BOOKS
89
GREAT SOLDIERS OF THE TWO WORLD WARS. By H. A. de Weerd.
W.
W. Norton. $3.00.
Though not free from the usual shortcomings of its type, this popular
hook is more than a mere biographical account of the military heroes who
rose to fame during the last thirty years. The twelve "portraits" are so
arranged as to cover nearly all important events of the two wars and all
major contributions to military thought.
There is a remarkable freedom in the selection of the representative
figures. It was a splendid idea to begin the list of the "great soldiers of
the two world wars" with the name of Schlieffen. The disciple of Clause·
witz and creator of the famous Schlieffen·plan which,
if
it had been cour·
ageously adhered to, might have saved the German armies from defeat at
the Marne in 1914, and which had not outlived its utility when it was
followed, with an important modification, by Hitler's armies in 1940, was
indeed "in a very real sense" a soldier of the two wars although he died
one year before the first world war began. While some names (Foch,
Haig,
Ludendorff) have been omitted for external reasons, the list other·
wise includes all who participated in the shaping of the present style of
warfare-Hindenburg and Hoffmann, Kitchener and Lawrence, Petain
and Gamelin, Pershing, Seeckt and Wavell, Churchill and Hitler.
Although the emphasis is on hero-worship rather than on "debunk–
ing," the misery of the lives of the great soldiers is revealed along with
their
splendor. There are few among them who would not have preferred,
at
one or another occasion, the defeat of their own country to the triumph
of a rival. Nor is it sufficient to dismiss those petty quarrels as merely
personal. They often expressed conflicting political and social tendencies,
just as the famous "pessimism" of Marshal Petain and his constant quar–
rels with the (democratic!) "politicians" during the first world war fore–
shadowed ·his pro-fascist acti vities of 1939-1941. Even more strikingly
appears the intimate connection of war and politics in the strangely
analogous careers of the two "statesmen-soldiers," Churchill and Hitler.
Both
acquired their present effectiveness in war through an extension into
the
realm of force of their life-long political struggles. There was no need
for the author, who is fully aware of this real source of Hitler's present
soldierly achievements, to fall for the fantastic tales told by Rauschning
iD
1941 about the "blueprints of the coming war" that were allegedly
outlined by Hitler to a group of young Nazis as early as 1932. In so far
a
it is not merely the application of a highly developed material equip·
ment the whole "unorthodox" Hitlerian technique of breaking down an
enemy
is
based on the transfer of the methods of civil war to a war against
outside enemies.
KAru.
KoRSCH
SO IT DOESN'T WHISTLE. By Robert Paul Smith. Harcourt, Brace. $2.50.
Mr. Robert Paul Smith, the most recent (as we go to press) of the
lelllimentally visceral and isn't-Bix-wonderful school of novelists, looks
remarkably like another Boy in the Back Room.
So It Doesrt't Whistle
is
