Geoffrey Best

Basil Liddell Hart was ‘the captain who taught generals’. His active participation in fighting was limited to three brief bursts during the First World War, the last and by far the worst ending with a nightmarish experience of panic and gas in Mametz Wood, on the Somme, which left him unfit for further front-line service. In proportion as the Army’s hold on him weakened, his critical interest in its mentality and methods increased. He began to write about training and tactics and at once was noted for the clarity and confidence of his prose and the originality of his ideas. His appointment as military correspondent of the Morning Post in 1924 gave him non-professional readers for the first time. He moved to the Daily Telegraph in 1925, where he stayed until climbing to what was then the top of the newspaper tree, the Times, in 1934.‘

The Director of the International Studies Center at New York University believes that the world has recently made giant strides towards becoming much fairer. He makes the case as well as it could be made, but possessing apparently no sense of wonder and not much of historical perspective, Thomas Franck doesn’t seem to realise how extraordinary a claim it is. Whoever, anywhere, before our own later 20th century, thought that the world could be ‘fair’? Was ineradicable unfairness not the common perception? And if this has been more or less the shape of things through the millennia, how could our fifty years ring in such giant changes, and how permanent can we expect them to be?

The astounding story told in these pages is of how the country which came victoriously out of the First World War, ‘that bloody and ill-managed conflict’, with nearly two million soldiers in Belgium and France, a more than adequate industrial backing for them, and a growing habit of victory, at the start of the Second could send there only a thinly-backed 160,000. It is the story primarily of the British Army, but it is presented within a broad framework of references familiar to all who know anything about British inter-war history: ‘Locarno’, Disarmament, Depression and ‘Munich’; Baldwin and Chamberlain, Gandhi and Mussolini, ‘Boney’ Fuller, Liddell Hart and – though he is hardly welcomed to the feast – ‘Colonel Blimp’. It is founded on so much systematic research in Cabinet and War Office papers, let alone other military archives, that it must at once become a prime resource for fellow scholars: yet it is written with so much force, directness, wisdom and wry humour that it would be instructive and agreeable reading for anyone concerned to understand in depth the decline of British power – not least because of its worrying speculation in conclusion, as to whether the country might not now be repeating mistakes made then. It is not a cheering book, but it is a strong and wholesome one, which fortifies Mr Bond’s place in the very top rank of the military-historical hierarchy.

The self-effacing authors of this excellent book aim to contribute some clear-headedness and penetration to what ought to be our great debate, but is too often our puzzle-headed mumble, about war. So exemplary is the clarity of their rich, varied and powerful argument that their hopes may well be realised. Good books about ethics and warfare – that is, books which can meet the military and political ‘realists’ on their own grounds, without sacrificing moral principle – are not as rare as they used to be. Gallie and Walzer come at once to mind. But none is as unusual as this: a book co-authored by a philosopher and a historian, both of whom are possessed by the notion that people are more likely to take ethics seriously if connections with hard, familiar cases are not shirked, and who share a standpoint of modified Kantianism which encourages them to believe that moral awareness and concern can be elicited and educated from even the rather unpromising human subjects which most of us are.