B. Nonfiction Barker, Alan

Higginson, T. W.

Kimball, William J.

Lee, Fitzhugh

Leech, Margaret

Liddell-Hart, B. H.

McElroy, John

Mitchell, J. B.

Nevins, Allan

Pratt, Fletcher

Pullen, John J.

Semmes, Raphael S.

Stern, P. Van Doren

Stewart, George B.

Army Life in a Black Regiment (Bea-
con BP-129; Collier AS-344 both
paperbacks)

Richmond in Time of War (Houghton-
Mifflin #5 paperback)

General Lee (Fawcett Premier T-110
paperback)

Reveille in Washington (Universal
Library UL-11 paperback)

Sherman (Praeger FAP-18 paper-
back)

Andersonville: Story of Rebel Military Prisons (Fawcett Premier T-162 paperback)

Decisive Battles of the Civil War (Fawcett Premier T-147 paperback) The War for the Union (2 vols. so far, Charles Scribner's Sons, hardbound) A Short History of the Civil War: Ordeal by Fire (Pocketbook C 7 paperback)

The Twentieth Maine (Fawcett Premier T-164 paperback)

The Confederate Raider Alabama (Fawcett Premier T-146 paperback)

Soldier Life in the Union and Confederate Armies (Fawcett Premier T-114 paperback)

Pickett's Charge (Fawcett Premier T191 paperback)

This represents only a sampling of available Civil War books. Your librarian can advise you about many others, especially the standard clothbound editions. Paperbacks predominate in this listing because many of them are reprints of clothbound editions which have long been out of print.

IV

Novels of World War I (1914-1918)

Five novels have been selected as representative of this period. Each has been widely acclaimed and reprinted in many languages and editions. Two novels, one German and one Czechoslovakian, seem typical of the attitudes of soldiers of the Central Powers. Three novels are by writers on the Allied side.

Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front ("Im Westen Nichts Neues"), a German antiwar novel, has sold more than 3.5 million copies in the United States and has been translated into 25 languages. The film version won the "Oscar" award of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1929-30. Less well known is The Good Soldier: Schweik by Jaroslav Hasek, a devastating, Falstaffian satire on the Austro-Hungarian military machine and armies in general, written by a Czech. To depict a Russian attitude toward the war we have selected the first volume of Mikhail Sholokhov's great trilogy of Don Cossack life, And Quiet Flows the Don. It has often been favorably compared with Tolstoy's War and Peace. C. S. Forester's fine story, The General, is an English war novel. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, an American author who won both the Nobel and the Pulitzer Prizes in literature, completes the list. It has twice been made into a motion picture.

At the present time there are no French novels of World War I in the desired format. However, if you can secure Verdun by Jules Romaines or The Paths of Glory by Humphrey Cobb, you will find both are excellent and worthwhile novels. The Paths of Glory was also filmed.

You may read these five novels in any order. Each of them represents the reaction of its author to the shock of total war. Malcolm Cowley's fine essay on the novels of the two World Wars

(reproduced in this Reader's Guide) discusses the attitudes of the novelists who wrote about these wars. The authors who wrote about World War I were "rebels," which implies they had faith in their ability to do things better than those in power. They felt their elders had betrayed them, had led them by glittering words and false propaganda to the slaughterhouse. The common theme of the World War I novels is disillusionment, leading to pacifism, to pessimism, to the concept of a "lost generation."

You may read Cowley's essay either before you read the novels of World War II, or after you have read them. See if you agree with his comparison of the novels of the two wars, with his assessment of the attitudes of the writers of each period.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND: This war may be considered as marking the end of one era (the era of limited war) and the beginning of another (the era of total war). It was the first of the World Wars.

Prior to 1914 most of the European and American nations had fought limited wars: limited in objectives, limited in scope, limited in manpower mobilization, limited in economic effort, and often limited in their effects on the areas and populations involved in the actual theaters of war. We have previously reviewed the warfare of the 17th and 18th centuries in our introduction to the Napoleonic Era: primarily dynastic in objective, fought by small professional armies, with rather primitive weapons and methods of war. The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars introduced the concept of the "nation in arms," with the development of mass armies of relatively untrained troops. With the exception of the Napoleonic period of warfare, the wars of the 19th century were waged to upset the balance of power in Europe or to restore it, or to secure colonies in Asia and Africa. Major-General Sir Charles Callwell and other military writers term the period from 1850 to 1900 a "half-century of small wars." The American Civil War (1861-1865) is an exception to this generalization.

The half-century of small wars was really a time of great technological and doctrinal development of the history of warfare. Missile weapons (breech-loading rifled cannon and hand weapons, the machinegun, the grenade, and the mortar shell) were greatly improved. Modern instruments of transportation and communication (the railroad; the automobile and the airplanes powered by internal combustion engines; the replacement of sails by steam in the world's navies; the electric telegraph, telephone, and radio),