Volume 11, Number 11 · December 19, 1968
Luxury Trade
By Geoffrey Barraclough
A History of Warfare
by Field-Marshal Viscount Montgomery of Alamein
World, 583 pp., $15.00
Waterloo: Day of Battle
by David Howarth
Atheneum, 239 pp., $7.95
The War to End All Wars: The American Military Experience in World War I
by Edward M. Coffman
Oxford, 412 pp., $9.75
President Wilson Fights His War: World War I and the American Intervention
by Harvey A. DeWeerd
Macmillan, 457 pp., $12.50
The Ordeal of Total War 1939-1945
by Gordon Wright
Harper & Row, 315 pp., $7.95
The German Officer Corps, 1890-1914
by Martin Kitchen
Oxford, 242 pp., $5.50
The mythology of militarism has had a long and impressively successful run. Ever since the days of Thucydides, wars and battles have been the historian's traditional delight. Arma virumque cano… Every girl loves a soldier, and every historian has his favorite general. There they prance across the pages of history, the men on horseback in their shining armor, with their waving plumes and their fear-inspiring helmets, as resplendent as those triumphant, larger than life-size portrayals of Louis XIV's victories which bedazzle us in the halls of the Louvre and the palace of Versailles! War, Treitschke taught us, is the final arbiter of the fate of nations. And it is to its generals that a nation instinctively turns for salvation in its hour of danger or despair, as France turned to Pétain in 1940. Every student knows that the real ruler of Germany after 1916 was Ludendorff; and in our own day we have seen the army step in to 'save' the nation from its politicians in Egypt, Pakistan, and Indonesia, to name only the most conspicuous cases. It is a tradition with roots in a dim and distant past—and a tradition by no means dead. General LeMay may easily turn out to be a portent, not an anachronism.
Review, 4049 words
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