Volume 9, Number 7 · October 26, 1967
The War Game
By D.A.N. Jones
The Memoirs of George Sherston: Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man; Memoirs of an Infantry Officer; and Sherston's Progress
by Siegfried Sassoon
Giniger/Stackpole, 656 pp., $8.95
Sagittarius Rising
by Cecil Lewis
Giniger/Stackpole, 332 pp., $4.95
Blasting and Bombardiering
by Wyndham Lewis
California, 343 pp., $7.50
The naïve idealism involved in World War I, that idiot's tale, was first supplied by the British. In most nation-states, the keen fighters believed that they were defending their own fatherland, by invading some other territory. Our hunting fathers, in Britain, feeling quite secure and sheltered behind the Grand Fleet, were unselfishly concerned with the independence of Belgium. Right from the beginning, they liked to think that their actions were building a better world. Later on, as A. J. P. Taylor remarks, 'their idealism was echoed in other countries. The British started it, and their disillusionment afterwards was therefore greater also.'
Review, 2461 words
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