Sublime

Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck,

Square by square, I walked to a church. I’d been there twice before. But the details keep it from ever getting old. Outside there is a monument that was erected to the “Chasseurs-Volontaires de Saint-Domingue” of the Battle of Savannah during the American Revolutionary War. Eight hundred men from what is now Haiti alongside three thousand Frenchmen

There never was a time when nations were more militarist. There never was a time when men were less brave. All ages and all epics have sung of arms and the man; but we have effected simultaneously the deterioration of the man and the fantastic perfection of the arms. Militarism demonstrated the decadence of Rome, and it demonstrates the decadence

It wasn’t the poor white man who had the most to lose in that skirmish as the majority of landowning and slaveholding families in the south were generationally wealthy American aristocrats. Yet, most of those who died fighting for the right to retain ownership of Africans as a permanent source of free labor was the poorest southerners who belonged

At Chattanooga in 1863, George Thomas refused Grant’s order to attack until he was resupplied with draft horses to pull his artillery. Grant was furious, but Thomas was right and, by refusing to attack prematurely, he probably saved Grant’s career. Ridgway and Taylor were also correct, and may well have saved Ike from certain disaster.f

I was there. So was my old war buddy, Bernard V. O’Hare.

As a result, Crusade in Europe remains one of the clearest and least opinionated books to come out of World War II. If Ike had an ax to grind, he avoided doing so in his book. Like Grant’s Memoirs, it is also free of the petty bitterness that characterized the books of Montgomery and Lord Alanbrooke, and the diaries of George Patton, which were