Arma Virumque
IT seems to be a characteristic of modern war that it is preceded by intelligent and cold-blooded technical writing, accompanied by a hectic literature of propaganda, and followed by a hair-raising literature of horror, better written than either. World War II arrived early enough in the fall book season to bring propaganda and technical writing simultaneously from the presses, and early enough in the years to permit the nightmare literature to overlap both. This fall’s offerings thus present a cross-section of all war books, minus only histories of the yet-unenacted events, and the volumes here presented fall readily into the three classifications.
R. Ernest Dupuy’sWorld in Arms (Military Service Publishing Company, $2.00), an outline war geography with notes on military potential, maps the strategic lines of attack against each of the powers, and lists each country’s military strength in neat diagrammatic form. It is as cold and clear as a World Almanac, and in one sense as superficial, for it says nothing of those questions of supply which so deeply determine the issue of modern war.
The Defence of Britain, by Liddell Hart (Random House, $3.50), two degrees higher and several degrees narrower, is specific for the British Isles and Empire, written by a man so deeply in the confidence of the War Council that it seems to have adopted his larger concepts in toto. Liddell Hart was looking straight at Germany when he wrote the book; he prescribes for England the kind of ‘super-guerilla war,’ with blockade as its pivot, that England is now waging. Were it not for detail on the organization of the British army that fills the last half of the book, it would be the most interesting work on the list.
As it is, the place is usurped by How Strong Is Britain? by Count Buckler (Veritas Press, $2.50), an intelligent Nazi’s analysis of the strength of Germany’s chief opponent. Pückler goes deeper than Hart and into a different order of problems, emerging with the conclusion that the war of usury which Hart recommends will end by breaking down the social, political, financial, and economic structure of the Empire. It is really too bad that a good deal of keen analysis and close reasoning on his part should be thrown into question by a devotion to Hitlerism which causes him to report that Britain’s greatest danger is the ‘attractiveness’ of the Nazi economic system for peoples not speaking English.
It will seem rather curious to the non-military reader who has been brought up on horrific tales of what airplanes will do to cities that both the detailed studies of the British problem hardly more than touch the point. George F. Eliot’s Bomba Bursting in Air (Reynul and Hitchcock, $1.75) both repairs and explains the omission. Major Eliot pointing out that air attack on major cities is an extremely unattractive military gamble, the most probable result of which would be the emasculation of the air service that attempted it. The reasons are rather complex, but Eliot handles them with his usual gift for effective simplification, and his work is all the better for the fact that in the course of this simplification he is required to take special cognizance of the question ol whether America can be bombed.
Crossing the border into the works hurried through the presses since the shooting started, one is instantly in a land where ideologues passionately argue unrealities behind a cloud of words.
Both The Deadly Parallel, by C. Hartley Grattan (Stackpole, $2.00), and Keep America Out of War, by Norman Thomas and Bertram D. Wolfe (Stokes, $1.50), were written by men strongly convinced that the present quarrel is none of ours; both declare that war would bring an effective Fascism to this country; both offer programs for peace in which a prominent part is given to prohibition of loans, a renewed and strengthened arms embargo, and American insistence on feeding the warring populations, even to the point of fighting for the last privilege. Already this third element reveals the frantic clutching of unrealities which marks this school of literature. Mr. Grattan, for instance, would have the government establish ‘close control over capital investments’ and ‘require’ newspapers to publish material promoting peace — which, as a method of avoiding Fascism, strikes one like curing a cold in the head by decapitation.
Both Words That Won the War (Princeton University Press, $8.75) and Propaganda for War (University of Oklahoma Press, $3.00) are professorial studies of the propaganda that accompanied our participation in the last conflict. The former is written by James R. Mock and Cedric Larson and deals with the work of the George Creel Bureau in the United States, a necessarily somewhat summarized account of that organization’s immense and widespread activity. The latter, based on British documents hitherto held secret, and full of information about English propaganda in America from 11)14, is itself subject to considerable correction for auctorial astigmatism; its author, H. C. Peterson, is one of those people who believe that nobody in America really wanted to go to war last time, and that British propaganda and the Morgan investments were the only things that got us in.
The two remaining books likewise belong to the hangover from the last war. Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun (Lippincott, $2.50), a literary tour deforce of the first order, is the voice of a dead man crying for life, beautifully done, philosophically not quite fair, since the dead man is presented as willingly taking up a hard destiny he later regrets. What Will Happen and What to Do When War Comes, edited by Larry Nixon (Greystone Press, $2.25), ostensibly a symposium on how the individual can protect himself from the effects of war. should really be classified with the propaganda books. The six authors come out with the conclusion that the individual can really do nothing to preserve money, job, property, or life, and might as well jump in front of a train on the day of the declaration. But perhaps they are right.
FLETCHER PRATT