Volume 32, Number 7 · April 25, 1985
Spoils of War
By Howard Moss
The Balkan Trilogy: Vol. I, The Great Fortune, Vol. II, The Spoilt City, Vol. III, Friends and Heroes
by Olivia Manning
Penguin, 924 pp., $8.95 (paper)
The Levant Trilogy: Vol. I, The Danger Tree, Vol. II, The Battle Lost and Won, Vol. III, The Sum of Things
by Olivia Manning
Penguin, 568 pp., $7.95 (paper)
Wars have a momentum of their own and a tendency to destroy the very thing they set out to preserve or to gain. Each starts out as something vast—a reflection of the society that concocts it—only to become a vastness in itself. Masterpieces have been written that illustrate the point, and War and Peace is our supreme example. But Tolstoy described the last war that did not radically alter the social system that supported it and saw less of what the future held in store than did Ford Madox Ford in Parade's End. The weaponry had changed; an era was in ruins. What had looked like an end and a beginning was really the beginning of the end. Two decades later, the world was at war again.
Review, 3480 words
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