Quintili Vare, legiones redde!
Next month I’ll be attending a conference at the ZiF Center at the University of Bielefeld. The conference is not OrgTheory related, but Bielefeld is near the Teutoburg Forest, which in A.D. 9 was host to one of the great Organizational Disasters in history, when P. Quinctilius Varus led three Roman legions into the dense forest in torrential rain, where they were annihilated by a force of Germanic tribes led by Hermann (or Arminius). In Suetonious’s Lives of the Twelve Caesars, we see the emperor Augustus rending his clothes at the news and being heard to shout or moan, “Varus, give me back my legions!” whenever the memory of the defeat occurred to him.
And what a defeat it was: something of the order of 20,000 Roman soldiers died — essentially the whole army in the field. In volume II of The Sources of Social Power Michael Mann discusses Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow and, in passing, remarks,
Marshal Ney wrote to his wife with anguish of the rear guard he commanded, “It is a mob without purpose, famished, feverish … General Famine and General Winter have conquered la Grande Armée”. It was literally decimated: Fewer than 40,000 limped back into Germany, the most complete loss of a major army since AD 9, when the legions of Varus disappeared into German forests.
(This is on p.276 of volume II. Oddly, Varus appears on p.276 of volume I, as well.) In Roman history, such gigantic losses were not by any means unheard of. The mother of them all is the Battle of Cannae, two centuries before Varus, where Hannibal’s army outflanked, encircled and destroyed a Roman army of about 60,000 men — bad management by CEOs having rather more severe consequences in those days than in present times.
“…bad management by CEOs having rather more severe consequences in those days than in present times.”
And here I thought the opposite was the general sentiment, that we live in the worst of times now (in terms of managerial malfeasance, well — killing fields versus cooking the books [or, firing employees] are different categories altogether).
tf
April 24, 2008 at 2:57 am
I should have said, “bad management by CEOs having rather more severe consequences for CEOs and employees alike in those days” — back when the preferred exit for failure was falling on one’s sword rather than the golden parachute.
Kieran
April 24, 2008 at 3:55 am
In Rome: Total War, you get to run through a simulation of the Tuetenborg Forest battle and it was a result of bad management. From what historians can tell, and what the computer game told me, the Roman generals had relied too much on indigenous German scouts to schlep the army through the ancient German wilderness. So when a few of the scouts turned to the other side, it was easy for the Roman army to be ambushed. The interesting thing is that the German scouts had led them to a remote area where embankments had been set up by the natives, which boxed in the Romans and made ther signature moves hard to pull off. Also, according to one website, the Romasn had decided to march through Germany with a full load of women and children. Some historians think there was no single battle, but a serious of guerilla engagments over a few weeks that decminated the slow Roman forces.
So in the end, we can laugh at bad management, but you reall can’t conquer ancient Germany without help from the locals and the need to haul all your gear around. It makes you susceptible to this kind of break down. Also, I also get my #$$$ kicked by the Germans in the computer game.
fabiorojas
April 24, 2008 at 3:03 pm
And it was after Cannae that Rome became the world’s leading power (their world, of course). Maybe it was because they had no liberal press…
claudio
April 24, 2008 at 4:13 pm
on the subject of treating ancient military history as an org problem, I’ve long that there is definitely an org story in Xenophon’s Anabasis, which tells how, after having their officers assassinated, a Greek mercenary force self-organized and made an orderly retreat back to Greece from the middle of Persia.
Gabriel
April 25, 2008 at 9:30 pm