Of the Arms of the Parthians

It is a remarkable thing about the Parthians that their fighting was most deadly when they appeared to be running away. They would turn in full flight and loose their arrows backward with as much precision and force as they had when charging — perhaps more, for the pursuing enemy, flushed with the confidence of pursuit, was less guarded. The Romans, who prided themselves on standing firm and meeting the enemy face to face, found this manner of war peculiarly difficult to answer.

I find in this a useful lesson about the nature of effectiveness, which has no necessary connection with the appearance of virtue. We admire the soldier who holds his ground, who plants his feet and does not yield — and rightly, for there is beauty in that. But the soldier who retreats and kills as he retreats is no less dangerous, and may accomplish more. Our admiration for the handsome form of a thing sometimes blinds us to what the thing actually achieves.

“The Parthians thought it no shame to flee, and in fleeing to conquer — they made of retreat itself a weapon keener than any sword.”

War is a school in adaptation. The general who can only fight as he was taught to fight, in the conditions he expects, is already half defeated. Caesar’s greatness lay not only in his boldness but in his faculty of revision — he encountered a new difficulty and did not insist that it conform to his prior knowledge of difficulties. He read what was in front of him.

The same principle holds beyond war. In argument, in commerce, in all the contests of life, the man who can work obliquely, who can accomplish his purpose by apparently moving away from it, has a resource that the merely frontal attacker lacks. I do not say this recommends dishonesty — the Parthians were not dishonest, they were simply intelligently inconvenient to their enemies. There is a considerable difference between deception and the refusal to be predictable.