From the American Civil War to the beginning of America’s involvement in the Second World War is a long time, and the two things apparently have very little relation with one another. Yet there is a thread connecting them, if it is nothing more than the thin strand that runs through human affairs, tying the man of the 1930’s with the men of the 1860’s; and one is somehow compelled to think about it in examining the career of General George Catlett Marshall, who became America’s top military man just in time to handle the momentous matters that led the United States to go to war with Adolf Hitler’s Germany and the Japanese Empire.

A reminder is at hand in Forrest C. Pogue’s new book, George C. Marshall: Education of a General, 1880-1939 . This is the first volume of what will ultimately be a three-volume life of one of America’s great soldiers: the definitive biography, almost certainly, a work very much worth attention. Marshall, of course, first saw daylight long after the Civil War had ended, and yet somehow he had roots that went back to that time: reading about what he was and what he did, one cannot help feeling that he stemmed out of the Civil War era, that the strengths he brought to his high position grew out of things done and learned in that most terrible of conflicts.

To begin with, Marshall appears to have been a born soldier: a man who from his childhood was meant for this calling, one whom the soldier’s duties and responsibilities fitted as the glove fits the hand. As a military cadet and later as a young second lieutenant, he was obviously a man destined to command, a soldier in—let us say—the tradition of Stonewall Jackson, who clearly could have been nothing on earth of any consequence except a leader of fighting men.

In addition, consider this: Marshall was born in Pennsylvania in 1880, and instead of going to West Point he went south, into Virginia, and went to the Virginia Military Institute, which may not seem quite the place for a Yankee. He went there showing no enormous talents as a student. At the end of his third year he ranked only nineteenth in a class of forty-seven—and yet, as everybody in the place expected, he was made first captain of the corps of cadets for his senior year. V. M. I. had seen born soldiers before that, and it recognized this one when it had him.

Beyond which, the old tradition touched him sharply. The superintendent of V. M. I. had been with the cadets who fought the Yankees at New Market, Virginia, in 1864. The walls of the barracks at the Institute still bore the marks of Federal cannon balls, the graves of Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee were near at hand, and the college catalogue in its listing of graduates gave heavy black type to those who had