The Old Guard
Soldiers and Governments: Nine Studies in Civic. Military Relations. Edited by Michael
Howard. (Eyre and Spottiswoode, 21s.)
'THE subject of this. book is an enthralling and important one, and each of the contributors is distinguished in his or her own field. But the result of this.combination, in 191 pages, is almost as flat as the countryside round the Marne memorial.
The most obvious fault of the book, which started as a series of lectures, is that it is badly planned. There are two Clear divisions into which the countries treated in it fall : those countries in which the armed forces are no longer capable of acting as an independent and decisive politi- cal force, and those countries in which they are, or may be. It is, therefore, rather pointless to lump them together and produce a series of essays on- individual countries, and hope that they will illustrate some general theme. It would have been much more satisfactory to have -treated the whole subject in a way which would have allowed the like problems of like countries to be discussed together. Such a method might have avoided, too, the impression, given in some of the essays, that the authors have merely taken down their own or other historians' more general works, and copied out the references to the armed forces in chronological order.
It would also have helped to overcome the appalling omissions. Professor Guy Chapman, for example, rightly argues much of his case about the French Army in terms of its social structure. But, once 1867 and the Cardwell reforms have been taken in his stride, Mr. Robert Blake ignores the class background of the British Army altogether, except for a passing reference in his description of the Curragh incident. Even in Professor Brogan's essay, admirable though it is within its own set limits, almost nothing is said of the complicated social links between the big business, military and political hierarchies in America, which, to use Mr. Wright Mills's phrase, constitute the 'power elite.' Civic-military relations are not just a matter of constitutional relations, with a few strong personalities thrown in. Yet' such is how they are largely treated in this book, not least in the extraordinarily unilluminating essay on Russia.
The periods covered in the various essays are 4,1s0 puzzling. Most of them stop short of the Present day, apart from some rather unfortunate closing paragraphs. Yet they come close enough to the present not to allow either convincing or Penetrating historical judgments to be made. (One almost longs for an essay on the Roman Empire.) TheY are not, in short, either history, which they pretend to be; or essays in speculative inquiry, Illustrating permanent themes, which they could Well have been. Lastly, the present day, when it is approached, is seen with a dimness which can only reflect on the academic backgrounds of the authors. Professor Brogan, in his acute glances at West Point and Annapolis and his closing plea that 'the United States needs armed forces for the age of Einstein—and Oppenheimer,' puts at least one foot into the year in which Sputnik 11 has been launched and the Germans may be encour- aged to construct nuclear weapons (what on earth is the relevance of the Prussian officer corps in that context?), but the rest of his fellow authors remain comfortably in the company of Boulanger, Kerensky, Hindenburg and Haldane.
HENRY FAIRLIE
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