Essay 15 from Montaigne has never held much importance to me. It is another of his early military strategy essays, this one concerned with the consequences of defending a military outpost for too long, or in other words, knowing when to retreat or surrender.
He starts out noting examples of troops that kept fighting to defend forts that were eventually overrun, leading the victors to put to death everyone captured alive. But Montaigne tempers these examples toward the end with a few more about militaries overcoming or surviving attacks that appeared overwhelming. Perhaps the only interesting element is Montaigne’s first inclusion of admiration for pre-Columbian cultures and their military prowess, although even that is muted here and will be examined in far more interesting contexts soon enough.
Another somewhat interesting element is that Pyrrhonism finds its way into the essay, via Montaigne arguing that strength, position and tactical advantage are always in the eye of the beholder. But, in the end, the essay doesn’t really say much. Montaigne isn’t accepting the conventional wisdom that it is always better to give up or retreat when facing short odds of success, but he’s not refuting it either. This makes the piece come across as filler and any extrapolation of this essay to a broader philosophical meaning, therefore, is not advised.
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