Defeat is an ugly thing, and as Wellington once observed "Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won." It is better, when corpses and the detritus of battle are strewn around, to be on the winning side.
Elation in victory is normally for sports and elections. For soldiers in the field a winning campaign is hard work, mind-numbing fatigue, and a stiff casualty toll. It's even worse for the losers.
The brilliant military analyst Richard Simpkin once observed that the conduct of warfare is an interplay of three disciplines: Statistics, physics and psychology. Nowhere is this more evident than when one side breaks and crumbles in a long conflict.
Defeat, like so many other human events, comes in on a logarithmic curve. The Confederate Army of Northern Virginia held for 10 months in an increasingly desperate defence of Richmond during the American Civil War; once it broke the end came in two weeks. In June of 1918, the Germans looked to be winning the war on the Western Front; within six weeks the situation reversed; and their armies disintegrated before the November Armistice.
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