Books in Brief

A Soldier With the Arabs, by Sir John Bagot Glubb (Harper, $6.00). In retrospect, the British Empire looks better and better. Among other things, it gave the world a century of comparative peace, and the benefits of British power often applied not to Britain alone but to the entire West. And, to list one benefit to the “conquered” peoples, it was not a “steam-roller” empire on the Russian model, applying the maximum of crushing, smothering naked force. As a rule the British attempted to apply only that minimum of force needed to “do the job.” The men, like Glubb, who made this possible, were a strange—a dedicated—lot, as unique as they are irreplaceable. Most of his life Glubb lived as an Arab, yet he remained the prototype of the British professional soldier, confident that in faithfully serving foreign kings he continued to serve his own. He built up the finest Arab army in existence, the backbone of the most stable Arab state, and then watched both founder on the Israeli reef and sink into the current Middle-Eastern morass. This book is more than Glubb’s personal story. It is a record of the follies of Western “policy” that smashed the personal achievements of the Glubbs and created the impersonal vacuum which remains. He can and does tell us where we went wrong, but he cannot give us a solution. Glubb, like the Empire he served, has been swept clean off the board, and itisuptousto supply new pieces. Perhaps not better ones—that would be a great deal to expect. But, please God, let us supply something.

J. P. MCFADDEN The Decision to Intervene, by George F. Kennan (Princeton, $7.50). This is the second volume of Ambassador Kennan’s projected study of “Soviet-American Relations, 1917-20.” Reading it makes one wish that Mr. Kennan would keep his nose, as here, close to the grindstone of the past, instead of sticking it so ineptly—as during the Reith Lectures this past winter— into the gears of the present. If The Decision to Intervene has certain of the defects of a somewhat official sort of diplomatic history, it has also most of the virtues. The narrative of these tangled events, told with a richly seasoned use of letters, documents and diaries, is wonderfully interesting. It is extraordinary to find here in prelude the leitmotifs for almost all the types of American response to Soviet power that have kept the stage during these four subsequent decades. There is even, in Colonel Raymond Robins, the prototype of the eternal high-minded fellow-traveler. And it is discouraging to observe that in not a single recorded response was there that combination of understanding and resolution that alone could have hoped, or could hope, to meet that power’s challenge.

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A Soldier With the Arabs, by Sir John Bagot Glubb (Harper, $6.00). In retrospect, the British Empire looks better and better. Among other things, it gave the world a century of comparative peace, and the benefits of British power often applied not to Britain alone but to the entire West. And, to list one benefit to the “conquered” peoples, it was not a “steam-roller” empire on the Russian model, applying the maximum of crushing, smothering naked force. As a rule the British attempted to apply only that minimum of force needed to “do the job.” The men, like Glubb, who made this possible, were a strange—a dedicated—lot, as unique as they are irreplaceable. Most of his life Glubb lived as an Arab, yet he remained the prototype of the British professional soldier, confident that in faithfully serving foreign kings he continued to serve his own. He built up the finest Arab army in existence, the backbone of the most stable Arab state, and then watched both founder on the Israeli reef and sink into the current Middle-Eastern morass. This book is more than Glubb’s personal story. It is a record of the follies of Western “policy” that smashed the personal achievements of the Glubbs and created the impersonal vacuum which remains. He can and does tell us where we went wrong, but he cannot give us a solution. Glubb, like the Empire he served, has been swept clean off the board, and itisuptousto supply new pieces. Perhaps not better ones—that would be a great deal to expect. But, please God, let us supply something.

J. P. MCFADDEN The Decision to Intervene, by George F. Kennan (Princeton, $7.50). This is the second volume of Ambassador Kennan’s projected study of “Soviet-American Relations, 1917-20.” Reading it makes one wish that Mr. Kennan would keep his nose, as here, close to the grindstone of the past, instead of sticking it so ineptly—as during the Reith Lectures this past winter— into the gears of the present. If The Decision to Intervene has certain of the defects of a somewhat official sort of diplomatic history, it has also most of the virtues. The narrative of these tangled events, told with a richly seasoned use of letters, documents and diaries, is wonderfully interesting. It is extraordinary to find here in prelude the leitmotifs for almost all the types of American response to Soviet power that have kept the stage during these four subsequent decades. There is even, in Colonel Raymond Robins, the prototype of the eternal high-minded fellow-traveler. And it is discouraging to observe that in not a single recorded response was there that combination of understanding and resolution that alone could have hoped, or could hope, to meet that power’s challenge.