Statistics
Patrick Cosg rave The Art of Warfare in the Age of Marlborough David Chandler (Botsford £6.95) War is a human condition: art does—and should—attend its arrangement. In the second half of the twentieth century we shrink from the idea of war between nations (however much we tolerate war between individuals and within communities.) It is, now, almost foreign to us to imagine a race of men who, accepting that war would break out as often as peace, sought to regulate its manifestation. We cannot imagine that soldiers could see the horrors of conflict as readily. as us more peaceable folk. It was Wellington, however, who said that 'next to a battle lost, the greatest misery is a battle gained'. In the eighteenth century Saxe was convinced that wars could be won without fighting battles. In the late nineteenth century, misreading Clausewitz, the British Imperial General Staff concluded, in a famous memorandum (of August 1914) that only a battle to the death between the leading armies of the main opposing powers could produce a decision. Between the generalisation of Saxe and that of the IGS stands Marlborough, the greatest of all commanders in the modern epoch. In his fine book Marlborough as Military Commander (Batsford, 1973, 0.00) Mr Chandler, in considering the origins of the battle of Blenheim—the first of the Duke's four great victories—showed how John Churchill broke with the old rules of gentlemanly manoeuvre and sought a fight to the finish with main forces, hundreds of miles from his base. In his latest work Mr Chandler has drawn a superb panorama of a moment in time, when war hovered between being an act of art and an act of desperation. His book is a sober and detailed work, full of figures and horrors, in clinical prose retailing the story, not of those who fell, but of their statistics. Anybody who pretends to a serious judgment on the business of war must read this book.
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