Books in Brief: Acts of War

Acts of War: The Behavior of Men in Battle, by Richard Holmes (Free Press, 436 pp., $19.95)

The history of mankind is an unending tale of wars and rumors of wars, of nation rising against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. Our race is addicted to war: Deep down inside us something longs for the roll of drums and the sharp tang of powder, and we keep the fond memory of battle alive long after the shooting stops. Since J. Glenn Gray wrote The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle, no book has dealt with the paradoxes of war as honestly and sympathetically as Acts of War: The Behavior of Men in Battle, by Richard Holmes, a reserve officer and member of the faculty of England’s Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. Long dissatisfied with the kind of military history that manages to lose “the soul of man, with all its majesty and mystery,” in “a welter of arrows on maps,” Holmes here focuses his attention on the soldier himself, on his “feelings and behavior from his training for war, through his experiences of battle, and on into its aftermath.” Drawing on oral and written sources that range from the Peloponnesian War to the battle for the Falkland Islands, Holmes offers us an account of war by those who fight it that is both horrible and heartrendingly poignant. Beginning with the systematic molding of a civilian into a soldier during basic training, examples abound of casual brutality and extraordinary sacrifice, of exhaustion and cowardice and unexampled courage. The reader for whom war is epitomized by the Mylai killings will learn that soldiers are not by definition brutish murderers, but ordinary human beings thrown into often inhuman situations. The reader who believes that soldiers are idealists motivated by wartime propaganda will be surprised to discover, as William Manchester did, that war is often an “act of love” in which soldiers “do not fight for flag or country, for the Marine Corps or glory or any other abstraction. They fight for one another.” It is unlikely that we human beings will lose our taste for war any time soon: We are too much addicted. If that is true, we need books like Acts of War to remind us, always to remind us, of the incalculable costs of human conflict.

CS

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Carl R. Schmahl

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Acts of War: The Behavior of Men in Battle, by Richard Holmes (Free Press, 436 pp., $19.95)

The history of mankind is an unending tale of wars and rumors of wars, of nation rising against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. Our race is addicted to war: Deep down inside us something longs for the roll of drums and the sharp tang of powder, and we keep the fond memory of battle alive long after the shooting stops. Since J. Glenn Gray wrote The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle, no book has dealt with the paradoxes of war as honestly and sympathetically as Acts of War: The Behavior of Men in Battle, by Richard Holmes, a reserve officer and member of the faculty of England’s Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. Long dissatisfied with the kind of military history that manages to lose “the soul of man, with all its majesty and mystery,” in “a welter of arrows on maps,” Holmes here focuses his attention on the soldier himself, on his “feelings and behavior from his training for war, through his experiences of battle, and on into its aftermath.” Drawing on oral and written sources that range from the Peloponnesian War to the battle for the Falkland Islands, Holmes offers us an account of war by those who fight it that is both horrible and heartrendingly poignant. Beginning with the systematic molding of a civilian into a soldier during basic training, examples abound of casual brutality and extraordinary sacrifice, of exhaustion and cowardice and unexampled courage. The reader for whom war is epitomized by the Mylai killings will learn that soldiers are not by definition brutish murderers, but ordinary human beings thrown into often inhuman situations. The reader who believes that soldiers are idealists motivated by wartime propaganda will be surprised to discover, as William Manchester did, that war is often an “act of love” in which soldiers “do not fight for flag or country, for the Marine Corps or glory or any other abstraction. They fight for one another.” It is unlikely that we human beings will lose our taste for war any time soon: We are too much addicted. If that is true, we need books like Acts of War to remind us, always to remind us, of the incalculable costs of human conflict.