Mars v. Militarism

MILITARY HISTORY OF THE WORLD WAR -- Girard Lindsley McEntee -- Scribner ($7.50).

THE HISTORY OF MILITARISM--Alfred Vagts--Norton ($4.75).

In war books like Hervey Allen's Toward The Flame, big battles are presented from the plain soldier's point of view as little more than explosions of murderous confusion. Captain Liddell Hart's A History of the World War, caustically analyzing the strategy of opposing generals, gives the impression that battles were almost as confusing to the professionals who planned and directed them. Readers who want to add to their knowledge of what happened at the Somme, the Marne, Cambrai, St. Mihiel, Mons--and why it happened as it did--can get some insight into the confusion from two recent volumes that review the history of the World War--one from a pacifist's, the other from a professional soldier's point of view--will find that it looks almost equally forbidding in both.

Colonel McEntee's Military History of the World War is a huge volume of 583 large pages, complete with 459 maps, charts and time schedules of battles. Its main contribution is its pictorial demonstrations of both original plans for battles and step-by-step diagrams of the way they worked out. Thus Colonel McEntee exhaustively describes the original von Schlieffen Plan that called for invasion of Belgium, uses nine maps to show what happened when the Marne was reached and changes in the Plan had weakened the German forces. Relying heavily on official reports. Colonel McEntee writes uncritically, only occasionally pinning responsibility for defeats on backbiting officers, interfering politicians.

According to Dr. Alfred Vagts's The History of Militarism, "much of military history is misleading as a result of the authors' deliberate intentions," most of the rest so stereotyped it is useless in determining what happened in any war. The confusion of battle is perpetuated because generals edit the official reports, and "word their orders in such an oracular fashion that victory, if it comes, can be traced to them, while failure, if it befalls," can be blamed on somebody else. To make sense of these bewildering official

tions, Dr. yagts has written a -page volume that is less a history than a monumental, smoothly-composed, historical essay on the nature of the military mind.

Making a distinction between militarism and the military way of waging a war, Dr. Vagts defines militarism as a comparatively new growth in modern society that serves no genuine military purpose, often loses battles. When military enterprises are undertaken to enhance the reputation of generals during wars, for instance, it is militarism, as it is when unnecessarily large armies are maintained during peace. The genuine military point of view Dr. Vagts finds occasionally in Napoleon (when he said an unnecessary maneuver, no matter how brilliant, was criminal), in Washington, in Clausewitz, in General Hagood, in Colonel Lawrence, who regretted a victorious battle because he knew the enemy would have surrendered in a few days without one. But the militaristic point of view (exemplars: Foch, Weygand, Leonard Wood) leads to situations like the Dreyfus case; to the preservation of archaic customs like dueling in the German army; to the inflexible employment of traditional tactics when new situations have made them dangerous, such as the use of cavalry early in the World War.

Tracing this distinction from the feudal period to the totalitarian state, with a vast display of scholarship, innumerable quotations, occasional flashes of bitter humor, Dr. Vagts includes two brilliant sections that might well be reprinted as separate volumes. One is a provocative analysis of the pre-War German army, its officers split into snobbish cliques, undermining the plans of their rivals without regard for the cost of human life. The other is a soberly inspiring appraisal of Washington as a military genius who is almost unique in history in that he had no militaristic ambitions. Net conclusion of all Dr. Vagts's scholarship: there is little military science, much militaristic posturing, in modern wars.

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