Yet this is where the shoe really pinches. The professional soldier, probably of necessity, spends his life learning how to beat an enemy to his knees, and he does his best to learn this by studying the ways in which the last enemies were beaten. Then the world moves out from under him, and his body of knowledge becomes a hindrance rather than a help—and, once again, history turns a corner.

A French military historian, Colonel A. Goutard, examines this problem in The Battle of France, 1940 , and the book makes a good companion piece to the study written by Mr. Falls. Colonel Goutard says bluntly that the soldiers of France—a nation whose army had a military tradition as good as any in Europe —had learned from World War I nothing except a few outmoded lessons in tactics, and that France lost its part of the Second World War as a direct result.

The French, Colonel Goutard suggests, missed the boat several times: specifically, right at first, by consenting to the inactive phase of the “phoney war,” from the moment war was declared in the fall of 1939 to the outbreak of the German offensive in the following May. Germany was vulnerable then, he insists, and a sharp French offensive might have settled things in short order. He quotes German generals as confessing, much later, that a French drive in the fall of 1939 could have crossed the Rhine and occupied the Ruhr; after which, as the Reich’s General Westphal admitted, “the whole face of Europe would have been changed.”

The Battle of France, 1940 , by Colonel A. Goutard, with a foreword by Captain B. H. Liddell Hart. Ives Washburn, Inc. 280 pp. $4.

But this was the last thing French military thought could contemplate. The French Army was put on the defensive, not because it was unprepared, not because the government had not given it proper equipment and training, but because the wrong lessons had been learned from the earlier experience. The overriding principle was to sit tight, to play for time, to wait until this, that, or the other circumstance would make a real show of force advisable.

Unfortunately, the Germans refused to play it that way. Colonel Goutard is blunt about it: “Our defeat in May 1940 was achieved by tactical and strategic surprise against our High Command. The tactical surprise was because our ideas were inherited from 1918, as against the German lightning war.” The Germans had learned something—one lesson (its sharp edge presently to be blunted) being that a modern war, whatever else it does, had better be short if the people who have made it hope to get what they want. They hit hard and suddenly, they tossed the supposed tactical teachings of 1918 out the window, and they knocked France out of the war. And this, Colonel Goutard insists, was not because France was