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When trench warfare forced the French generals to revise their Fochian formula, the real grind of modern war began. These were dark times for Foch. His son and son-in-law had been killed. He himself fell out of favor, was retired by Joffre from command of the Northern Group of Armies. Not until the throes of disaster led the Allies to appoint him their supreme commander could his faith burn openly where all could see and feel. "Materially, I do not see that victory is possible. Morally I am certain that we shall gain it." The Author. Born in 1895, Capt. Basil Henry Liddell Hart, entered the British Army in 1914 as a Cambridge University Candidate; at 20 he commanded a battalion. He invented the English Battle Drill System (1917); the Expanding Torrent method of attack, officially adopted since the War. Badly wounded, he stayed in the army until 1927. As military correspondent of the London Daily Telegraph, Military Editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, his theories of future warfare, army mechanization have been read, inwardly digested by Europe's leading Ministries of War. Other books: The Decisive Wars of History, The Remaking of Modern Armies, The Real War, Great Captains Unveiled.
Home-Work
A LESSON IN LOVE — Colette — Farrar and Rinehart ($2.50).
In this fragment of autobiography, Colette learns another lesson from love by teaching it so well. This lesson foretastes of her final graduation. Advancing years and her own trials of marriage & divorce have made her realize that "Love, one of the great banalities of existence, is about to retire from my life. . . . Once past that, we see that all the rest is gay, varied, amusing. But you don't get past that when and as you will."
Chief obstruction this time is Vial, youngish interior decorator, whose cottage neighbors Colette's on the Mediterranean shore. Here she has retired with her dog. her cats to watch the hours pass of her declining day. Swimming parties, summer diversions with her neighbors fill whatever gaps tending her animals, her garden, or her memories may leave. But Vial . . .!
Vial attends the swimming parties, picnics, too. Always in his background hovers young Helene Clement, whom he, to his distaste, infatuates. Helene, a green girl helpless, appeals to older, infinitely wiser Colette. She does her woman's best to forward the affair. But the affair won't go forward: it is Colette whom Vial loves. She knows it, will not admit it until there is nothing else to do. After two summers of perfect prenuptial flying, Vial goes back to his Paris shop, apparently to stay. Helene Clement will see to that. Colette takes Vial's departure a little hard. "I don't sing Vial's praises in a lyric strain. I regret him. ... I shall have no reason to magnify him until I begin to regret him less. He will come down—when my memory shall have achieved its capricious work which often deprives a monster of his hump or his horns, effaces a mountain, respects a straw ... he will come down and take his place deep within me, where love, that superficial spray, does not always manage to penetrate."
Gospeler's Truth
APOCALYPSE—D. H. Lawrence—Viking ($3).