"THE WAR IN OUTLINE."

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 193, 15 August 1936, Page 2

"THE WAR IN OUTLINE."

LIDDEEL HART'S HISTORY.

The Great War being over IT .years behind us, and the flood of self-justi-fying memoirs and histories written by politicians, generals and admirals having subsided, it is now possible for the layman tQ learn with a considerable degree of accuracy what really happened. For those disposed to undertake that melancholy but interesting task. "The War in Outline" (Faber and Faber), by Liddell Hart, will serve excellently as an introduction. This "outline," with index, occupies only 2.">0 pages —which is a remarkable feat of condensation — but nothing of consequence has been omitted, though the reader will find that events which once seemed momentous, when given their proper relative place can be described in half a page. In part this is made possible by the j author's awareness of the result of post-war research and in part by his gift for concise exposition. Captain Hart as far as possible lets the' facts tell the story. When it is necessary to summarise the ideas which prompted any major move he reports, whenever possible, the words, at the at the time of the men responsible, for "it is fairer that the- performance of such leaders should be judged by what they said rather than by what others have said of them since, either in criticism or opology." It is certainly a fair method, and, just as certainly, it is destructive of some great reputations. Indeed, the reader's main recurring thought will be of the failure of leadership in the war, on both sides, and of the virtues of the men-. In September, 1914, General Sir Henry Wilson spoke of Kitchener's army as "ridiculous and preposterous," and said that under no circumstances could "these mobs" take the field until two years had passed. Hut they were ready for their baptism of fire within nine months, and in the Somme in 1010 when "sixty thousand men paid forfeit for the plan that failed—the heaviest day's loss that a British army ever suffered" —these citizen-soldiers of Britain bore "a percentage of loss such as no army of the past had ever been deemed capable of withstanding, unbroken." In his necessarily brief summary of the Gallipoli campaign—"a sound and far-sighted venture which had been wrecked by a chain of errors hardly to be rivalled even in British history." Captain Hart emphasises its important effects. By its threats it upset the whole war plan of the Germans for 1015, "It was ironical that Joffre and French, who had striven so hard to thwart the Gallipoli expedition, should have been saved by that staveling campaign from the danger of meeting a German onslaught in the west; that they should have owed the chance of pursuing their dream of victory to the very more whose value~they had failed to appreciate"

In recording in his last paragraph the fact that the Armistice came at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, Captain Hart says this circumstance symbolically suggested "that western civilisation had been given a last chance to profit by experience and to disprove Heine's saying: 'Wo learn from history that- we do not lenrn from historv.'"