Volume 23, Number 20 · December 9, 1976
Goodbye to All That
By Neal Ascherson
The Face of Battle
by John Keegan
Viking, 354 pp., $10.95
On the Psychology of Military Incompetence
by Norman F. Dixon
Basic Books, 447 pp., $12.50
The Social History of the Machine Gun
by John Ellis
Pantheon, 224 pp., $4.95 (paper)
How could men fight in battles? What sort of human beings are generals, who deliberately bring them about? It is good that so many people in Britain and America do not know the answers to these questions and now—to judge by recent writing on the topic—are fascinated by almost any explanation. Good, but strange in the American case where so many thousands of still young men who fought in Vietnam could provide their own experiences. Most people, however, watched the war on television and are still mystified. Less strange in Britain. It is twenty years since Suez, and in that time the British have at last grown out of that extraordinary fatalism which saw 'wartime' and 'peacetime' as night and day, a natural alternation in which every generation must expect the call to 'do its bit.' The very word 'peacetime,' with its seasonal implication, has vanished from the language.
Review, 2970 words
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