The Unknown War
by
[Scribners, $5.00]
THE sterilization of history was almost complete. The modern historian who travels the dusty way from the ‘scientific approach’ to the culmination of economic determinism, who recognizes in human action only the curve of forces beyond human control, had almost done his perfect work. Readers had fled to Biography, and only the scholar held the stricken field. What a chance then for Winston Churchill, and how gloriously he has taken advantage of it! Statesman, soldier, artist, First Lord of the Admiralty, Chancellor of the Exchequer, world strategist with the aura of Marlborough behind him and all about him the shimmering romance of a great career, he pens his chronicle with the verve and dynamic of a master dramatist. Not for him is History a story without a hero. His is the Shakespearean conception. Men great and small, good and evil, still control events for all the rabble of citizens and soldiers in the background of the scene.
Of all Mr. Churchill’s books of the World Crisis, this culminating volume on the Unknown War — the Eastern front — has the most difficult tale to unfold. Europe from the Gulf of Finland to the Black Sea is the scene of it. Russia, Germany, Austro-Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, Turkey, are the main ingredients of the Devil’s Broth which bubbles over Europe. The war is on a scale which turns old-fashioned fighting into manœuvres of tin soldiers. The chronicle of Russia’s martyrdom alone is the most stupendous record of collapse since the dissolution of the Roman Empire. Tannenberg, the Masurian Lakes, Lodz, Warsaw, the Winter Battle of whose transcendent horror Hindenburg himself exclaimed, ‘Men will ask themselves, have Earthly Beings done these things, or is it all but a fable or a phantasm? ’— each was attended by losses which would bleed an empire white. Yet the Giant of the North still fought on until the final paroxysm of agony came from self-inflicted wounds. The entire panorama, inconceivably enormous, complex almost beyond disentanglement, is here made clear and patent in prose of noble and permanent excellence. Yet these backgrounds of nations in torment, of armies vaster than the hordes of Genghis Khan, of events tumbling over each other in a Niagara of promiscuity, are dominated by actors with speaking parts. Francis Joseph, never too old to suffer, the savage Conrad von Hötzendorf, Berchtold the unconscionable, Falkenhayn of all the talents, Mackensen, the massive Hindenburg coalesced with Ludendorff into H-L, the most terrifying formula of the war — these and their compeers stride across the forefront of the stage, giving their orders and making human and intelligible a mad and inhuman epoch.
The literature of the Great War will grow until libraries burst, but to the end of time these books of Churchill’s will have a place apart. Never again can the cataclysmic story be told by a man who writes of these events with the proud consciousness quorum pars magna fui.
ELLERY SEDGWICK