Reviewed in Brief

A Military History of the Western World, Vol. III, by Major-General J. F. C. Fuller. 666 pp. New York: Funk & Wagnalls Co. $6.00

No one in recent years, unless it be Liddell Hart, has written so well of military questions as Major-General J. F. C. Fuller. This third volume brings to a fitting, if ominous, close his study of warfare in the West, a study that is at the same time an epitome of Western history. The theme of this final volume is war in the age of the Industrial Revolution, war “governed by a single law—that every means is justified by the end—[that] no moral or spiritual conceptions or traditional behaviour must stand in [the] way.” It ends with the emergence of a new kind of war, the product of the material development and the moral degeneration of that age. All-out physical warfare in the old sense has become so destructive astobeno longer an effective instrument of policy. Decision today rests in the successful prosecution of that new combination of political, economic, guerrilla and civil warfare which we call, for lack of a better name, cold war.

Featured Tags

A Military History of the Western World, Vol. III, by Major-General J. F. C. Fuller. 666 pp. New York: Funk & Wagnalls Co. $6.00

No one in recent years, unless it be Liddell Hart, has written so well of military questions as Major-General J. F. C. Fuller. This third volume brings to a fitting, if ominous, close his study of warfare in the West, a study that is at the same time an epitome of Western history. The theme of this final volume is war in the age of the Industrial Revolution, war “governed by a single law—that every means is justified by the end—[that] no moral or spiritual conceptions or traditional behaviour must stand in [the] way.” It ends with the emergence of a new kind of war, the product of the material development and the moral degeneration of that age. All-out physical warfare in the old sense has become so destructive astobeno longer an effective instrument of policy. Decision today rests in the successful prosecution of that new combination of political, economic, guerrilla and civil warfare which we call, for lack of a better name, cold war.