Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
February 1959 | Volume 10, Issue 2
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
February 1959 | Volume 10, Issue 2
It is the unhappy fate of some men to stand as symbols of the human being’s natural reluctance to realize that the world has changed. They survive into a day that they cannot understand, and the simple fact that they do not understand it remains beyond their grasp; and since this is the case, the solutions which they attempt for the problems that the changed world brings them are completely inadequate. When these men stand in positions of high authority the results can be tragic. Since the world has probably seen more sweeping change in the last 50 or 75 years than in any preceding half-dozen centuries, this inability to adjust to change —inability, indeed, to see that any adjustment is necessary—is one of the melancholy hallmarks of our era. An eminent example is the case of that distinguished British soldier, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig. Haig had many military virtues. He had integrity, devotion, long training in his profession, the sort of iron-hard determination that a successful general must have. He would have made a first-rate soldier in Wellington’s army; his trouble was that he commanded British armies in a war that resembled Wellington’s war only in the fact that men still shot each other. He believed in throwing massed numbers into a head-on attack; he believed in victory by attrition; above all he believed in cavalry—he felt that bullets had little stopping power against the horse, and that the role of mounted men would become more and more important in an era of machine guns, repeating rifles, barbed wire, and quick-firing field guns—and, all in all, he was somewhat like a man trying to solve a problem in the new mathematics by diligent use of the abacus. In Flanders Fields: the 1917 Campaign , by Leon Wolff. The Viking Press. 308 pp. $5.00. In 1917 Haig planned and conducted the tremendous six-months battle that has come down into history as the Passchendaele offensive. It cost the British armies involved in it 448,000 casualties, including 22,000 junior officers; it gained a few square miles of useless ground; it churned the whole battle area into a hideous swamp in which effective military movement was all but impossible; and it grimly underlines the fact that the First World War marked the dreadful end of an era. It comes up for careful examination in a genuinely first-rate book, In Flanders Fields , by Leon Wolff. Mr. Wolff’s book makes it very clear that conventional military thinking in that war had collapsed. The western front ran from Switzerland to the English Channel in a continuous chain; nothing that armies had ever done before could be done on this front, but the generals could not realize this fact and they persisted in trying what had been done in the old days. Haig and the men like him grew furious at any suggestion that