Books: Prelude to Waterloo

Trajalgar (261 pp.)—Rene Maine—Scrlbner ($4.50).

"It is the appointed lot of some of History's chosen few to come upon the scene at the moment when a great tendency is nearing its crisis and culmination. Specially gifted with qualities needed to realize the fullness of its possibilities . . . they thenceforth personify to the world the movement which brought them forth." These famous opening words to The Life of Nelson (1897) by famed Naval Historian-Philosopher Alfred Thayer Mahan contain the gist of Rene Maine's new study of the most decisive moment in French and...