British Major-General John Frederick Charles Fuller is remembered today as one of the great strategists and military historians of this century. Always controversial, he is renowned for such works as The Generalship of Ulysses S. Grant (1929), Grant and Lee: A Study in Personality and Generalship (1933), the monumental A Military History of the Western World (three volumes, 1954-56), The Generalship of Alexander the Great (1958), and Julius Caesar: Man, Soldier, and Tyrant (1965). So prolific a writer was he that before his death in 1966 he had completed and published 45 books and innumerable essays and articles.

General Fuller’s fame as a strategist is such that he is sometimes called the “20th-century Clausewitz.” One of the first to understand the significance of the tank and to anticipate accurately the upheaval that this invention would engender, he became an early and uncompromising advocate of mechanization. In some respects, his ideas were the logical outgrowth of his service as commander of the Royal Tank Corps during World War I. Yet Fuller was not a conventional British officer. A visionary of sorts and possessed of an extraordinarily agile mind, his thoughts leaped decades beyond those of other military men. The war of the future, he predicted in the 1920’s, would be one of movement and fluidity and would not be a repeat of the bloody stalemate of 1914-1918. During the period between the two great European wars, the general staffs of both Britain and France not only failed to grasp these theories but took pains to ridicule them.

Fuller was undaunted and continued his provocative writing. The cumulative weight of his blunt criticism was finally too much for the military establishment to bear, and he was retired in 1933. It is typical of the man that his autobiography, published in 1936, has as its motto a quotation from Heraclitus printed boldly on the title page: “Asses would rather have refuse than gold.” This was a parting shot at the hidebound obstinacy of the Imperial General Staff, since for them and for the French nothing changed after 1914. France, as we know, opted for the ultimate in trench warfare, the Maginot Line, which Fuller at the time dubbed the “tomb of France.” Despite such warnings, strategic thinking among the Allies remained imbedded firmly—and disastrously—in the past. German military planners, however, were not so slow-witted. Men such as Guderian and Rommel understood what Fuller was talking about. Thirty thousand copies of Fuller’s manual on armored warfare were published in Germany. In contrast, the English published only 500 copies. Of course, when the Blitzkrieg overwhelmed Prance in an avalanche of steel in 1940, Fuller’s theories were at last recognized as sound.

The Conduct of War is part of a series of reprints of General Fuller’s most valuable contributions to military history. It was written when the author was over eighty years old and represents a careful distillation of his lifetime of study.

He begins by noting that Arnold Toynbee was once perplexed by the fact that with the birth of democratic government war had suddenly become more ferocious than ever before, though (in Toynbee’s view) democracy’s roots were fed by notions of Christian love and brotherhood. How, with these antecedents, was it possible for democracy to act in so antisocial a manner? Toynbee, it seems, was never able to satisfactorily solve his enigma.

Fuller maintains that Toynbee’s question is legitimate, “because the understanding of the problem of war is wrapped up in its correct answer.” Fuller insists that this answer may be found not in abstractions but in the very nature of the human being, who at best is only partly civilized and who, with a minimum of prompting, will quickly revert to his primitive ways. Moreover, democracy is not rooted in Christian love. On the contrary, the idea is “as great a myth as Rousseau’s ‘noble savage.'” Instead, he tells us, “the motive force of democracy is not love of others, it is the hate of all outside the tribe, faction, party or nation. The ‘general will’ predicates total war, and hate is the most puissant of recruiters.”

The foregoing reveals much about the leitmotif of this volume, which is that the French, Industrial, and Russian revolutions (such a peculiar embodiment of democratic ideals) set in motion forces that transformed civilized society and its concept of warfare. The author asserts that for several hundred years prior to the French Revolution war had slowly come to be limited and even somewhat humane. Armies were small and comprised of professional soldiers, war aims were tightly circumscribed, and, by and large, civilians were left unmolested by battle. However, with the dawn of the age of nationalism and the rise of democratic ideologies, armies expanded to enormous size, new technologies offered ever more efficient methods of devastation, and, perhaps most significantly, the passions of civilian populations were inflamed, and thus mobilized, through the medium of propaganda.

Democratic warfare aimed at the obliteration not only of the enemy’s military forces but of his government and noncombatants, along with their homes and places of work. “Unconditional surrender” became a watchword, and war was once again “total.” Moreover, Fuller remarks, this cycle of amplified brutality appears to have no end: from the Napoleonic Wars springs the Franco-Prussian War; the Franco-Prussian War gives birth to the First World War; that catastrophe, in turn, leads to vet another world war; the Second World War sets the stage for the Cold War, and so on. Each new war, though it held forth promises of decisive results and lasting peace (“the war to end all wars,” “the war to make the world safe for democracy,” etc.), served instead to usher in a fresh and more barbarous sequel. Only with the Cold War did the universal savagery seem slightly to abate, and that, according to Fuller, came about only with the development of weapons of mass destruction and a threat to the existence of both victor and vanquished. Yet, even this is illusion. Our age, he says somberly, is one of random terrorism, fierce regional conflicts, and permanent emergency: “Today, fear of annihilation grips every heart; no longer are there any signs of stability, or feelings of security, and, as bad, no bonds of honour or even of common decency bind the nations together.”

Fuller, an avid reader of Thomas Carlyle, espoused the “great men” theory of history. He therefore devotes much of this book to leaders who have contributed to the shape of modern warfare and determined the course of contemporary events: Napoleon, Moltke, Foch, Lenin, Hitler, Churchill, and Stalin, among others. Clausewitz, “the father of modern war,” receives the most comprehensive treatment, “because he was the first and remains one of the few who grasped that war ‘belongs to the province of social life.'”

The Conduct of War received laudatory reviews when it first appeared, including one from another military historian and pioneer, Basil Henry Liddell Hart, who considered it Fuller’s finest book. It is indeed fascinating to read. Like all of Fuller’s historical works, this book is filled with a rich eloquence and vivid imagery that one does not usually expect from the pen of a professional soldier. In addition, it is marked by an impatience with and a contempt for the delusions and banalities of our era and by astringent judgments against the feckless dilettantes and unscrupulous opportunists who have led a once great civilization to the very edge of the precipice.

 

[The Conduct of War: 1789-1961, by Major-General J.F.C. Fuller (New York: Da Capo Press) 352 pp., $14.95]