Dieu Est Mon Droit

FOCH--Capt. B. H. Liddell Hart--Lit-tle, Brown ($4)./-

Vieux soldat, vieil imbecile--so say the French, but not of Foch. Though an oldish soldier (62) when the War began, he became before its close France's symbol and stimulant of undefeat. "The Man of Orleans," as Biographer Hart subtitles him, filled the role of national redeemer when the Kaiser was Satan and when, for a four-year wink of the Divine eye, God was French.

When on May n, 1871, Ferdinand Foch, a young student at the Jesuit College of St. Clement's at Metz, heard the classroom windows rattle to the guns' announcement that the city was now German, the nightmare of the Franco-Prussian War turned into a dream of revanche. He fed the dream with legends of Napoleon; his religious training gave him the very highest sanctions. From the Polytechnique he pushed through the Ecole d'Application, the Cavalry School at Saumur, Ecole Superieure de Guerre. In 1890 he was summoned to the General Staff at the Ministry of War. Here the dream of revanche took strategical form. "Adopting the offensive as the essential form of action, Foch's sequence of action was, first, to feel for one's enemy, then to grip him, finally to 'strike one supreme stroke on one point,' using one's reserves 'as a club'. . . This theory, essentially mechanistic or mathematical, was too simple for truth."

As professor and later as commandant of the Ecole de Guerre, from its high pulpit he taught the army's teachers his theories of military strategy. By books, by word of mouth he popularized the doctrine of Attack, until it became dogma to the French. "This theory, which really rested on the sentimental assumption that Frenchmen were braver than Germans, certainly simplified the role of the leader. For directly an enemy was sighted he had merely to give the order, 'Forward.' " Biographer Liddell Hart, more concerned with military strategy than patriotic ardors, puts the armies' battles, from the early battle of Morhange to the second battle of the Marne, down on maps; traces in tactical detail the errors of attack.

When at long last the awaited German invasion broke, Foch was on hand to put his theory into practice, watch the other generals do the same. In the face of the enemy's first crushing advance, the generals threw their men to death with a strictly impersonal elan. When Foch's subordinates warned of being exterminated, Foch enheartened them: "Get smashed to the last man, but hold on like leeches. No retirement. Every man to the attack." These tactics fed the soldiers so fast to the machine-guns that the Germans nearly broke through.

When trench warfare forced the French generals to revise their Fochian formula, the real grind of modern war began. These were dark times for Foch. His son and son-in-law had been killed. He himself fell out of favor, was retired by Joffre from command of the Northern Group of Armies. Not until the throes of disaster led the Allies to appoint him their supreme commander could his faith burn openly where all could see and feel. "Materially, I do not see that victory is possible. Morally I am certain that we shall gain it." The Author. Born in 1895, Capt. Basil Henry Liddell Hart, entered the British Army in 1914 as a Cambridge University Candidate; at 20 he commanded a battalion. He invented the English Battle Drill System (1917); the Expanding Torrent method of attack, officially adopted since the War. Badly wounded, he stayed in the army until 1927. As military correspondent of the London Daily Telegraph, Military Editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, his theories of future warfare, army mechanization have been read, inwardly digested by Europe's leading Ministries of War. Other books: The Decisive Wars of History, The Remaking of Modern Armies, The Real War, Great Captains Unveiled.

Home-Work

A LESSON IN LOVE -- Colette -- Farrar and Rinehart ($2.50).

In this fragment of autobiography, Colette learns another lesson from love by teaching it so well. This lesson foretastes of her final graduation. Advancing years and her own trials of marriage & divorce have made her realize that "Love, one of the great banalities of existence, is about to retire from my life. . . . Once past that, we see that all the rest is gay, varied, amusing. But you don't get past that when and as you will."

Chief obstruction this time is Vial, youngish interior decorator, whose cottage neighbors Colette's on the Mediterranean shore. Here she has retired with her dog. her cats to watch the hours pass of her declining day. Swimming parties, summer diversions with her neighbors fill whatever gaps tending her animals, her garden, or her memories may leave. But Vial . . .!

Vial attends the swimming parties, picnics, too. Always in his background hovers young Helene Clement, whom he, to his distaste, infatuates. Helene, a green girl helpless, appeals to older, infinitely wiser Colette. She does her woman's best to forward the affair. But the affair won't go forward: it is Colette whom Vial loves. She knows it, will not admit it until there is nothing else to do. After two summers of perfect prenuptial flying, Vial goes back to his Paris shop, apparently to stay. Helene Clement will see to that. Colette takes Vial's departure a little hard. "I don't sing Vial's praises in a lyric strain. I regret him. ... I shall have no reason to magnify him until I begin to regret him less. He will come down--when my memory shall have achieved its capricious work which often deprives a monster of his hump or his horns, effaces a mountain, respects a straw ... he will come down and take his place deep within me, where love, that superficial spray, does not always manage to penetrate."

Gospeler's Truth

APOCALYPSE--D. H. Lawrence--Viking ($3).

Though literati may look at it and wink, the Revelation of St. John the Divine has long piqued the curiosity of exegetical minds. As the hart panteth after the water brooks so do exegetes pant, sometimes puff, to expound the seven trumps, the sea of glass, the four beasts "full of eyes before and behind." From childhood on Literatus Lawrence found the Apocalypse antipathetic--"This perpetual 'wrath of the Lamb' business exasperates one like endless threats of toothless old men." Nevertheless he could not leave it alone; in his latest posthumous publication he goes the orthodox exegetes one better, expounds the Christian mystery book in neo-pagan terms.

Lawrence suspects that John of Patmos "knew a good deal about the pagan value of symbols, as contrasted even with the Jewish or Christian value. And he used the pagan value just when it suited him, for he was no timid soul." To Lawrence, St. John's pagan values are sheep, his Jewish and Christian values, goats. To separate them takes the greater part of the book.

To reveal his own revelation, bolster personal interpretation, Author Lawrence introduces what mythological waifs and strays he has at hand. Sun and moon, Pythagorean numbers, dragons green and red make the mise en scene for his philosophy. Out of the confusion he draws some ideas that are confoundedly clear, many that are clearly confounded. Like some other gospelers Lawrence makes many a mystic leap out of the brain pan into the soup. Other times he speaks what seems to be the necessarily sober truth.

"We have lost the cosmos, by coming out of responsive connection with it, and this is our chief tragedy. What is our petty little love of Nature--Nature!!--compared to the ancient magnificent living with the cosmos, and being honored by the cosmos!" Readers may question whether modern men, if they start by biting off the cosmos, will find their little world so very much easier to chew.

Marionettes Without a Country

MARIETTA--Anne Green--Button ($2.50).

To transfuse blood is easier than to transplant it. Transplants in foreign lands seldom throw down enough roots to get a complete diet. They seem to live less in the foreign society than off it. Anne Green's Americans of the Paris colony scrape a material living out of exile; the rest of life seems to come to them vicariously, piecemeal. This makes their actions, like those of marionettes, all the more amusing.

Marietta is the prize daughter of the Malory family, so much livelier, prettier than her younger sister that Lucile never seems to have a chance. Yet Lucile gets engaged to Timothy Sheldon, whom Marietta fancies for herself. To stop the marriage she persuades her mother to have Lucile examined for tuberculosis; finds that she has a touch of it herself. In Switzerland, where she retires to recover, she meets up with young American Eugene Monk, becomes his mistress to spite herself. As soon as they get back to Paris she throws him over. To divert her jealousy of Timothy and Lucile, she starts on a round of amours. But with all the world to choose from her choice narrows down to her sister's husband. She finally succeeds in seducing him. Lucile discovers Timothy's infidelity, but soon after bears him twins, forgives him. He is only too glad to shake off desperate Marietta. She, now entirely hopeless, is put out of her troubles when her taxi skids into a dray.

Cream of a Decade

DRAWN FROM LIFE--S. J. Woolf--Whittlesey House ($5).

Some readers of the New York Times are going to feel cheated when they read this book. They will wonder why the man who writes the biographical sketches in the Sunday magazine section, with the drawing of the subject in the middle of the page, did not tell them all that he now has told in his book. Other more faithful Times readers will realize that much of Artist Woolf's material has already been published. Reading it again, and reading what has been added, they will acutely realize what an extraordinary reporter has been serving them these many years. His pictorial reporting of externals is so accurate and satisfying as to have become taken-for-granted. His equally accurate and satisfying reports of what he has observed behind famed faces have a cumulative effect when bound together. They form a most unusual glossary of the first figures of a decade.

Here are a number of celebrities from all important countries except the Orient. The important U. S. figures are all there, from the young Lindbergh to the venerable Holmes, with such curious exceptions as Henry Ford and Henry Lewis Stimson. The European gallery lacks Spain's recent Alfonso, England's George and in fact all other royalty.

Realism is the true reporter's touchstone. Cub newspapermen everywhere may with profit study the candor and simplicity with which this artist, alert and at all times objectively interested, sets down such minutiae as the differences in the cigar-smoking of Calvin Coolidge (knife and holder) and Herbert Hoover (fingernails and teeth), or the lineaments of Toscanini's left hand:

". . . The baton in his right hand commands, but his left hand wheedles the tones he desires. That left hand is a study; thin and shapely, with a long thumb that starts very near the wrist, it performs an entire symphony by itself. Tenderly it hushes the strings; commandingly it calls for volume from the brass; it goes to the heart when it wants melody; and, closed Ardst'Author, The somewhat startling full name of the Times's artist-interviewer is Samuel Johnson Woolf. About the only things he has in common with the great lexicographer are patience and precision. He observes that an error in fact will ruin a joke for Herbert Hoover and while the same is not true of Artist Woolf, it is true that for him a solecism could ruin a heroism. His pursuit of the world's great has been as pure-in-purpose as it has been clever. He reached Einstein through that great man's sculptress daughter--and departed a real friend of the family. Born in Manhattan 52 years ago, Artist Woolf studied at the National Academy of Design, the Art Students' League, started out as portrait painter in oils. During the War, as correspondent with the A. E. F. he did portraits of men at the Front. Interviews followed. Now he works in chalk, lithograph, any medium he wishes. In recent years he has drawn many cover pictures for TIME.

/- Published Feb. 2.

* New books are news. Unless otherwise designated, all books reviewed in TIME were published within the fortnight. TIME readers may obtain any book of any U. S. publisher by sending check or money-order to cover regular retail price ($5 if price is unknown, change to be remitted} to Ben Boswell of TIME, 205 East 42nd St New York City.

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