian O’Driscoll, and John Williams (eds.), Just War: Authority, Tradition, and
Practice (Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2013), p. 46. For a primer on the principles of
the just war tradition: Charles Guthrie and Michael Quinlan, Just War: Ethics in Modern Warfare
(London: Bloomsbury, 2007).
5 Oliver O’Donovan, The Just War Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 13.
The Very Object of ( Just ) War? 3
Rather, the purpose of just war theory is to guide our efforts to examine how the
actions and results that wars entail might be interrogated in ethical terms. Within
this, an issue that requires further attention is the question of how one should
understand the relationship between the jus ad bellum and jus in bello judgements.
Should a belligerent party’s jus ad bellum basis for resorting to war in the first
instance be taken into account when considering what counts as permissible con-
duct in the course of that war? Michael Walzer, whose 1977 text Just and Unjust
Wars has swiftly become a modern classic, has argued that, all things being equal,
jus ad bellum and jus in bello considerations should be treated independently of
one another.6 This opens up the possibility of judging an otherwise justified war to
have been waged unjustly, and vice versa. Recent years have seen this proposition
become the focus of a fierce debate between Walzer and his critics.7 Scholars such
as Jeff McMahan have claimed that it reflects faulty reasoning.8 Their argument is
that the strict separation of jus ad bellum and jus in bello considerations leads to
wrongheaded thinking, such as, for instance, the belief that so long as he or she
adheres to jus in bello norms, a soldier does no wrong by fighting for an unjust cause.
I will have more to say about this debate, and its implications for the argument
I seek to develop in this book, in Chapter 7.
In the meantime, it is important to say something about why the idea of just
war matters. Although the discussion has focused thus far on Latinate categories
of analysis and abstract scholarly debates, one should not underestimate the prac-
tical edge of just war thinking and its significance for international politics. While
it was possible in the past to discount the idea of just war as an obscure, recondite
hobby pursued by Catholic theologians cloistered in ivy towers, its recent promin
ence in the discourse of political and military leaders suggests a very different
story.9 As numerous scholars have shown, just war has become the predominant
frame through which western military and policy elites discuss matters of war and
peace.10 Walzer has famously dubbed this development the ‘triumph of just war
6 ‘War is always judged twice, first with reference to the reasons states have for fighting, secondly
with reference to the means they adopt.’ Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument
with Historical Illustrations—Fifth Edition (New York: Basic Books, 2015), p. 21.
7 There is a wealth of material available on this debate, which is often (misleadingly) cast as a clash
between ‘revisionist’ and ‘traditionalist’ approaches to just war theory. For an overview: Seth Lazar,
‘Evaluating the Revisionist Critique of Just War Theory’, Daedalus 146:1 (2017): 113–24; and James
Pattison, ‘The Case for the Non-Ideal Morality of War: Beyond Revisionism Versus Traditionalism in
Just War Theory’, Political Theory 46:2 (2018): 242–68.
8 Jeff McMahan, ‘Innocence, Self-Defence and Killing in War’, Journal of Political Philosophy 2:3
(1994): 193–221.
9 President Barack Obama famously framed his Nobel Peace Prize address in the language of just
war. Barack Obama, ‘Nobel Lecture’, 10 December 2009. Available at: www.nobelprize.org/prizes/
peace/2009/obama/26183-nobel-lecture-2009/. Accessed: 18 January 2019. Obama was not alone in
invoking just war, however. Other leaders have also made extensive reference to it. See: Cian
O’Driscoll, ‘Talking about Just War: Obama in Oslo, Bush at War’, Politics 31:2 (2011): 82–90.
10 For example: Mark Totten, First Strike: America, Terrorism, and Moral Tradition (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2010), pp. 80–3; and Daniel Brunstetter and Scott Brunstetter, ‘Shades of
Green: Engaged Pacifism, the Just War Tradition, and the German Greens’, International Relations 25:1
4 Victory
theory’.11 He argues that since the Vietnam War just war discourse has emerged as
the lingua franca of those in power. This, he notes, is a significant development. It
indicates how deeply just war norms and concepts have become embedded in con-
temporary international relations. It is not merely that generals and presidents exploit
the just war idiom for rhetorical purposes, it is that it has also been internalized
by them and incorporated into military planning and operations at all levels. It is
not going too far to suggest that the just war tradition has become the pre-eminent
framework for examining the rights and wrongs of the use of force in inter
national society.12
Victory
Victory is integral to how we understand war. Aristotle and Cicero called it the
‘telos’ of military science, Sun Tzu hailed it as ‘the main object in war’, while
General Douglas Macarthur proclaimed that it knows ‘no substitute’.13 But what is
it? Victory is one of those concepts that, like time, appears simple to grasp until
you actually start to examine it.14 The issue is that victory is simultaneously a
rhetorically powerful concept but also a hopelessly vague one.15 On the one hand,
it is a very resonant term. It conjures up images of soldiers driving enemies from
the battlefield, planting a flag on a captured hill, seizing the enemy’s capital, and
vanquishing their foes.16 In each case, victory is represented as something that is
emphatic, decisive, conclusive. It stands for the termination of hostilities, the
(2011): 65–84. It is also important to note the work being done by the adjective ‘western’. In terms of its
provenance, just war theory is usually regarded as a western tradition. It does, however, have ana-
logues in other cultures. My focus will be on western just war theory. On the comparative ethics of
war: Gregory M. Reichberg, Henrick Syse, and Nicole M. Hartwell (eds.), Religion, War, and Ethics:
A Sourcebook of Textual Traditions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Vesselin Popovski,
Gregory M. Reichberg, and Nicholas Turner (eds.), World Religions and Norms of War (New York:
United Nations University Press, 2009); and Richard Sorabji and David Rodin (eds.), The Ethics of
War: Shared Problems in Different Traditions (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006).
11 Michael Walzer, Arguing About War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 3–22.
12 For a different take which emphasizes legalistic discourse: Fernando G. Nunez-Mietz,
‘Legalization and the Legitimation of the Use of Force: Revisiting Kosovo’, International Organization
72:3 (2018): 725–57.
13 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. by Harry Rackham (London: Wordsworth, 1996), p. 3
[1.i.3]. Marcus Tullius Cicero, ‘The Republic’, in The Republic and the Laws, trans. by Niall Rudd
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 83 [V.8]. Mark R. McNeilly, Sun Tzu and the Art of Modern
Warfare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 16. General Douglas MacArthur, ‘Farewell Address
to Congress’. Available at: www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/douglasmacarthurfarewelladdress.htm.
Accessed: 18 January 2019.
14 ‘What then is time? Provided that no one asks me, I know.’ Augustine, Confessions, trans. by
Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 230 [XI.xiv.17].
15 Robert Mandel describes victory as a ‘fuzzy, contentious, and emotionally charged’ idea. Robert
Mandel, The Meaning of Military Victory (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2006), p. 13.
16 Dominic P. Johnson and Dominic Tierney, Failing to Win: Perceptions of Victory and Defeat
in International Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 5–6. Also: Paul
settlement of a dispute, the end of ‘war-time’, and the resumption of peacetime.17

On the other hand, it can be hard to pin down exactly what victory means in
practical terms.18 Although we know it stands for winning, what this means in
practice is often anyone’s guess. Victory has historically been indexed to, among
other things, body-counts, the occupation of enemy territory, and the winning of
hearts and minds.19 Yet the fog of war is such that these indicators seldom give us
little more than a very rough idea of what victory looks like in war.
The tensions inherent in victory are observable in the wars of the post-9/11 era.
President George W. Bush placed the goal of victory at the forefront of US war
aims in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the so-called War on Terror more generally.
Delivering an address on the Iraq War in 2005, for example, ‘Bush used the word
“victory” fifteen times while standing in front of a sign that read “Plan for
Victory” and pitching a document called “Our National Strategy for Victory in
Iraq” .’20 Despite this, neither Bush nor his generals had, in Andrew Bacevich’s
words, ‘the foggiest notion of what victory would look like, how it would be won,
and what it might cost’.21 This was due in part to the nature of the struggle itself:
waged over amorphous battlespaces against shadowy foes rather than on clearly
demarcated battlefields against ranked and massed enemy armies, the wars the
US waged in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere were not configured to generate
readily identifiable victories. As General Petraeus put it, these were not the sort of
struggles ‘where you take a hill, plant the flag, and go home with a victory parade’.22
President Obama subsequently sought to shift US strategic discourse away from
any association with victory. The term ‘victory’ was unhelpful, he explained, because
Kekcskemeti, Strategic Surrender: The Politics of Victory and Defeat (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1958).
17 Andrew R. Hom, ‘Conclusion’, in Andrew R. Hom, Cian O’Driscoll, and Kurt Mills (eds.), Moral
Victories: The Ethics of Winning Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 235.
18 Richard Hobbs, The Myth of Victory: What is Victory in War? (Boulder: Westview, 1979), pp. xvi–2;
Tommy Franks, ‘What is Victory? A Conversation with General Tommy Franks’, The National Interest
86 (2006), p. 8.
19 Philip Caputo’s remarks are indicative: ‘Victory was a high body-count, defeat a low kill-
ratio, war a matter of arithmetic.’ Philip Caputo, A Rumour of War (New York: Henry Holt &
Company, 1996), p. xix. On the metrics of winning: Leo J. Blanken, Hy Rothstein, and Jason J. Lepore
(eds.), Assessing War: The Challenge of Success and Failure (Washington DC: Georgetown University
Press, 2015); Gregory A. Daddis, ‘The Problem of Metrics: Assessing Progress and Effectiveness in the
Vietnam War’, War in History 19:1 (2012): 73–98.
20 Dominic Tierney, The Right Way to Lose a War: America in an Age of Unwinnable Conflicts (New
York: Little, Brown & Company, 2015), p. 145.
21 Andrew J. Bacevich, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War (New York: Henry Holt
& Company, 2010), p. 10.
22 Mark Tran, ‘General David Petraeus Wars of Long Struggle Ahead for U.S. in Iraq’, Guardian,
11 September 2008. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/sep/11/iraq.usa. Accessed:
18 January 2019. Donald Rumsfeld went further, complaining that there was no ‘metrics to know if we
are winning or losing the Global War on Terror’. Quoted in: Mandel, The Meaning of Military Victory,
p. 135. For more on this: Jeffrey Record, Bounding the Global War on Terrorism (Carlisle, PA: Strategic
Studies Institute, 2003), pp. 5–6.
6 Victory
‘it invokes the notion of Emperor Hirohito coming down and signing a surrender
to MacArthur’.23 Obama’s efforts to excise victory from the lexicon have since
been reversed by President Donald Trump, in whose rhetoric ‘winning’ occupies
pride of place.24
The wars of the post-9/11 era also illuminate the degree to which victory
remains essential to how people think and talk about war. This underlines the
need for a clear definition of victory. This is easier said than done. Victory defies
parsimonious formulae. This is a reflection of its multivalence and historical
mutability. Victory can denote a wide variety of outcomes and has been under-
stood in very different ways at different times. As William C. Martel has observed,
‘victory describes in general terms a wide range of favourable or successful polit
ical, economic, and military outcomes that routinely occur in war’.25 It is, in this
sense, a very baggy or ‘imprecise’ term which only loosely captures a vast range of
phenomena.26 Strategists and military historians have tended to respond to this
problem (if that is indeed what it is) by elaborating complex typologies that are
intended to reflect the different categories of victory that can be achieved through
the use of force. Thus, for example, Colin Gray parses victory along operational,
strategic, and political dimensions while the aforementioned Martel refers to the
tactical, strategic, and grand-strategic levels of victory.27
The famous Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz furnishes us with another
way of approaching the task of defining victory. Instead of accounting for its
vicissitudes, he attempted to reduce it to its core essence. According to Clausewitz,
victory is best understood in terms of the imposition of one’s will upon the
enemy.28 As such, and unlike other similar terms such as ‘success’, it denotes a
fundamentally zero-sum outcome. For one side to win, the other must lose, and
for every victor there must be a vanquished.29 Victory, on this account, is a matter
23 Quoted in: Gabriella Blum, ‘The Fog of Victory’, European Journal of International Law 24:1
(2013), p. 421. On Obama’s efforts to excise victory from US discourse: William C. Martel, Victory in
War: Foundations of Modern Strategy—Revised and Expanded Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2011), pp. 17–18.
24 It would be a missed opportunity not to include at least one quote evoking victory from
President Trump: ‘You’re going to be so proud of your country. [. . .] We’re going to turn it around.
We’re going to start winning again: we’re going to win at every level, we’re going to win economically
[. . .] we’re going to win militarily, we’re going to win with healthcare for our veterans, we’re going to
win with every single facet, we’re going to win so much, you may even get tired of winning, and you’ll
say “Please, please, it’s too much winning, we can’t take it anymore”, and I’ll say “No it isn’t”, we have to
keep winning, we have to win more, we’re going to win more!’ Quoted in: Cian O’Driscoll and
Andrew R. Hom, ‘Introduction’, in Andrew R. Hom, Cian O’Driscoll, and Kurt Mills (eds.), Moral
Victories: The Ethics of Winning Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 3.
25 Martel, Victory in War, p. 19. 26 Ibid.
27 Colin S. Gray, Defining and Achieving Victory (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, 2002),
p. 11. Martel, Victory in War, pp. 34–9.
28 Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1989), pp. 77 [I.I]; 142–3 [II.II]. Clausewitz is discussed further in Chapter 6.
29 Lawrence Freedman, Strategy: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 71. Also:
Michael Howard, ‘When Are Wars Decisive?’, Survival 41:1 (1999), p. 130.
of prevailing over one’s adversaries and of forcing them to taste defeat. This way of
approaching victory emphasizes its antagonistic, conflictual character. This is
very much in line with the synonyms people habitually substitute for it: conquest,
triumph, vanquish, subdue, subjugate, and overcome.30 Each of these terms high-
lights the notion that victory is something that is achieved over others and at their
expense through means of domination and/or violence. Furthermore, while the
practice of characterizing a victory by reference to its degree of comprehensive-
ness (i.e., tactical, strategic, or grand-strategic) serves a practical purpose, it is
predicated upon the fact that victory, unqualified, ordinarily carries connotations
of decisiveness and totality.31
The Victory of Just War
Having introduced the fundaments of just war and victory, the next challenge is
to consider how they go together. This issue has not received much attention in
recent just war scholarship. While books and essays have appeared on almost
every conceivable issue relating to the ethics of war—from long-standing con-
cerns regarding sovereignty and intervention to novel worries arising from the
emergence of new military technologies—since the publication of Walzer’s Just
and Unjust Wars, the relation between just war and victory has been largely
overlooked.32 To put it more accurately, just war scholars have tended to avoid
using the language of victory and winning. This is not to say that the concept of
victory has been entirely absent from the current literature on just war. It does
make an occasional appearance. The issue is that it is seldom handled with any
care or concern for its full depth of meaning. Scholars evoke it but do not
engage it. This is especially apparent in three domains of contemporary just war
scholarship.
Reasonable Chance of Success
We might expect to find a thoughtful discussion of victory and its relation to the
idea of just war in analyses of the jus ad bellum principle of reasonable chance of
success. This principle may be taken to suggest that a war that satisfies all the
30 These synonyms are listed in: Martel, Victory in War, p. 22. 31 Ibid.
32 There are several honourable exceptions. Janina Dill (ed.), ‘Symposium on Ending Wars’, Ethics
125:3 (2015): 627–80; Beatrice Heuser, ‘Victory, Peace, and Justice: The Neglected Trinity’, Joint Forces
Quarterly 69 (2013): 1–7; Blum, ‘The Fog of Victory’; James Q. Whitman, The Verdict of Battle: The Law
of Victory and the Making of Modern War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). There is
also the collection of essays that I co-edited with Andy Hom and Kurt Mills: Andrew R. Hom, Cian
O’Driscoll, and Kurt Mills (eds.), Moral Victories: The Ethics of Winning Wars (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2017).
8 Victory
relevant jus ad bellum requirements would nevertheless only be justified if it is

also a war that one is likely to win. It can in this form be traced back to the Neo-
scholastic writings of Francisco Suarez. As Suarez framed it, ‘For a war to be just,
the sovereign ought to be so sure of the degree of his power that he is morally
certain of victory.’33 The reason for this, he explained, is that ‘otherwise the prince
would incur the evident peril of inflicting on his state losses greater than the
advantages involved’.34 This is exactly how the principle is stipulated in contem-
porary just war theory. Consider for example the following exposition in Guthrie
and Quinlan’s 2007 primer on the principles of just war:
The ‘success’ criterion reflects the truth that, whatever may be thought of an
individual’s entitlement to hazard or lose his or her life . . . it cannot be right for a
national leader, responsible for the good of all the people, to undertake—or pro-
long—armed conflict, with all the loss of life and other harm that entails, if there
is no reasonable likelihood that this would achieve a better outcome for the
people than would result from rejecting or ending combat and simply doing
whatever is possible by other means.35
Thus framed, the principle of reasonable chance of success does not demand the
prospect of a certain victory as a condition for waging war. It merely rules out, or
at least creates a prima facie case against, the recourse to force in cases where
there is reason to believe it would be futile. In essence, it sounds a cautionary note
against throwing soldiers’ lives after lost causes.
This may appear a promising place to find a thoughtful discussion of victory
and its relation to the idea of just war. The reality, however, is disappointing. The
first hint of this arrives courtesy of the shift in vocabulary it introduces, from
victory to success. We might suppose that this is just a matter of nomenclature, the
significance of which should not be overstated. Yet this is not quite right. There is
something lost when one substitutes success for victory in discussions bearing on
the rights and wrongs warfare. The use of success nudges the tone of just war
inquiry onto a euphemistic register by obfuscating the fact that, where war is con-
cerned, anything resembling a ‘positive’ outcomes must always necessarily have
been achieved at someone else’s expense. Put simply, it obscures the agonistic
logic of warfare that victory captures. This lends the misleading impression that
prevailing in war has nothing to do with the brutish, zero-sum realities of defeat-
ing the other party, when in fact it is grounded in them. Beyond this, the principle
of reasonable chance of success is prone to dissolve upon contact into a mushy
33 Francisco Suarez, ‘A Work on the Three Theological Virtues: Faith, Hope, and Charity: Disputation
XIII: On War’, in Selections from Three Works, ed. by Thomas Pink, trans. by Gwladys L. Williams,
Ammi Brown, and John Waldron (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2015), p. 937 [IV.10].
34 Ibid. 35 Guthrie and Quinlan, Just War, p. 31.
form of proportionality calculation. This is evident in the emphasis Guthrie and

Quinlan place upon the balancing of costs and benefits in their account of rea-
sonable chance of success.36 Others, like James Turner Johnson, define it in a way
that highlights its overlap with the principle of proportionality. In Johnson’s
words, the reasonable chance of success principle enjoins ‘Prudential calculation
of the likelihood that the means used will bring the justified ends sought.’37 Thus
configured, it functions as a kind of rump utilitarian backstop designed to guard
against feckless military adventurism. As such, it assumes rather than interrogates
the concept of success, and is thereby symptomatic of the general failure of today’s
just war theorists to acknowledge, let alone problematize, the relation between
victory and just war.
Jus Post Bellum
The other area of contemporary just war scholarship that purportedly addresses
the relation between just war and victory is the jus post bellum. Jus post bellum
analysis purports to address the ethical and legal questions that arise specifically
when a war is in the process of being concluded. Approached as a discreet field of
inquiry, jus post bellum analysis can be traced back to a 1994 essay by Michael
Schuck in the Christian Century.38 Appalled by the triumphalism displayed by the
US in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War, and in particular the attendance of military
top brass at a victory parade hosted by a Disney theme park, Schuck lamented
what he saw as his country’s lack of remorse for the losses that the war had occa-
sioned on both sides.39 More deeply, he claimed, it exposed the general lack of
thought devoted to the question of how states ought to comport themselves in the
aftermath of war. As a remedy, Schuck coined the phrase jus post bellum and prof-
fered it as the missing element of just war theory. Latterly, Brian Orend, Gary
Bass, Larry May, Eric Patterson, Mark Allman and Tobias Winright, Louis Iasiello,
Robert Williams and Dan Caldwell, and Alex Bellamy, among others, have
endorsed the case for jus post bellum and argued that, rather than concentrating
36 Ibid.
37 James Turner Johnson, Morality and Contemporary Warfare (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1999), p. 29. Some scholars, Nicholas Fotion and A. J. Coates among them, have even gone so far as to
identify reasonable chance of success as a subcategory of proportionality. Nicholas Fotion, War and
Ethics: A New Just War Theory (London: Continuum, 2007), p. 15; A. J. Coates, The Ethics of War
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), p. 179. Also: Frances V. Harbour, ‘Reasonable
Chance of Success as a Moral Criterion in the Western Just War Tradition’, Journal of Military Ethics
10:3 (2011): 230–41.
38 Michael J. Schuck, ‘When the Shooting Stops: Missing Elements in Just War Theory’, Christian
Century (26 October 1994), pp. 982–3.
39 I discuss this elsewhere: Cian O’Driscoll, ‘After Disneyland: The (Hollow) Victory of Just War’, in
Daniel R. Brunstetter and Jean-Vincent Holeindre (eds.), The Ethics of War and Peace Revisited
(Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2018): 287–302.
10 Victory
all their efforts on the initial resort to war and its subsequent conduct, theorists
should devote more time to the ethical challenges that arise at war’s end.40
Jus post bellum scholars present victory as pivotal to their enterprise.
Louis V. Iasiello equates jus post bellum analysis with parsing the liabilities and
responsibilities that victors incur with respect to the societies whose armies they
have defeated in combat. He writes that the task of the jus post bellum theorist is
to devise ‘moral precepts to guide the post bellum activities of victors’.41
Alex J. Bellamy submits that the key division in the jus post bellum field is between
minimalist and maximalist approaches, a distinction that turns on whether one
apportions minor or extensive responsibilities to victorious parties for those soci-
eties that they have defeated in war.42 Finally, Larry May claims that the central
jus post bellum question is ‘what difference should there be between victors and
vanquished in terms of post war responsibilities?’43
Yet even though the concept of victory pervades jus post bellum analysis, it is
not developed with any precision. This is because, despite its prominence in the
literature, victory is not actually the central concern of conventional jus post bel-
lum scholarship. Rather, as David Rodin has pointed out, the majority of jus post
bellum scholars are actually less interested in what victory might mean than they
are in discerning what principles should obtain after victory has already been
achieved.44 Viewed in this light, jus post bellum analysis is not designed to shed
any light on the concept of victory or its relation with just war. Instead, it treats
victory as a point of departure or threshold condition for a schematic examin
ation of what former belligerents owe one another after the war between them has
been won.45
40 Brian Orend, ‘Jus Post Bellum’, Journal of Social Philosophy 31:1 (2000): 117–37; Brian Orend, ‘Jus
Post Bellum: The Perspective of a Just-War Theorist’, Leiden Journal of International Law 20 (2007):
571–91; Gary Bass, ‘Jus Post Bellum’, Philosophy & Public Affairs 32:4 (2004): 384–412; Larry May, After
War Ends: A Philosophical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Eric Patterson,
Ending Wars Well: Order, Justice, and Conciliation in Contemporary Post-Conflict (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2012); Eric Patterson (ed.), Ethics Beyond War’s End (Washington DC: Georgetown
University Press, 2012); Mark J. Allman and Tobias L. Winwright, After the Smoke Clears: The Just War
Tradition and Post-War Justice (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2010); Louis V. Iasiello, ‘Jus Post Bellum: The Moral
Responsibilities of Victors in War’, Naval War College Review 57:3/4 (2004); Robert E. Williams and
Dan Caldwell, ‘Jus Post Bellum: Just War Theory and the Principles of Just Peace’, International Studies
Perspectives 7:4 (2006): 309–20; and Alex J. Bellamy, ‘The Responsibilities of Victory: Jus Post Bellum
and the Just War’, Review of International Studies 34 (2008): 601–25.
41 Iasiello, ‘Jus Post Bellum: The Moral Responsibilities of Victors in War’, p. 40.
42 Bellamy, ‘The Responsibilities of Victory’, p. 602. 43 May, After War Ends, p. 1.
44 David Rodin, ‘Two Emerging Issues of Jus Post Bellum: War Termination and the Liability of
Soldiers for Crimes of Aggression’, in Carsten Stahn and Jann K. Kleffner (eds), Jus Post Bellum:
Towards a Law of Transition from Conflict to Peace (The Hague: TMC Asser Press, 2008): 53–77.
45 This is neatly summed up by Walzer’s statement of purpose in a 2012 essay he wrote on jus post
bellum. ‘I am going to assume the victory of the just warriors and ask what their responsibilities are
after victory.’ Michael Walzer, ‘The Aftermath of War: Reflections on Jus Post Bellum’, in Eric Patterson
(ed), Ethics Beyond War’s End (Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2012), p. 37.
Jus Ex Bello
Rodin used the essay referred to above as a springboard to propose a new pole of
just war theorizing, jus terminatio, which would focus on the ethics of how wars
are brought to an end. Independently but around the same time, Darrel
Moellendorf issued a call for the development of what he called a jus ex bello pole
of just war theory, devoted to the same purpose identified by Rodin.46 ‘Although
there is a discussion of the morality of ending wars that goes back at least as far as
early modern philosophy, in recent debates on just war theory, the questions of
whether and how to end a war have received comparatively little attention.’47 This,
he contended, urgently requires correction. These calls have since inspired a pro-
fusion of work.48 The key argument that this body of work advances is that just
war theory would benefit from greater attention being paid to how we judge
whether and when to end our wars.49 This would necessarily involve more sys-
tematic thinking about the coherence between the jus ad bellum basis of a war,
the jus in bello restrictions that bear upon it, and the morally appropriate way to
terminate it.50 Scholars interested in jus ex bello matters have set for themselves
the task of examining whether belligerents waging a just war should always press
on for victory, no matter how arduous and costly a task that might be, while also
considering the possibility that there might be some point or threshold beyond
which they ought to sue for peace.51
Though the authors involved generally steer clear of the idiom of victory, the
premise of their work is that we as just war scholars need to pay more attention to
the relation between just war and victory. This book seeks to build on this insight.
Triumph, Tragedy, Irony
The purpose of this book is to examine the relation between just war and victory,
and to use this focus as a prism through which to shed new light on the idea of
just war, and in particular to highlight its tragic limitations. It will proceed by
interrogating what I consider to be the seven major problems that victory raises
for just war theorists. The aim in each case is to identify the parameters of the
problem, establish why just war theorists regard it as a reason for avoiding the
46 Darrel Moellendorf, ‘Jus Ex Bello’, Journal of Political Philosophy 16:2 (2009): 123–36.
47 Darrel Moellendorf, ‘Ending Wars’, in Seth Lazar and Helen Frowe (eds.), The Oxford Handbook
of Ethics of War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
48 Most notably: Dill (ed.), ‘Symposium on Ending Just Wars’.
49 Darrel Moellendorf, ‘Jus Ex Bello in Afghanistan’, Ethics & International Affairs 25:2 (2011), p. 156.
50 Janina Dill, ‘Ending Wars: The Jus ad Bellum Principles Suspended, Repeated, or Adjusted?’,
Ethics 125:3 (2015), p. 627.
51 Cecile Fabre, ‘War Exit’, Ethics 125:3 (2015), pp. 631–2.
12 Victory
concept of victory, show why this reason is actually a basis for engaging it, and
consider what this tells us about how just war is understood. We will discover the
same pattern at work across all seven problems.
It will be demonstrated that the reason just war theorists are so circumspect about
victory is because of what it reveals about just war: namely, that ‘just war is just war’.52
The claim that ‘just war is just war’ is usually asserted to undermine the idea of just
war. It affects to lay bare the truth that even the wars that one might regard as justi-
fied are nasty affairs, no different from any other war. It thus suggests that just war
theory both distracts from and sanitizes the horrors of modern warfare by dressing it
up in the garb of moral principles. Ken Booth furnishes its classic formulation. ‘The
idea of just war is beguiling’, he writes, ‘because it ennobles the profession of vio-
lence, and offers a set of conditions that seem to suggest rational control and
restraint.’53 Yet it is susceptible to being ‘misused and manipulated’.54 The result is
that it provides a source of legitimation for practices that should be condemned.
When I suggest, then, that viewing it through the prism of victory will reveal
just war to be just war, what I mean is that it will prick the pretensions of just war
theory. Instead of imbuing the idea of just war with triumphalism, interrogating it
through the lens of victory compels scholars to keep in mind that all wars, even
just ones, are brutish affairs that involve armies doing their utmost to defeat one
another. It follows that reflecting on just war in light of the kind of questions that
victory raises—What does victory in a just war look like, and can it ever be worth
the cost?—undercuts the impression that it is a rational, civilized, carefully cali-
brated, and orderly enterprise. Instead, it reveals it to be a wretched and bloody
business that trades in death and devastation—no different, in other words, from
any other kind of war. So far as thinking about victory obliges us to take this into
account, this helps us to think more realistically and therefore also more pru-
dently about just war—which can only be a good thing. This, then, is a reason for
engaging victory, not ignoring it.
At the same time, revealing just war to be just war might be taken as a damning
critique of the idea of just war. Indeed, some scholars—most notably Booth, but
also Andrew Fiala and Maja Zehfuss—have made exactly this case.55 They have
suggested that it furnishes us with good grounds for dismissing the whole idea of
just war as so much dangerous hot air. Just war theory, they argue, should be
rejected as ‘the continuation of war by other rhetoric’.56 I draw the opposite con-
clusion, however. I contend that it is precisely because ‘just war is just war’, with
all that this implies, that we must not shy away from just war theory, but should
52 Ken Booth, ‘Ten Flaws of Just Wars’, International Journal of Human Rights 4:3–4 (2000), pp. 316–17.
53 Booth, ‘Ten Flaws of Just Wars’, pp. 316–17. 54 Ibid.
55 Booth, ‘Ten Flaws of Just Wars’; Andrew Fiala, The Just War Myth: The Moral Illusion of War
(Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield: 2008); and Maja Zehfuss, War and the Politics of Ethics (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2018). I will discuss these scholars in depth in Chapter 7.
56 Booth, ‘Ten Flaws of Just Wars’, p. 317.
instead renew our commitment to thinking carefully and judiciously about it. Put
differently, instead of treating the realization that ‘just war is just war’ as grounds
for abandoning the task of just war thinking, we should take it as a spur to
approach it with the intellectual honesty and seriousness it demands. I say this
despite believing that the critics are correct when they say that just war is as much
a part of the problem as the solution when it comes to limiting the scourge of war.
Yet, unless we are willing to give up on the idea of subjecting war to moral judge-
ment, which I am not, I see no other option than to persevere with the idea of just
war, even as we—viewing it through the prism of victory—recognize the dangers
it presents.
Bringing all of this together, then, this book illuminates the tragedy of just war.
By asking what victory means in relation to just war, it invites us to consider the
limited return that can be expected from any use of force, regardless of whether it is
intended to serve a just cause or not. Just war, it submits, cannot fix our problems
for us; the best it can do is defer, allay, or contain them for a period, while producing
others in their place. This book thus frames just war, not as a means of resolving the
ills of the world, but as a symptom of them. Yet this does not mean we should wash
our hands of it. On the contrary, acquiring a deeper awareness of its limitations is a
reason for approaching just war with a renewed sense of purpose. This will involve
acknowledging that the problems that just war is symptomatic of are also what
render it necessary in the first place. At the same time, it will also require us to be
both more circumspect with respect to what we expect just wars to deliver, and
more honest about the fact that, as Erasmus put it, ‘even the most just of wars brings
with it a train of evils’.57 This, as we shall see, is itself a hard task, for the nature of the
just war idea is such that it encourages those of us who engage it to forget that it is
implicated in the problems it is intended to ameliorate.58
The aim of this book, therefore, might be described as ironic in the sense
described by Paul Fussell. For Fussell, the ironic disposition stands in opposition
to that brand of inquiry that ‘solves problems and cleans up the place, leaving you
feeling tidy and satisfied’. Rather, it accentuates the intractability of the problems
we face by complicating them and ‘leaving them messier than before’.59 The value
of this approach is that it forces us to confront the tragic dimension of our politics
where we might otherwise prefer to overlook.
57 Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince, trans. by Lisa Jardine (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997), p. 103. The argument that there is a need for more realism in just war theory is
the centrepiece of an excellent recent book: Valerie Morkevicius, Realist Ethics: Just War Traditions as
Power Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
58 I am minded of what Niebuhr called ‘the ironic tendency of virtues to turn into vices when too
complacently relied upon: and of power to become too vexatious if the wisdom which directs it is
trusted too confidently’. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2008), p. 133.
59 Paul Fussell, Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays (New York: Summit Books, 1988),
p. 42.
14 Victory
Thinking with History
This book comprises seven chapters, each one devoted to a different problem that
the concept of victory raises for just war theorists. Before previewing the content
of those chapters and showing how they hang together, it will be helpful to say
something about the form that these chapters take. In addition to drawing on a
range of classical and contemporary cases (or, to borrow a phrase, ‘historical illus-
trations’) to illuminate the nature of the problem it seeks to treat, each chapter
will both excavate and then engage the formative articulation of that problem.60
What this means in practice is that each chapter will look to dig up and exposit
the signature or paradigmatic expression of the given problem, and then use it as
a springboard for analysis and argument. The writings of, among others, Saint
Augustine, Marcus Tullius Cicero, Bernard of Clairvaux, Honore Bouvet, Christine
de Pizan, Thomas Aquinas, Cardinal Cajetan, Francisco de Vitoria, Francisco Suarez,
Alberico Gentili, Hugo Grotius, and Emer de Vattel, as well as of Jean Bethke
Elshtain, Oliver O’Donovan, David Rodin, Jeff McMahan, and the aforementioned
Michael Walzer, will all feature in this manner.
The aim behind this approach is not, of course, to glean ready-made answers
from our forebears about the proper relation between just war and victory, or to
channel their theories so that they speak more directly to the questions we worry
about today. Rather, it is to partake in what Carl Schorske has called ‘thinking
with history’, a task that involves locating ourselves in history’s stream and work-
ing with ‘the materials of the past and the configurations in which we organize
and comprehend them to orient ourselves in the living present’.61 It is, in other
words, to employ the diverse range of how the great and the good of previous
generations conceived of and responded to the problems of their day as a back-
drop against which to set (and understand) the issues we confront today.62 This,
then, is an exercise in expanding our horizons, not an act of deference to those
who have gone before us.63 It posits the past, not as a mirror on the present, but as
60 I am invoking here the same methodological link that Walzer posits between the use of historical
illustrations and the plural pronouns ‘we’, ‘ours’, and ‘us’. Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, pp. xxvi, xxviii.
For an analysis, Anthony F. Lang, Jr., ‘Politics, Ethics, and History in Just War’, in Lothar Brock and
Hendrik Simon (eds.), The Justification of War and the International Order: From the Past to the Present
(forthcoming).
61 Carl Schorske, Thinking with History: Explorations in the Passage to Modernism (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 3.
62 ‘He who would confine his thought to the present time will not understand present reality.’ Jules
Michelet quoted in: Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1954), p. 35.
63 This approach reflects the influence of Quentin Skinner. See: Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics,
Volume I: Regarding Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 89. It is also inspired
by the historical approach to the ethics of war. I have already mentioned Johnson, Russell, Bellamy,
and Cox in this regard. I would add: Nigel Biggar, Chris Brown, Daniel Brunstetter, Luke Glanville,
Pablo Kalmanovitz, John Kelsay, Tony Lang, Valerie Morkevicius, Stephen Neff, Gregory Reichberg,
Nick Rengger, Daniel Schwartz, and Henrik Syse. I write about this approach elsewhere: Cian
a ‘set of counter-images’ that places the present in its proper perspective and
reminds us of its contingency.64
Methodological snares abound with a work of this kind. As the list of thinkers
furnished above suggests, this book covers a very wide historical period—from
classical antiquity to the present day—and a great deal of material. In parsing this
material for the purpose of this inquiry, I have tried to steer a course between the
twin perils of anachronism and antiquarianism.65 This is no easy task. The approach
adopted here reflects a pragmatic attempt to balance sensitivity to the particularities
of historical context against the need to draw connections across time between
homologous concepts. I have, in other words, attempted to pay due tribute to the
stories of both change and continuity that we discover when we examine how vic-
tory has been related to just war down the centuries.66 Whether or not I have dis-
charged this task satisfactorily will ultimately be for the reader to judge.
Seven Deadly Sins
The book will proceed as follows. As noted above, it will comprise seven chapters,
each one corresponding to a different problem that the idiom of victory poses for
just war theorists. Chapter 1 kicks matters off by examining the stock belief that
contemporary just war theorists do not so much have an issue with the category
of victory as believe it to lie beyond their jurisdiction. Victory, on this view, has
never been a topic of direct inquiry in the just war tradition—if it has ever been a
problem, it has been somebody else’s problem. This chapter will expose this belief
as bogus. Via a detailed engagement with the writings of Saint Augustine, it will
reveal that, far from being neglected, victory was a central concern in the forma-
tive texts of the just war tradition. Indeed, it will show how victory featured in
O’Driscoll, ‘The Historical Just War Tradition’, in Chris Brown and Robyn Eckersley (eds.), The Oxford
Handbook of International Political Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018): 209–20. Also:
Cian O’Driscoll, ‘Divisions within the Ranks? The Just War Tradition and the Use and Abuse of
History’, Ethics & International Affairs 27:1 (2013): 47–65.
64 John Tosh, Why History Matters (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), pp. 28–9.
65 Anachronism involves reading the past in light of the present. Antiquarianism signifies a love of
the past for its own sake and, as such, dissolves into romanticism. George Klosko, ‘Introduction’, in
George Klosko (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Political Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2013), p. 3.
66 I have been guided in this respect by the principle expressed by Richard Rorty, J. B. Schneewind,
and Quentin Skinner that, as a scholar interested in intellectual history, I work, not for the sources I
cite, but for the readers to whom I relate them. Richard Rorty, J. B. Schneewind, and Quentin Skinner,
‘Introduction’, in Richard Rorty, J. B. Schneewind, and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Philosophy in History
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 7. Trevor Roper’s remark that ‘the historian
belongs not to the past but to the present’ is also apposite. Quoted in: E. H. Carr, What Is History?
(London: Penguin, 1987), p. 25. Carr glosses: ‘The function of the historian is neither to love the past
nor to emancipate himself from the past, but to master and understand it as the key to the under-
standing of the present.’
16 Victory
Augustine’s writings as the foil that brought the tragic dimensions of his vision of
just war to light. Why, then, it asks, have just war scholars wrongly assumed that
our predecessors did not address the topic of victory directly?67 It will submit that
the reason we have been so reluctant to acknowledge the place of victory in the
tradition is because it would force us—as it forced Augustine—to confront the
tragic limitations of just war.
Chapter 2 tackles the proposition that the desired end of a just war is peace, not
victory, and that the latter, so far as it has the potential to impede the former, is a
category to be avoided. The concern this raises, then, is not simply that peace and
victory constitute distinct objectives for a just war. It is that they might also be
mutually implicated yet incompatible aims. For a just war to advance the aim of
peace it presumably must be consummated in victory. Yet, so far as victory glori-
fies the idea of prevailing over one’s enemies in combat, and encourages people to
view war, not in terms of its relation to justice, order, and peace, but in a more
reductive zero-sum logic, it appears more likely to confound rather than to
advance that same aim of peace that the just war is intended to serve. Drawing on
the writings of Cicero and Roman victory rituals, this chapter examines this pos-
sibility. It contends that the relation between victory and peace exposes what we
might regard as the principal paradox of just war: the act of winning a just war is
likely to undermine the peace that the just war is being fought to advance.
Chapter 3 considers the view that, so far as victory is a strategic and not a nor-
mative concept, it is best ignored. The logic here is simple: because victory speaks
to the kinetics of war rather than the ethics of war, we should refrain from
engaging it. This chapter refutes this contention. Drawing on a range of historical
sources, including Bernard of Clairvaux, Honore Bouvet, and Christine de Pizan,
it reveals that the idea that victory is a purely strategic concept is actually out of
step with how victory has generally been conceived down the centuries. From
classical times through to the present day, victory has always been regarded as a
concept that is, on some level at least, freighted with moral and even divine over-
tones. This history, it will be concluded, is not just interesting in its own right; it
also exposes something very troubling about the idea of just war—namely, its
propensity to seed a combination of complacency and self-righteousness in those
who invoke it.
Chapter 4 reflects on the view that victory has no place in just war theory
because, despite what its name suggests, just war, properly understood, is not
really a form of warfare, but is rather a mode of extra-territorial punishment.
67 Examples of this wrong assumption can be discerned in the premise put forward for why we
need jus post bellum and jus ex bello domains of just war theorizing. It is, we are told, because just war
theory has hitherto neglected to address the termination of war and its aftermath that we need these
new frameworks. Victory is presumably encompassed within this claim. For example: Bass, ‘Jus Post
Bellum’, p. 384; Moellendorf, ‘Ending Wars’. For a related argument: Eric Patterson, Just American
Wars: Ethical Dilemmas in U.S. Military History (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), pp. 162–6.
Adherents to this school of thought submit that just war is not so much a military
contest between rival sovereigns, each vying to advance its own interests through
armed combat, as an extension into the international sphere of the punitive func-
tion that the judiciary discharges in the domestic realm. This chapter explores
this view as it has been, on the one hand, put forward by contemporary scholars
like Oliver O’Donovan, Nigel Biggar, Jean Elshtain, and David Rodin, and, on the
other, as it was formulated in the late Middle Ages and early modern period by
Thomas Aquinas, Cardinal Cajetan, Francisco de Vitoria, and Francisco Suarez. It
will conclude that the endurance of this school of thought discloses a delusional
tendency at the heart of just war thinking to sanitize just war by disguising its
brutish nature and re-casting as a rational and civilized mode of law enforcement
where, in actual fact, it is a much grimmer affair.
Chapter 5 focuses on the fact that the concept of victory carries negative
connotations of conquest for just war theorists. These associations with conquest,
which designates the subjugation and assumption of control over a people or
place by military force, makes just war theorists deeply uncomfortable. Instead of
contesting the claim that victory is connected to conquest, this chapter argues
that the issue of conquest highlights a set of important questions bearing on the
legal effects of victory that the idea of just war generates but which contemporary
just war theorists tend to overlook. Does victory in a just war generate certain
rights or entitlements for the victor, and, if so, on what basis? Is just war genera-
tive of what we might call a ‘right of conquest’? And does this right extend even
to cases where the victor does not have justice on its side? Drawing on the
seventeenth-century legal writings of Alberico Gentili and Hugo Grotius, this
chapter contends that the answers just war thinkers have historically furnished to
these questions reveal a degree of overlap with the doctrine of might is right that
contemporary just war theorists have been conditioned to ignore and are likely to
find disquieting.
Chapter 6 considers what might be regarded as a more anodyne problem. It
examines the view that, insofar as today’s wars are configured in such a way that
they are basically unwinnable, it would be anachronistic to address them in the
idiom of victory. The claim arising from this is that, because victory has little
relevance to how contemporary armed conflicts end, just war theorists are cor-
rect to ignore it. This chapter assesses this contention. It confirms that, to the
degree that victory is understood through the prism of so-called ‘decisive battles’,
which is the standard way it has historically been conceived, its critics have a fair
point. Very few wars in any age, not just the present one, have ever concluded
with a clear-cut victory for one side and an emphatic defeat for the other. There
is, then, a sound historical basis for declaiming victory as an obsolete concept.
While this is true, it is not, however, the entire story. It overlooks the moral
weight that this idealized vision of victory has historically carried in just war
thought. Reflecting on this insight, which it substantiates by reference to the
18 Victory
writings of Emer de Vattel, this chapter concludes that what the examination of
the relevance of victory to modern war reveals is the dated conception of war
that underpins just war thinking.
Chapter 7 addresses the worry that to speak about war in terms of victory is to
court an escalatory logic that undercuts the spirit of moderation that the just war
tradition champions. The pursuit of victory compels an uncompromising attitude
toward the conduct of hostilities. It encourages an eyes-on-the-prize approach
that inclines armies to set the rules aside and take the fight to their enemies with
greater fury and less constraint. Playing to win, the argument goes, means playing
hard. This chapter examines this concern. Turning it on its head, it contends that
while the idiom of victory brings an escalatory logic with it, so too does the idea
of just war. This is demonstrated by reference to the writings of two leading con-
temporary just war scholars: Michael Walzer and Jeff McMahan. The conclusion
arising from this is not necessarily that we should back away from speaking about
either victory or just war. It is, however, a reminder of both what is staked when
we do engage them, and why they must always be approached with great caution.
In addition, then, to offering an analysis of the problems that just war theorists
perceive victory to pose, this book can also be engaged as a critical history of the
just war tradition, from Cicero to McMahan, read through the lens of victory. It
tells the story of the tradition as a tale of coming to terms (or not) with the hard
questions that victory raises for the idea of just war.
Conclusion
The argument arising from all of this is that, when it comes to just war thinking,
victory appears as a glitch that has been built into the system: a glitch that cannot be
fully figured out or fixed, but also a glitch without which the system would not
operate. In light of this, it is possible to see that the reason just war theorists con-
sider the problems posed by victory to be a cause for avoiding it—namely, that it
reveals that ‘just war is just war’—should actually be taken as a cause for engaging it.
It is precisely because victory forces us to confront the fact that just war is just war,
with all that this implies, that we must think both more carefully and more deeply
about it than we have so far been prepared to do. This should not be taken as a case
for dismissing just war theory, however. Where the assertion that just war is just war
is usually invoked to discredit the enterprise of just war theory, the argument I pre-
fer to advance is that it should instead be taken as a reminder of why we need it in
the first place. Viewed in this light, what is cast by Booth and others as a damning
critique of just war theory is actually better understood as a restatement of its raison
d’être. This in turn provides a platform for developing an account of just war that,
highlighting its basis in tragedy, casts it as a function of loss.
1
Beneath Every History, Another History
It is the tyranny of hidden prejudices that makes us deaf to what

speaks to us in tradition.
Hans-Georg Gadamer1
Introduction
Raising the issue of victory among contemporary just war scholars provokes
consternation. The first reason for this is the stock belief that victory has never been
a part of our brief. Even those scholars who have advocated for the extension of the
just war framework to incorporate discrete jus post bellum and jus ex bello domains
have assumed as their premise the claim that just war theorists have historically
discounted victory as a primary object of analysis.2 Moved by Hilary Mantel’s
provocation that history is often more layered than we imagine, this chapter con-
tests this claim.3 Courtesy of a detailed engagement with the writings of Saint
Augustine, it will reveal that, far from being neglected, victory was a central con-
cern in the formative texts of the just war tradition. Indeed, it will show how victory
featured in Augustine’s writings as the foil that brought the tragic dimensions of his
vision of just war to light. Why, then, have just war scholars wrongly assumed that
our predecessors did not address the topic of victory? What explains our selective
memory in this regard? I will suggest in this chapter that the reason we have been
so reluctant to acknowledge the place of victory in the tradition is because it would
force us—as it forced Augustine—to confront the tragic limitations of just war.
Two Cities Created by Two Loves
The focus of this chapter will be upon what Augustine had to say about just war,
victory, and the relation between them. However, a few words to introduce
1 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. by Joel Weinsheimer and D. G. Marshall
(London: Continuum, 2004), p. 272.
2 For example, Gary Bass, ‘Jus Post Bellum’, Philosophy & Public Affairs 32:4 (2004), p. 384.
3 Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (London: Fourth Estate, 2009), p. 66. The title of this chapter is an allu-
sion to Mantel’s observation.
Victory: The Triumph and Tragedy of Just War. Cian O’Driscoll, Oxford University Press (2020). © Cian O’Driscoll.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198832911.001.0001
20 Victory
Augustine and the main tenets of his political theology are necessary before we go
any further. Augustine was born in 354 ce in Thagaste, which is now Souk Ahras
in Algeria, but was then a provincial town on the edge of the Roman Empire. His
mother, Monica, was a devout Christian; his father, Patricius, a local official.
A gifted student, Augustine excelled at school and graduated as a teacher of rhet
oric. He had a wayward streak, however, and pained his mother by seeking spirit-
ual guidance outside the Church. Augustine grappled throughout his life with
the problem of evil in the world, searching for answers in what he would later
characterize as all the wrong places. These aspects of Augustine’s life are familiar
thanks to his autobiographical work, the Confessions.4 This book—among the first
of its kind—traces Augustine’s spiritual journey from his early dalliances with
Manichean thought to his dramatic conversion to Christianity circa 386 ce. Along
the way, it records his intellectual debts to Cicero, whom we will meet again in
Chapter 2, as well as the martyr Saint Paul, and the influential Bishop of Milan,
Ambrose, under whose sway he fell when he was still a young man. It also
describes how Ambrose’s teachings, combined with Monica’s persistent encour-
agement, eventually created the conditions for Augustine’s return to the Catholic
faith and his ordination in 388 ce. His rise to prominence was swift and he was
elected Bishop of Hippo in 395 ce. This was an important role and it placed him
at the centre of several controversies, and even violent quarrels. He would serve in
this position until his death in 430 ce.5
Isidore of Seville once quipped that Augustine wrote so many texts that anyone
who claims to have read them all must be a liar.6 Augustine was indeed a prolific
writer, authoring at least 113 works on a range of topics. This is in addition to the
300 letters he is estimated to have written, and the approximately 8,000 sermons
he delivered. A number of these interventions were very influential, especially in
respect of defining the Church’s response to other faiths and divisions within its
own ranks. It is, however, his musings on just war that are of most interest here.
While it would be an exaggeration to call Augustine the sole progenitor of the just
war tradition, there is no doubting his importance as the keynote early Christian
thinker and principal bridge between classical and medieval just war thought.7
4 Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. by Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
5 On the life and times of Augustine: Gerald Bonner, St. Augustine of Hippo: His Life and
Controversies (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 1986); Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Jean Bethke Elshtain, Augustine and the Limits of
Politics (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995). Also: Jean Bethke Elshtain, ‘Augustine’, in
David Boucher and Paul Kelly (eds.), Political Thinkers: From Socrates to the Present (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003): 95–107.
6 R. W. Dyson, Normative Theories of Society and Government in Five Medieval Thinkers (Lampeter:
Edwin Mellen Press, 2003), p. 3.
7 The relevant literature reveals, if not a lively debate, at least a healthy mix of views regarding the
nature of Augustine’s contribution to the just war tradition. There are some who see him as the ‘fons et
origo’ of the tradition. See: Jonathan Barnes, ‘The Just War’, in Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny,
and Jan Pinborg (eds.), The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge
Beneath Every History, Another History 21
The problem arises, however, that whatever Augustine had to say on this topic
was incidental to his primary purpose, which was to develop a Christian account
of the human condition—an account that, in Peter Brown’s words, married a ‘pre-
occupation with the inner life’ with an emphasis on ‘otherworldliness’.8
Augustine believed that, as God’s children, all human beings have value. Their
merit rests not in their capacity to perform courageous deeds or achieve excel-
lence in some or other sphere of life, but in the virtue of their eternal souls, which
bear the imprint of God’s saving grace. For so long as people are alive on this
earth, however, their souls must be considered alienated from God, trapped as it
were in their mortal bodies. During this time people will be tempted to distract
themselves from their wretched condition by indulging themselves in earthly
pleasures. This might involve activities that are usually considered wholesome,
such as spending time with family and friends, as well as some, like fornication
and gambling, that have historically been deemed base. Augustine rejected this
distinction. He argued that both sets of pleasures, the wholesome as well as the
base, should properly be regarded as vices. This is because they lead people away
from what really matters, which is the love of God that is planted in the breast of
every person. The more people indulge them, he argued, the more people are
prone to forget that the true source of value in this world lies not in the satisfac-
tion of earthly desires, but in devotion to the Lord. People, it followed, will only
ever be at one with themselves when they orient their lives in respect of this,
which means disregarding temporal goods as so many temptations to sin, and
University Press, 1982), p. 771. Also: John Mark Mattox, Saint Augustine and the Theory of Just War
(London: Continuum, 2006), p. 14; William V. O’Brien, The Conduct of Just and Limited War (New
York: Praeger, 1981), p. 4; Jean Bethke Elshtain, Just War Against Terror: The Burden of Order in a
Violent World (New York: Basic Books, 2004), pp. 49–50; Innes Claude Jr., ‘Just War: Doctrines and
Institutions’, Political Science Quarterly 95:1 (1987), p. 87; and William R. Stevenson, Christian Love
and Just War: Moral Paradox and Political Life in Saint Augustine and his Modern Interpreters (Macon:
Mercer University Press, 1987), p. 2. There are, however, others who argue that Augustine did not
invent the idea of just war ex nihilo, but instead developed it from materials inherited from classical
antiquity. See: James Turner Johnson, Just War Tradition and the Restraint of War (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1981), p. xxiv; Alex J. Bellamy, Just Wars: From Cicero to Iraq (Cambridge:
Polity, 2006), p. 29; Gregory M. Reichberg, Henrik Syse, and Endre Begby, ‘Augustine: Just War in the
Service of Peace’, in The Ethics of War: Classic and Contemporary Readings (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006),
p. 70; and Cian O’Driscoll, ‘Rewriting the Just War Tradition: Just War in Classical Greek Thought and
Practice’, International Studies Quarterly 59:1 (2015), p. 1.
8 Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity ad 150–750 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1971), pp. 45;
52. Finally, James Turner Johnson has recently argued that, viewed in their own right, Augustine’s
writings were not as formative for the development of the just war tradition as one might assume.
Rather, Augustine’s influence upon the subsequent development of the just war tradition derives from
the manner in which a restricted selection of his writings were interpreted and transmitted by medi
eval interlocutors to subsequent generations. James Turner Johnson, ‘Saint Augustine’, in Daniel
R. Brunstetter and Cian O’Driscoll (eds.), Just War Thinkers: From Cicero to the 21st Century (London:
Routledge, 2017): 21–33. I take this argument seriously but nevertheless focus this chapter on
Augustine’s writings rather than their later reception.
22 Victory
devoting themselves in an ascetic, self-giving way to living in joyful hope of the

day when their souls will pass from this world and join God in the next one.
The central ordering device in Augustine’s mature political theology was the
proposition that humanity was delineated into two camps, the ‘city of God’ and
the ‘city of man’.9 He elaborated this idea in his masterwork, The City of God
against the Pagans.10 The two cities were not material entities that existed in
determinate form in human history. Instead, they stood for the primary commu-
nities of belief that were immanent within humanity. What distinguished one city
from the other was the direction of the unifying ‘love’ its members shared.
Augustine elaborated this idea in Book XIV of the City of God: ‘Two cities, then,
have been created by two loves: that is, the earthly by love of self, extending even
to contempt of God, and the heavenly by love of God extending to contempt of
self.’11 ‘The one’, he explained, ‘glories in itself, the other in the Lord; the one seeks
glory from men, the other finds its highest glory in God, the Witness of our con-
science. The one lifts up its head in its own glory; the other says to God “Thou art
my glory, and lifter of mine head” .’12
The members of the city of God included all those, living and dead, who
directed their loves to God. Despite being separated by whatever distance divides
heaven from earth, the souls of the elect combine to form one unified society of
grace. Within this totality, that contingent yet to ascend to heaven comprised a
‘small and temporarily stranded part of its total membership’.13 Emphasizing the
idea that their time on earth was merely a temporary affair, a prelude to the enjoy-
ment of eternal life with God in heaven, Augustine labelled them pilgrims.14
Upon their mortal demise, God would lift them up to join the rest of the angels
and saints in ‘the Eternal City’, where they would enjoy perfect concord and life
everlasting.15
The members of the city of man were less fortunate. Because this city comprised
men who, by dint of the fact that they loved earthly goods ahead of God, were
sinful, its members would not be resurrected when their lives on earth came to a
close.16 ‘Estranged from God’, they had no hope of accession to the heavenly city.17
Meanwhile, because they were animated by sin rather than a properly ordered
love, they would never know true peace or justice, and their time on earth would
be plagued by struggle and disorder.
The members of both cities lived among and alongside one another for such
time as they were on this earth. Following R. A. Markus, Augustinian scholars
9 On viewing the two cities as ‘camps’: Frederick Coplestone, A History of Philosophy: Volume II
(New York: Doubleday Books, 1946), p. 100.
10 Augustine, The City of God Against the Pagans, ed. and trans. by R. W. Dyson (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998).
11 Augustine, City of God, p. 632 [XIV.28]. 12 Ibid.
13 Dyson, Normative Theories of Society and Government, p. 19.
14 Augustine, City of God, p. 216 [V.16]. 15 Ibid., p. 216 [V.16].
16 Ibid., pp. 638–9 [XV.4] 17 Ibid., p. 961 [XIX.26].
tend to refer to the resultant mixed zone as the saeculum. ‘The saeculum for
Augustine was the sphere of temporal realities in which the two “cities” share an
interest’, Markus explains. It is ‘the whole stretch of time in which the two cities
are “inextricably intertwined”; it is the sphere of human living, history, society,
and its institutions, characterised by the fact that in it the ultimate eschatological
oppositions, though present, are not discernible.’18 Though the saeculum was
not entirely depraved, nor was it a happy place to be, especially for those mem-
bers of the city of God who were exposed to the predations of their more sinful
neighbours. Akin to a rough part of town, it was a fraught environment for any
faithful pilgrims passing through it. Yet if life was gruelling in the saeculum,
Augustine believed that this was all part of God’s plan. He cast the elect into this
ante-chamber for a reason: to test and steel them. Pilgrims were exhorted either
to prove themselves worthy of God’s grace or to be dragged down to the level of
the sinners around them.19 The trials of the saeculum were not pointless, then.
They provided the opportunity for pilgrims to display their worthiness of
salvation.20
Augustine’s views appear quite strange today. They become more intelligible,
however, when one considers that he lived at a time when Christians were still
grappling with how to situate themselves in the world. Waiting in hope for the
Second Coming of their Lord, which they believed would happen imminently,
they expressed uncertainty about the merits of engaging with the political affairs
of the saeculum. Should they get involved, and risk dirtying their hands, or
should they stand back, and chance allowing the wicked to rule unchecked? If, as
we have seen, Augustine’s answer to this question was that Christians should
approach life on this earth as a trial to be endured en route to the heavenly king-
dom, this was not a counsel of passivity or withdrawal. Instead, it was a com-
mand to train one’s heart toward God in hope of the resurrection to come, even
while respecting and serving one’s earthly community in the saeculum. In light
of these considerations, Christians were obliged, where necessary, to take up
their position on the bench as judges, act as jailers and executioners, collect
taxes, and—crucially for our purposes—contribute to the state’s defence and
serve in its wars. It was as an extension of this latter duty that Augustine
expounded his conception of just war.
18 R. A. Markus, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of Augustine (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 133.
19 ‘However, the threshing-floor bears a single threshing-sledge to remove the stubble and purge
the grain. Again, the furnace of a goldsmith accepts only one fire for the dross to be reduced to ash,
and the gold to be freed from impurities. Similarly, Rome too has endured a single time of trial. The
pious have been chastened by this, but the impious condemned.’ Augustine, ‘Sermon: The Sacking of
the City of Rome [c.410/11]’, in Political Writings, ed. by E. M. Atkins and R. J. Dodaro (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 213 [IX].
20 Stevenson, Christian Love and Just War, pp. 28–30.
24 Victory
The Necessity of Waging Just Wars
Augustine’s forebears, the Early Christian Fathers, were generally agreed that
Christians should refrain from contributing militarily to the wars waged by the
Roman Empire.21 The problem with this approach was its flagrant hypocrisy.
What were Romans of pagan stock to think when they observed Christians bene-
fiting from the security that the Empire afforded them while doing nothing to
support it? Augustine, who had experienced first-hand the anger vented at
Christians by Rome’s pagan population in the aftermath of the sacking of the city
in 410 ce by Alaric’s Goths, was moved by these concerns.22 Resigned to the fact
that the Second Coming was not likely to happen any time soon, he believed that
Christians had to find a new set of arrangements for being in the world. In par-
ticular, they could not continue to exempt themselves from contributing to the
defence of the communities in which they lived. It was against this backdrop,
then, that he mounted a theological case for why Christians should serve in just
wars waged by Rome. What this amounted to in practice was a set of arguments,
contra many of the Early Christian Fathers, for why and how Christians could
contribute to Rome’s just wars by serving in them.23
If the challenge confronting Augustine was a novel one, his response to it bor-
rowed from elements of Roman political thought, most notably the writings of
Marcus Tullius Cicero—writings we will return to in Chapter 2.24 The definition
of just war Augustine furnished in Questions on the Heptateuch followed that
expounded by Cicero almost to the letter: ‘As a rule just wars are defined as those
21 Their scepticism was based on either outright hostility toward Rome, or, more typically, a prefer-
ence that Christians should remain aloof from affairs of state. Jean-Michel Hornus, It is Not Lawful for
Me to Fight: Christian Attitudes Toward War, Violence, and the State, trans. Alan Kreider and Oliver
Coburn (Eugene: WIPF & Stock, 1980), pp. 25–32. Also see: Louis J. Swift, The Early Fathers on War
and Military Service (Wilmington: Michael Glazier, 1983); Louis J. Swift, ‘Early Christian Views on
Violence, War, and Peace’, in Kurt Raaflaub (ed.), War and Peace in the Ancient World (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2007): 279–96; C. John Cadoux, The Early Christian Attitude to War: A Contribution to the
History of Christian Ethics (London: Headley Brothers, 1919); John Helgeland, Robert J. Daly, and
J. Patout Burns, Christians and the Military: The Early Experience, ed. by Robert J. Daly (Philadelphia:
Fortress, 1985); and James Turner Johnson, The Quest for Peace: Three Moral Traditions in Western
Cultural History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 23–32.
22 Augustine complained in the City of God of the pagan proclivity to blame Christians for all their
woes: ‘No rain: blame the Christians!’ Augustine, City of God, p. 53 [II.3].
23 This set of arguments was not coherent or especially developed. Augustine’s remarks on just war
were scattered across various texts and often loosely formed. Henrik Syse, ‘Augustine and Just War:
Between Virtue and Duties’, in Henrik Syse and Gregory M. Reichberg (eds.), Ethics, Nationalism, and
Just War: Medieval and Contemporary Perspectives (Washington DC: Catholic University of America
Press, 2007), p. 37.
24 Cicero’s definition of just war appears in Book III [35] of The Republic: ‘Wars are unjust when
they are undertaken without proper cause. No just war can be waged except for the sake of punishing
or repelling an enemy . . . no war is deemed to have been just if it has not been properly declared and
proclaimed.’ I treat it in the next chapter. Augustine’s relation to Cicero was mediated (or at least abet-
ted) by Saint Ambrose. For more on this: Joan D. Tooke, The Just War in Aquinas and Grotius (London:
SPCK, 1965), p. 10.
which avenge injuries, if some nation or state against whom one is waging war
has neglected to punish a wrong committed by its citizens, or to return something
that was wrongfully taken.’25 Any continuity that existed between Cicero and
Augustine was, however, more formal than substantive. Augustine may have
adopted Cicero’s definition of just war, but he infused it with new meaning by
connecting it to Christian rather than Roman premises. Where Cicero had
attached just war to preserving the Pax Romana, Augustine viewed it as a means
of curbing the effects of sinful behaviour in the saeculum and thereby ensuring
enough order to protect those pilgrims passing through on their way to the heav-
enly kingdom. To Cicero’s definition of just war, then, Augustine added a theo-
logical dimension that shifted its locus from temporal ideas of justice to the
Christian economy of redemption.
What was so morally problematic about war? Augustine had two principal mis-
givings. His first concern, which we will see was not strongly held, pertained to the
hardships that war inflicted on people.26 War killed and maimed men, women,
and children, tore towns and villages apart, and destroyed agricultural lands—
frequently to little purpose. Augustine developed this theme in a sequence of
chapters in Book III of the City of God that catalogued the grief arising from
Rome’s historic victories over the Sabines and Carthaginians, among others. In the
case of the war against the Sabines, Augustine argued that the Romans may have
conquered their neighbours, but this victory was rendered ‘shameful and deplorable’
by the fact that it was ‘purchased only with great injuries to kinsfolk and neigh-
bours alike, and many burials’.27 It was, however, the wars against the Carthaginians
that truly proved beyond any doubt the ghastliness of war: ‘During these wars, how
many smaller kingdoms were crushed, how many broad and noble towns destroyed,
how many cities afflicted and lost! How many regions and lands far and wide were
laid waste!’28 The atrocities suffered by both peoples were so extensive, he con-
cluded, that it would be too great a task to recount them all. ‘These calamities’, he
remarked in a manner that anticipates Erasmus’s critique of war, ‘were so great that
the victor was more like the vanquished.’29 On this count, war may provide ‘amuse-
ment for the demons’ but it is utterly ‘lamentable to men’.30
As already indicated, Augustine did not ultimately attach much weight to this
concern. While he was dismayed to hear of people losing their lives and
25 Augustine, ‘Questions on the Heptateuch [VI.10]’, in Gregory M. Reichberg, Henrik Syse, and
Endre Begby (eds.), The Ethics of War: Classic and Contemporary Readings (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006),
p. 82.
26 Richard Shelley Hartigan, ‘Saint Augustine on War and Killing: The Problem of the Innocent’,
Journal of the History of Ideas 27:2 (1966), p. 201.
27 Augustine, City of God, pp. 107–9 [III.13]. 28 Augustine, City of God, p. 123 [III.18].
29 Augustine, City of God, p. 125 [III.19]. Erasmus: ‘Very often the victor laments a victory bought
too dearly.’ Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince, ed. by Lisa Jardine (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997), p. 107 [XI]. Erasmus will be discussed at more length in Chapter 7.
30 Augustine, City of God, p. 124 [III.18].
26 Victory
livelihoods, he was also aware that these goods would have perished sooner or
later anyway. There was, it followed, little sense in mourning the passage of some-
thing that was always already in a process of passing, and even less sense in iden-
tifying that as the root of what is wrong with warfare. As Augustine put it, ‘What
is it about war that is to be blamed? Is it that those who will die someday are killed
so that those who will conquer might dominate in peace? This is the complaint of
the timid, not of the religious.’31 Indeed, it would be a sin in its own right to invest
so much love in transient earthly goods that one perceived their loss as an evil.
This leads us to Augustine’s second, more substantive reason for regarding war
as morally problematic. This is that war is often a spur to sinful behaviour among
men. Augustine fretted that war awoke the proud, vicious, wrathful side of man’s
nature, the part of him that turned away from, rather than to, God’s love. In par-
ticular, he worried that it would encourage a spiteful desire to dominate their
enemies in the soldiers who waged it, or plant a cruel rage in their breasts. The
image of a vengeful Achilles racing into battle with nothing in his heart but a furi-
ous desire to slay anyone who stepped up against him was, perhaps, the kind of
case he had in mind.32 Augustine put it emphatically: ‘The desire for harming, the
cruelty of revenge, the restless and implacable mind, the savageness of revolting,
the lust for dominating, and similar things—these are what are justly blamed in
wars.’ War for Augustine was, it follows, a source of evil in human life, but only to
the degree that it lured those who waged it into vice.33
If Augustine was so painfully aware of the moral problems posed by war, why,
then, did he argue that Christians should muster to Rome’s military banners? His
primary contention was that the peace furnished by Rome was of sufficient value
that Christians should rally to its defence. Augustine was, of course, under no
illusions about the nature of that peace. It was provisional, imperfect, blighted,
and freighted with injustice.34 As such, it was a far cry from the perfect peace that
reigns in the city of God.35 Yet, Augustine argued, it was still worth striving for.
While the peace furnished by Rome consolidated rather than transcended certain
institutionalized forms of domination and injustice, it nevertheless provided the
31 Augustine, ‘Against Faustus the Manichean [XXII.74]’, in Gregory M. Reichberg, Henrik Syse,
and Endre Begby (eds.), The Ethics of War: Classic and Contemporary Readings (Oxford: Blackwell,
2006), p. 73.
32 It is also possible to think of more contemporary examples. A war memoir written by a former
member of the British army who served in Afghanistan casts light on this fear. The author recounts an
occasion when his unit had to decide what to do with the body of a Taliban fighter who had acciden-
tally blown himself up while planting a bomb. ‘As we debate whether to return his body to a mosque
before sundown, like the soft, moral, Geneva-bound men we are, the Taliban prepare to ambush us at
the mosque. Luckily, we don’t have the manpower. The family can collect him later. Then we find out
about the ambush. Rage. Fuck them, the dirty despicable bastards. Is nothing sacred? Ambush your
enemy as he returns your dead? Honour? You bastards. YOU FUCKING BASTARDS. I WILL KILL
EVERY LAST ONE OF YOU.’ Patrick Bury, Callsign Hades (London: Simon & Schuster, 2010),
pp. 218–19. Emphasis in original.
33 Augustine, ‘Against Faustus the Manichean’, p. 73.
34 Augustine, City of God, pp. 638–9 [XV.4]; also p. 934 [XIX.12]. 35 Ibid., p. 932 [XIX.10].
modicum of order that enabled the pilgrims passing through the saeculum on
their way to the heavenly kingdom to lead good lives.36 In Augustine’s own words:
‘For peace is so great a good that even in the sphere of earthly and mortal affairs,
we hear no word more thankfully, and nothing is desired with greater longing: in
short it is not possible to find anything better.’37 This peace, then, was worth
preserving.38
The Christian, it followed, should be prepared to hold his nose and fight a just
war for Rome where the peace it provided was jeopardized by an act of wrong
doing on the part of an adversary. Augustine was careful to emphasize, however,
that this was not a carte blanche for people to resort to un-constricted violence.
Rather, certain restraints applied. For a war to be a just war, it had to be waged in
response to, and to counter, some specific prior wrong. ‘It is’, he wrote, ‘the ini
quity of the opposing side that imposes upon the wise man the duty of waging
wars.’39 On this view, a just war was a remedial action or via negativa, a necessary
but also limited response to a particular act of wrongdoing, and not a general
invitation to use force, even for benign purposes. It was, in other words, a ‘vindi-
cative’ act intended to preserve the order by checking any instances where it has
been wrongfully threatened.40
Thus defined, a just war was, to borrow a recent formulation, a war of necessity,
not choice.41 The wise man did not wage it as a matter of preference. Rather, he
waged it because the same forces that drew a judge to service at the bench were
operative: a sense of social obligation put him under compunction to do so.42 He
was compelled by conscience to carry out the necessary task of preserving the
peace that Rome provided. In Augustine’s words: ‘Personally, [the judge] would
have liked to avoid bloodshed when sentencing; but maybe he did not want pub-
lic order to collapse. He was obliged to act in this way by his office, by his author-
ity, by the demands of his situation.’43 Moreover, he assumed this responsibility in
full knowledge that it was not an easy road to walk: it would come, not with
36 The earthly peace, Augustine argues in Book XIX [13] of the City of God, facilitates the enjoy-
ment of certain goods appropriate both to this life and for the spiritual preparation required for the
next one. Ibid., p. 940. In this regard, it was in perfect accord with God’s propensity for using man’s
propensity to sin as the remedy to its own ills. ‘A people estranged from God, therefore, must be
wretched . . . For the time being, however, it is advantageous to us also that this people should have
such peace in this life; for, while the two cities are intermingled, we also make use of the peace of
Babylon.’ Ibid., pp. 961–2 [XIX.26].
37 Ibid., pp. 932–3 [XIX.11].
38 ‘Peace ought to be what you want, war only what necessity demands. Then God may free you from
necessity and preserve you in peace.’ Augustine, ‘Letter 189: To Boniface [417]’, in Political Writings, ed.
by E. M. Atkins and R. J. Dodaro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 217 [VI].
39 Augustine, City of God, p. 929 [XIX.7].
40 The term ‘vindicative’ was popularized in just war thought by: Alfred Vanderpol, La Doctrine
Scholastique du Droit de Guerre (Paris: A. Pedone, 1919).
41 Richard N. Haass, War of Necessity, War of Choice (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009).
43 Augustine, ‘Sermon 302: On the Feast of Saint Laurence’, in Political Writings, ed. by E. M. Atkins
and R. J. Dodaro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 116 [XVI].
28 Victory
personal glory, but with hard calls, dirty hands, and tragic outcomes.44 And just
as the judge must be aware that, because he is fallible and does not have perfect
knowledge, he might, despite his best intentions, wrongly condemn an innocent
person, the wise man must be mindful that his sincere belief that his war is just
might be revealed in the fullness of time to be mistaken.45 Both men, Augustine
argued, must accept this possibility but not be deterred by it.
This was a miserable task, but also, Augustine supposed, an essential one. It was,
sharply put, a ‘necessary evil’.46 This is not all, though. If the waging of just war was
a miserable but essential task, it was also a providential one. The Christian who
served in Rome’s just wars did not merely fight Rome’s battles, he also did God’s
work. By chastising the sinful and setting a good example for the pious, he pro-
vided a vessel through which God might test men and determine who would be
saved and who would be damned on the Final Day. Those with and against whom
the soldier waging the just war fought would be challenged by the force of his
example to decline the temptation to sin and instead devote themselves to living in
accord with God’s will.47 The practice of just war could thus be considered ‘an
instrument of the Divine discipline by which mankind is punished and tested’.48
If this covered ‘why’ and for what purposes Christians should wage just wars,
one crucial question remained: How they could do so without lapsing into sin?
Augustine proposed that two closely related requirements must be met if one was
to fight in a just war without sinning. The first was that the soldier waging a just
war must fight in a spirit of obedience to an ordained authority, and not of his
own volition or for personal animus.49 The second was that the soldier must con-
duct himself so that he acts only with benevolent intentions toward everyone he
encounters, including his enemies.50 In other words, the soldier must always act
with love in his heart, even for his foes. If both of these requirements were ful-
filled, a soldier could be characterized as ‘an agent of the law’, and his acts of kill-
ing could be justified as a muscular expression of Christian charity rather than
lamented as a sinful surrender to the libido dominandi.51 In a nutshell, then,
whether a soldier incurred sin in the course of waging a just war was a function
not so much of their material actions or even the consequences of those actions,
but of the authority and intentions that guided them.
44 Markus, Saeculum, p. 100. 45 Augustine, City of God, p. 928 [XIX.6].

46 Augustine, City of God, p. 161 [IV.15]. 47 Augustine, City of God, pp. 43–4 [I.29].
48 R. W. Dyson, Natural Law and Political Realism in the History of Political Thought, Volume I:
From the Sophists to Machiavelli (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), p. 184.
49 ‘The divine authority itself has made exceptions to the rule that it is not lawful to kill men . . . he
who is commanded to perform this ministry does not himself slay. Rather, he is like a sword which is
the instrument of its user.’ Augustine, City of God, pp. 33–4 [I.21].
50 Augustine, ‘Letter 138: To Marcellinus [c. 411]’, in Political Writings, ed. by E. M. Atkins and
R. J. Dodaro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 38 [XIV].
51 Augustine, On the Free Choice of the Will, trans. by Thomas Williams (Indianapolis: Hackett,
1993), pp. 6–10 [I.4–5].
The Pride of Winning
What, then, did Augustine have to say about victory? And how did it bear on his
views on just war? It will surprise some people to learn that, in actual fact,
Augustine had quite a lot to say about victory. The word victoria appears roughly
400 times in his surviving texts.52 The frequency with which he invoked it is
indicative of its importance within his thinking. One of the major themes
Augustine sought to develop in his writings was the moral inadequacy of the
Roman view of victory. The Romans, as we will see in more detail in later chap-
ters, viewed victory in war as both proof of divine favour and evidence of the
justness of the Roman Empire and the Pax Romana it preserved. Victory, on this
view, was proffered by the Romans as a testament to the greatness of their imper
ial city and a legitimation of its title to rule the whole of the known world.
Augustine refuted this view of victory on the grounds that it could not bear the
weight placed upon it. In its place he elaborated a much more tempered, even
mordant, account of victory, one which, by amplifying its limitations, cast his
vision of just war in a tragic light.
One Barren Evil after Another
The place to start is Augustine’s efforts to diminish the esteem that people attached
to victory. In fact, Augustine devoted the entirety of Book III of the City of God to
systematically debunking the mythology of Rome’s great victories. Victory in war,
he argued there, was neither as glorious nor as important as the Romans who
came before him wished to believe. In Augustine’s hands, this argument took the
form of a dismissal of the idea that it is of paramount importance to win just
wars. Whether a just war ended in victory or defeat was, he argued, of little
importance. It did not matter in the long run who won this or that battle, or how
many enemies a king subdued, because such victories were mere distractions
from what was truly important: namely, acting in accordance with love for God.53
Any goods that could be won (or lost) in such a war were necessarily fleeting, and
therefore of limited value.54 They were, in Augustine’s words, ‘as smoke which has
no weight’.55 Consequently, when men like Cicero praised Rome’s latest military
success, they were missing the larger picture. As Augustine put it, the victories in
52 Phillip Wynn, Augustine on War and Military Service (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013), p. 265.
53 ‘For we do not say that certain Christian emperors were happy because they ruled for a long
time, or because they died in peace and left behind sons to rule as emperors, or because they subdued
the enemies of the commonwealth . . . For even certain worshippers of demons, who do not belong to
the Kingdom of God to which these emperors belong, have deserved to receive these and other gifts
and consolations of this wretched life.’ Augustine, City of God, pp. 231–2 [V.24]; also p. 217 [V.17].
54 Ibid., pp. 16–20 [I.10–11]. 55 Augustine, City of God, p. 218 [V.17].
30 Victory
which they exulted ‘were not the solid joys of the fortunate, but the vain comforts
of miserable men’.56
Augustine cited several historical cases in support of this declamation, with
Rome’s victory over the Albans chief among them. Commentators had long pre-
sented this victory as a glorious triumph for Rome. Yet the victory itself was,
according to Augustine, a tawdry affair. It was not, he submitted, worth the blood
spilt to secure it. ‘How frequently were massacres suffered by the Roman and
Alban armies alike, and how great was the impoverishment of both cities!’57 Both
sides, he added, suffered such harm that the very idea of there even being a win-
ner in a war such as that seemed nonsensical. This was exacerbated by the fact
that the two cities were sufficiently interdependent—Rome was originally a col-
ony of Alba—that any harm done to one rebounded upon the other. How terrible,
then, Augustine concluded, that Rome would later rejoice that ‘she had waged
war against her mother city with such great slaughter, and had conquered by the
effusion of so much kindred blood on both sides.’58 ‘Away’, he pleaded, with such
‘concealments and deceitful whitewashings’.59 When one pierced through the ver-
biage that accompanied them, one discovered that military victories such as that
won by Rome over Alba were rarely worth the blood and treasure that were spent
to secure them.60 Wars that publicists hailed as ending in great victories usually
achieved little and ended in nothing other than ‘great slaughters’.61
Victories of the kind that the Romans celebrated were, for Augustine, not only
costly, they were also wrapped up in vice and sinfulness. His debt to Sallust and
the stoic teachings of Seneca is evident in this regard. Victories, Augustine con-
tended, were both the cause and the effect of an inordinate desire for glory and
domination, which was exactly what he identified as evil about war. The desire to
prevail in battle was, Augustine imagined, fuelled by a hunger for glory, which,
when fed, only grew more pronounced.62 Military victories in this sense were ‘no
more than beguiling temptations to seek one barren evil after another’.63 They
drove leaders to disturb the peace by seeking war after war, using victory in one as
56 Ibid., p. 118 [III.17]. 57 Ibid., p. 109 [III.14].

58 Ibid., p. 110 [III.14]. Sulla’s victory over Marius in the Civil War presented a similar story. Each
side inflicted such damage on the other that it was impossible to discern where the line between
victory and defeat lay. When victory was wrested emphatically to Sulla’s side, the violence escalated. In
the end ‘it was difficult to tell whether the victors had slain more men before the victory, in order to
become victors, or after it, because they were victors.’ And this, Augustine noted, ‘when peace, not
war, was raging!’ Ibid., pp. 135–8 [III.27–8].
59 Ibid., p. 111 [III.14]. Further: ‘Why do our adversaries plead the words “praise” and “victory” to
me? Take off the cloak of vain opinion and let such evil deeds be examined naked.’ Ibid.
60 Ibid. 61 Ibid., p. 112 [III.14].
62 In this same spirit, Alberico Gentilii would later refer to victory being ‘insatiable’ while Prime
Minister Churchill spoke of the ‘victory disease’. This will be discussed in Chapter 7.
63 Augustine, City of God, p. 118 [III.17]. Augustine expressed similar concerns but in a much more
intimate context in his Confessions. There he lamented that as a young man he himself had been sus-
ceptible to an inordinate and ‘vain desire to win’. ‘I loved the pride of winning,’ he confessed.
Augustine, Confessions, pp. 12 [I.X16]; 22 [I.XIX.30].
a springboard to the next in a perpetual cycle of violence. The fate of Sulla, one of
Rome’s most successful generals and the man who dragged her into a brutal civil
war, was a case in point. Sulla had won one crushing victory after another over his
foes, but, far from establishing his greatness, this experience locked him into a
vicious spiral. Sulla, Augustine wrote, was overcome by the lust for glory and
domination that his own victories, and in particular his emphatic defeat of Marius
in the Roman Civil War, unleashed in him. ‘That victory brought him more greed
than gain through honour. Through it he became immoderate in his desires . . . that
his own moral ruin was greater than any bodily loss suffered by his enemies.’64
What Else is Victory but Subjugation?
Augustine’s critique of victory extended to the quality of peace that it could yield.
Victory is often posited as a means of bringing about or producing peace.65
Augustine was sceptical about this association. Speaking about life in the saecu-
lum, he rejected the view that victory can ever be a means of achieving peace in
the full sense of the term. So far as it can deliver any kind of peace at all—and
even that much is uncertain—the peace it delivers will necessarily be imperfect. It
will reflect the base interests and desires of those who won it.
It is clear that peace is the desired end of war. For every man seeks peace, even in
making war; but no one seeks war by making peace. Indeed, even those who
wish to disrupt an existing state of peace do so not because they hate peace, but
because they desire the present peace to be exchanged for one of their own choos-
ing. Their desire, therefore, is not that there should be no peace, but that it
should be the kind of peace that they wish for.66
The crux of Augustine’s message is clear: The only kind of peace that can arise
from a victory is a victor’s peace—that is, a peace that reproduces the victor’s
power over the vanquished. Moreover, Augustine believed that this applies to all
victories in the saeculum, even those won in just wars. Those who wage just wars
may be sincere in their desire for peace. Yet, insofar as winning a just war involves
the subjugation of the enemy, any peace it produces will necessarily be based on
64 Augustine, City of God, p. 86 [II.24].

65 The clearest expression of this arose in the course of the American Civil War when the Reverend
Joseph P. Thompson delivered his sermon in the Broadway Tabernacle Church on 11 September 1864.
It was published in both the Richmond Examiner and the New York Times under the title ‘Peace
Through Victory: A Thanksgiving Sermon’. It is available at: www.nytimes.com/1864/09/19/archives/
peace-through-victory-a-thanksgiving-sermon-preached-in-the.html. Accessed: 1 July 2018. This will
be discussed at greater length in the next chapter.
32 Victory
domination.67 For Augustine then, the kind of peace that follows from victory in
a just war is so compromised as to be barely recognizable as peace at all.
Yet Augustine also accepted that, imperfect though it may be, the kind of peace
produced by the victories achieved in just wars is still better in many cases than
the alternative, which is no peace at all. This peace, then, has what Augustine pre-
sented as a residual, negative value. Augustine explained this in Book XV [4] of
the City of God:
But it is not rightly said that the goods which this [earthly] city desires are not
goods; for, in its own human fashion, even that city is better when it possesses
them than when it does not. Thus, it desires earthly peace, albeit only for the
sake of the lowest kind of goods; and it is that peace which it desires to achieve
by waging war. For, if it conquers, and there is no one left to resist it, there will be
peace, which the opposing parties did not have while they strove in their
unhappy poverty for the things which they could not possess at once. It is for the
sake of this peace that wearisome wars are fought.68
This is not a message to infuse the troops with martial zeal. It does not promise
soldiers that victory will deliver world peace. Rather, it offers a more modest,
more sombre account of what victory in a just war can yield. The wise man who
wages a just war will not, it suggests, win true peace; the most he can hope for is a
slightly less malign status quo than obtained before he took up arms. Even then,
Augustine supposed, for all the reasons set out a moment ago, the wise man must
also recognize that whether the status quo is more or less malign is ultimately of
little significance.69 Yet, because he knows it could be worse, and because he is
obliged by a sense of duty to ensure that the worst forms of disorder are curbed so
that the pilgrims among us are not forced into wickedness, he is compelled to
wage just war in its name.70 The necessity of acting in this way, Augustine con-
cluded, was a ‘miserable’ one.71
What we observe here, then, is a profound ambivalence toward the kind of vic-
tories that the Romans had hailed as proof of their greatness. On the one hand,
Augustine was prepared to embrace victory in a just war as a welcome outcome.
‘Indeed, when victory goes to those who fought for the juster cause, who will
doubt that such victory is a matter for rejoicing and that the ensuing peace is to
be desired?’ These things are ‘goods’, he continued, and ‘are without doubt gifts of
67 ‘Just as there is no one who does not wish to be joyful, so there is no one who does not wish to have
peace,’ he explained. ‘Even when men choose to wage war, they desire nothing but victory. By means of
war, therefore, they desire to achieve peace with glory; for what else is victory but the subjugation of
those who oppose us?’ Ibid., p. 934 [XIX.12]. Also see: Augustine, ‘Letter 189: To Boniface’, p. 217 [VI].
68 Augustine, City of God, p. 639 [XV.4].
69 ‘As far as this mortal life is concerned, which is spent and finished in a few days, what difference
does it make under whose rule a man lives who is soon to die’? Ibid., p. 217 [V.17].
70 Ibid., pp. 927–8 [XIX.6]. 71 Ibid., p. 928 [XIX.6].
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Title: A private chivalry

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A PRIVATE CHIVALRY
PRIVATE CHIVALRY
A NOVEL
BY
FRANCIS LYNDE
AUTHOR OF A ROMANCE IN TRANSIT,
THE HELPERS, ETC.
Acts more dangerous, but less famous

because they were but private chivalries.
Sir Philip Sidney
NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1900
Copyright, 1900,
By D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.
All rights reserved.

CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I.— The woman ... whose hands are as bands 1
II.— The vintage of Abi-Ezer 13
III.— “The wreck of the Hesperus” 23
IV.— The migrants 33
V.— The scale ascending 44
VI.— A molehill levelled 49
VII.— And a mountain upreared 55
VIII.— A blow in the dark 64
IX.— The eye to the string 72
X.— The string to the shaft 78
XI.— And the shaft to the mark 85
XII.— The way of a maid with a man 88
XIII.— “Through a glass darkly” 99
XIV.— The anchor comes home 107
XV.— When hate and fear strike hands 118
XVI.— The goodly company of misery 125
XVII.— “As apples of gold in pictures of silver” 131
XVIII.— “Let the righteous smite me friendly” 139
XIX.— The leading of the blind 149
XX.— The demoniac 159
XXI.— “A rod for the fool’s back” 166
XXII.— How the smoking flax was quenched 177
XXIII.— How Dorothy blew the embers alive 190
XXIV.— “Whoso diggeth a pit shall fall therein” 201
XXV.— “Silence is an answer to a wise man” 213
XXVI.— In the valley of the shadow 221
XXVII.— Showing how faith may out-buffet a fact 234
XXVIII.— How the judge gave of his best 243
XXIX.— In which a wilful man has his way 255
XXX.— How love and friendship threw a main 260
XXXI.— A feast of mingled cups 266
XXXII.— Such friends are exultation’s agony 276
XXXIII.— Te morituri salutamus 281
XXXIV.— The wing-beat of Azrael 290
XXXV.— The wisdom of many and the wit of one 297
XXXVI.— In which a fox doubles once too often 310
XXXVII.— The law of the Medes and Persians 321
XXXVIII.— In which darts are counted as stubble 326
A PRIVATE CHIVALRY
CHAPTER I
THE WOMAN ... WHOSE HANDS ARE AS BANDS
The lights of Silverette were beginning to prick the dusk in the valley,
and the clanging of a piano, diminished to a harmonious tinkling,
floated up the mountain on the still air of the evening. At the Jessica
workings, a thousand feet above the valley, even the clangour of a
tuneless piano had its compensations; and to one of the two men
sitting on the puncheon-floored porch of the assayer’s cabin the
minimized tinkling was remindful of care-free student ramblings in
the land of the zither. But the other had no such pleasant memories,
and he rose and relighted his cigar.
“That is my cue, Ned. I must go down and do that whereunto I have
set my hand.”
“‘Must,’ you say; that implies necessity. I don’t see it.”
“I couldn’t expect you to see or to understand the necessity; but it is
there, all the same.”
The objector was silent while one might count ten, but the silence
was not of convincement. It was rather a lack of strong words to add
to those which had gone before. And when he began again it was
only to clinch insistence with iteration.
“I say I don’t see it. There is no necessity greater than a man’s will;
and when you try to make me believe that the honour man of my
class is constrained to come down to dealing faro in a mining camp
——”
“I know, Ned; but you don’t understand. You saw the fair beginning
ten years ago, and now you are getting a glimpse of the ending. To
you, I suppose, it seems like Lucifer’s fall—a drop from heaven to
hell; and so it is in effect. But, as a matter of fact, a man doesn’t fall;
he climbs down into the pit a step at a time—and there are more
steps behind me than I can ever retrace.”
“But you can’t go on indefinitely,” insisted the other.
The fallen one shook his head. “That is a true word. But there is only
one adequate ending to such a fiasco of a life as mine.”
“And that?”
“Is a forty-five calibre bullet, well aimed.”
“Bah! That is a coward’s alternative, and if you haven’t altogether
parted company with the George Brant I used to know, we needn’t
consider it. Why don’t you turn over a clean leaf and cut the whole
despicable business?”
Brant sat down on the porch step and clasped his hands over his
knee. Friendship has its key wherewith to unlock any door of
confidence, but from disuse the lock was rusted and it yielded
reluctantly.
“I have half a mind to let the game wait while I tell you,” he said at
length. “It isn’t a pleasant tale, and if you are disgusted you can call
me down.”
“Never mind about that; go on.”
“I’ll have to go back a bit first—back to the old college days. Do you
remember the old woman who lived on the flat below the campus?
the one who used to smuggle liquor and other contraband into the
dormitories when she came to scrub?”
“Mother Harding? Yes.”
“Well, you don’t remember any good of her, I fancy—or of her
daughter. But let that pass. The year after you went to Heidelberg
the girl blossomed out into a woman between two days, and went
wrong the day after, as the daughter of such a mother was bound to.
I got it into my callow brain that I was responsible. I know better now;
I ought to have known better then; but—well, to shorten a long story,
she has managed to spoil my life for me, root and branch.”
The assayer got upon his feet and swore out of a full heart.
“Good God, Brant! You don’t mean to say that you married that
brazen——”
But Brant stopped him with a quick gesture. “Don’t call her hard
names, Ned; I shot a man once for doing that. No, I didn’t marry her;
I did a worse thing. Now you know why I can’t turn the clean leaf. Let
the blame lie where it will—and it is pretty evenly divided between us
now—I’m not cur enough to turn my back on her at this stage of the
game.”
Hobart tramped up and down the slab-floored porch, four strides and
a turn, for two full minutes before he could frame the final question.
“Where is she now, George?”
Brant’s laugh was of hardihood. “Do you hear that piano going down
there in Dick Gaynard’s dance hall? She is playing it.”
“Heavens and earth! Then she is here—in Silverette?”
“Certainly. Where else would she be?”
Hobart stopped short and flung the stump of his cigar far out down
the slope.
“Brant,” he said solemnly, “I thank God your mother is dead.”
“Amen,” said Brant softly.
There was another pause, and then Hobart spoke again. “There was
a brother, George; what became of him?”
“He went to the bad, too—the worst kind of bad. He laid hold of the
situation in the earliest stages, and bled me like a leech year in and
year out, until one day I got him at a disadvantage and choked him
off.”
“How did you manage it?”
“It was easy enough. He is an outlaw of the camps, and he has killed
his man now and then when it seemed perfectly safe to do so. But
the last time he slipped a cog in the safety wheel, and I took the
trouble to get the evidence in shape to hang him. He knows I have it,
and he’d sell his soul, if he had one, to get his fingers on the
documents. In the meantime he lets me alone.”
“He will murder you some day for safety’s sake,” Hobart suggested.
“No, he won’t. I have made him believe that his life hangs on mine;
that when I die the dogs of the law will be let loose.”
“Oh!” The assayer made another turn or two and then came to sit on
the step beside his guest. “One more question, George, and then I’ll
let up on you,” he said. “Do you love the woman?”
Brant shook his head slowly. “No, Ned; I never did; at least, not in
the way you mean. And for years now it has been a matter of simple
justice. She was bad enough in the beginning, but she is worse now,
and that is my doing. I can’t leave her to go down into the hotter
parts of the pit alone.”
For a few other minutes neither of them spoke; then Brant rose and
girded himself for the tramp down the mountain.
“I must be going,” he said. “I’m glad to have had an hour with you; it
has given me a glimpse of the old life that is like the shadow of a
great rock in a thirsty land. And I want to see more of you, if you will
let me.”
“It will be your own fault if you don’t. Have you got to go now?”
“Yes. There is a tough crowd up from Carbonado, and Gaynard will
have his hands full to-night.”
“Wait a minute till I get my overcoat, and I’ll go with you.”
Brant waited, but when Hobart reappeared he made difficulties.
“You’d better stay where you are, Ned. It’s likely there will be trouble
and a free fight; and you are new to the place.”
“New to Silverette, but not to mining camps and rough crowds,”
Hobart amended.
Brant still hesitated. “I know, but there is always the risk—the
bystander’s risk, which is usually bigger than that of the fellow with
his gun out. Besides, you have a wife——”
Hobart pushed him into the downward path.
“You don’t know Kate,” he objected. “She would drive me to it if she
were here and knew the circumstances. She knows the camps better
than either of us.”
Fifteen minutes later they entered Dick Gaynard’s dance hall
together, and the assayer loitered in the barroom while Brant edged
his way back to the alcove in the rear, where stood the faro table.
Presently Hobart saw the dealer rise and give his chair to Brant; then
the loiterer felt free to look about him.
There was nothing new or redeeming in the scene. There was the
typical perspiring crowd of rough men and tawdry women surging to
and fro, pounding the dusty floor to the time beaten out of the
discordant piano; the same flaring oil lamps and murky atmosphere
thick with tobacco smoke and reeking with the fumes of alcohol; the
same silent groups ringing the roulette boards and the faro table.
Hobart looked on, and was conscious of a little shiver of disgust—a
vicarious thrill of shame for all concerned, but chiefly for his friend.
And Brant had come to this for his daily bread! Brant, the honour
man, the athlete, the well-beloved of all who knew him!
Hobart let himself drift with the ebb and flow of those who, like
himself, were as yet only onlookers, coming to anchor when he had
found a vantage point from which he could see and study the face of
the fallen one. For all the hardening years it was not yet an evil face.
The cheeks of the man were thinner and browner than those of the
boy, and the heavy mustache hid the mouth, the feature which
changes most with the changing years; but the resolute jaw was the
same, and the steady gray eyes, though these had caught the
gambler’s trick of looking out through half-closed lids when they saw
most. On the whole the promise of youth had been kept. The
handsome boy had come to be a man good to look upon; a man
upon whom any woman might look once, and turning, look again.
The assayer was not given to profanity, but he swore softly in an
upflash of angry grief at the thought that the passing years had
marred Brant’s soul rather than his body.
None the less, it was shipwreck, hopeless and unrelieved, as Brant
had asserted; and from contemplating the effect of it in the man,
Hobart was moved to look upon the cause of it in the woman.
Perhaps there was that in her which might make the descent into the
pit less unaccountable. Hobart would see.
He worked his way slowly around two sides of the crowded room,
and so came to the piano. One glance at the performer was enough.
It revealed a woman who had once been beautiful, as the sons of
God once found the daughters of men; nay, the wreck of her was still
beautiful, but it was the soulless beauty whose appeal is to that
which is least worthy in any man. Hobart saw and understood. There
be drunkards a-many who look not upon the wine when it is red in
the cup; and Brant was of these—an inebriate of passion. The
assayer turned his back upon the woman that he might the better
make excuses for his friend.
Gaynard’s bar did a thriving business that night, and the throng in
the gambling alcove thinned out early. The dance hall was the
greater attraction, and here the din and clamour grew apace until the
raucous voice of the caller shouting the figures of the dance could no
longer be heard above the clanging of the piano, the yells and
catcalls, and the shuffling and pounding of feet on the floor. Hilarity
was as yet the keynote of all the uproar, but Hobart knew that the
ceaseless activity of the bartenders must shortly change the pitch to
the key quarrelsome, and he began to wish himself well out of it.
Brant glanced up from time to time, always without pause in the
monotonous running of the cards, and when he finally succeeded in
catching Hobart’s eye he beckoned with a nod. The assayer made
his way around to the dealer’s chair, and Brant spoke without looking
up:
“Get out of here, Ned, while you can. There will be the devil to pay
before midnight, and there is no earthly use in your being mixed up
in it.”
Hobart leaned over the table and placed a coin on one of the inlaid
cards to keep up appearances.
“I’m here with you, and I mean to stay,” he insisted. “You may need—
By Jove! it’s begun.”
The dance stopped and the clamour sank into a hush, which was
sharply rent by a blast of profanity, a jangling crash of the piano
keys, and a woman’s scream. Then the two fought their way into the
thick of the crowd around the piano. A drunken ruffian was grasping
the woman’s arm and brandishing a revolver over her head.
“You won’t play it, won’t ye? And ye’ll give Ike Gasset a piece of yer
lip? By God, I’ll show ye!”
Brant’s pistol was out before he spoke. “Drop it right where you are,
and get out of here before I kill you,” he said quietly.
The man’s reply was a snap shot in Brant’s face, and, though his aim
was bad, both Hobart and Brant felt the wind of the bullet passing
between them. The crack of the pistol was the signal for a scene a
description of which no man has ever yet been able to set down
calmly in black on white. Shouts, oaths, a mad rush for the open air
foiled by a fiercer closing in of the crowd around the piano; all this
while the ruffian levelled his weapon and fired again. At the death-
speeding instant the woman started to her feet, and the bullet
intended for Brant struck her fairly in the breast. Hobart heard the
sharp snap of the steel corset stay, and saw Brant, catching her as
she reeled, fire once, twice, thrice at the desperado. Then the
assayer lifted up his voice in a shout that dominated the tumult:
“Silverettes! Out with them—they’ve killed a woman!”
There was a fierce affray, a surging charge, and when the place was
cleared Hobart ran back. Brant was on his knees beside the woman.
The smoking oil lamps burned yellow in the powder reek, but there
was light enough to show that she was past help. None the less,
Hobart offered to go for a doctor.
Brant shook his head and rose stiffly.
“She doesn’t need one; she is dead.”
Hobart grasped the situation with far-seeing prescience.
“Then you have nothing to stay here for; let us get out while we can.”
The din of the street battle rang clamorous at the front, and he took
Brant’s arm to lead him to the door, which opened upon the alley in
the rear. “Come on,” he urged; “they will be back here presently, and
you have nothing to fight for now.”
“No.” Brant yielded as one in a trance, but at the door he broke
away, to dart back with the gray eyes aflame and fierce wrath crying
for vengeance. Unnoted of all, the wounded desperado had lain
where Brant’s fusillade had dropped him. But now he was on hands
and knees, trying to drag himself out of the room. Brant was quick,
but the assayer pinioned him before the ready weapon could flash
from its holster.
“Good God, man, that would be murder!” he panted, wrestling with
the avenger of blood, and possessing himself of the pistol. “Come on
out of this!”
Again Brant yielded, and they made their way to the open air, and
through the alleyway to the mountain path, and so in silence up to
the Jessica and to the assayer’s cabin. Not until they were safe
within the four log walls did Hobart open his mouth. But when he had
struck a light and hung a blanket over the window which looked
valleyward he spoke tersely and to the point:
“A few hours ago, George, you told me why you couldn’t turn your
back on your shame, and I had nothing to say. But now the reason is
removed, and you have had an object lesson which ought to last you
as long as you live. What do you say?”
Brant spread his hands as one helpless. “What else am I good for?”
he asked.
“That question is unworthy of you, and you know it. You have your
profession; but without that you could still do as well as another.”
Brant was still afoot, and he fought his battle to a finish, pacing
slowly back and forth with his hands behind him and his head
bowed. For all his square jaw and steadfast eyes, rash impulse had
been the bane of his life thus far, and the knowledge of it made him
slow to decide even when the decision leaned toward the things
which make for righteousness. So he fought the battle to its
conclusion, and when it was ended was fain to sit down awearied
with the stress of it.
“I am not in love with the degradation of it; I think you must know
that, Ned. All these years I’ve had a yearning for decency and clean
living and respectability that I could not strangle, do what I would. So
you will understand that I am not halting between two opinions. It is
simply this: Can a man turn over a new leaf and bury such a past as
mine without being beset by a constant fear of its resurrection?
Won’t it come up and slap him in the face about the time he thinks
he has it decently buried and covered up and out of sight?”
Hobart’s rejoinder was prompt and definitive. “No. The world is wide,
and a few years of one man’s life are no more than so many texts
written in the sand.”
“You’re wrong there, Ned. The world is fearfully small, and its
memory of evil deeds is as long as its charity is short.”
“Let be, then. You are not a woman. You are a man, and you can
fight it out and live it down.”
Brant acquiesced without more ado. “I was merely stating the case,”
he said, as if the matter were quite extraneous to him. “You have
earned the right to set the pace for me, Ned; and I’ll do whatever you
say.”
“That is more like the George Brant I used to know. And this is what I
say: I know a trail across Jack Mountain that will take us to the
railroad in three hours. The night trains pass at Carbonado, and you
will be in good time to catch whichever one of them you elect to take,
east or west. There is no station on the other side of the mountain;
but there is a side track for the Hoopoee mine, and you can build a
fire to flag the train. Have you money?”
“Yes.”
“Enough?”
“Yes; enough to try whatever experiment you suggest.”
“I don’t know that I have anything to suggest more than your own
good judgment would anticipate. Find your allotted corner of the big
vineyard and go to work in it; that’s about all there is to it.”
“How deep shall I dive?”
“You will have to decide that for yourself. You are a Western man
now, and I suppose you don’t want to go back home. How about
Denver?”
Brant shook his head slowly. “Denver is good enough—too good, in
fact. I wonder if you will understand it if I say that I’d much rather
have my forty days in the wilderness before I have to face my kind,
even as a stranger in a strange city?”
“I can understand it perfectly, and the decency of the thing does you
credit. And if that is your notion, I can help you. You used to be the
best man in the ‘Tech.’ at map making; have you forgotten how to do
it?”
“No; a man doesn’t forget his trade.”
“Good. I met Davenport at Carbonado yesterday. He was on his way
to the Colorow district to do a lot of surveying and plotting, and was
sick because he couldn’t find an assistant before he left Denver.
Shall I give you a note to him?”
“It is exactly what I should crave if I had a shadow of the right to pick
and choose.”
Hobart found pen and paper and wrote the note.
“There you are,” he said. “Davenport is a good fellow, and you
needn’t tell him more than you want to. The job will last for two or
three months, and by that time you will know better what you want to
do with yourself. Now, if you are ready, we’ll get a move. It’s a stiffish
climb to the top of the pass.”
They forthfared together and presently set their feet in the trail
leading over the shoulder of the great mountain buttressing the slope
behind the Jessica. The sounds of strife had ceased in the town
below, and but for the twinkling lights the deep valley might have
been as Nature left it. Since the upward path was rough and difficult

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Victory: The Triumph and Tragedy of

Just War Cian O'Driscoll

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University of California at Irvine, Oxford University, Utah State University, Kiel

Introduction: The Very Object of (Just) War? 1

In war there can be no substitute for victory.

Committing one’s country to war is a grave decision. Governments often have to

The Very Object of ( Just ) War? 3

The Very Object of ( Just ) War? 5

settle­ment of a dispute, the end of ‘war-time’, and the resumption of peacetime.17

The Very Object of ( Just ) War? 7

The Victory of Just War

Reasonable Chance of Success

rele­vant jus ad bellum requirements would nevertheless only be justified if it is

The Very Object of ( Just ) War? 9

form of proportionality calculation. This is evident in the emphasis Guthrie and

Jus Post Bellum

The Very Object of ( Just ) War? 11

Triumph, Tragedy, Irony

The Very Object of ( Just ) War? 13

Thinking with History

The Very Object of ( Just ) War? 15

Seven Deadly Sins

The Very Object of ( Just ) War? 17

It is the tyranny of hidden prejudices that makes us deaf to what

Two Cities Created by Two Loves

Beneath Every History, Another History 21

devoting themselves in an ascetic, self-giving way to living in joyful hope of the

Beneath Every History, Another History 23

18 R. A. Markus, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of Augustine (Cambridge:

The Necessity of Waging Just Wars

Beneath Every History, Another History 25

Beneath Every History, Another History 27

44 Markus, Saeculum, p. 100. 45 Augustine, City of God, p. 928 [XIX.6].

Beneath Every History, Another History 29

The Pride of Winning

One Barren Evil after Another

56 Ibid., p. 118 [III.17]. 57 Ibid., p. 109 [III.14].

Beneath Every History, Another History 31

What Else is Victory but Subjugation?

64 Augustine, City of God, p. 86 [II.24].

Title: A private chivalry

Author: Francis Lynde

Release date: February 1, 2024 [eBook #72849]

Original publication: New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1900

Credits: D A Alexander, David E. Brown, and the Online

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A PRIVATE

Acts more dangerous, but less famous

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settlement of a dispute, the end of ‘war-time’, and the resumption of peacetime.17

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