Book Review: The Edge of the Sword
| DOI | 10.1177/002070206101600215 |
| Published date | 01 June 1961 |
| Date | 01 June 1961 |
| Author | John C. Cairns |
| Subject Matter | Book Review |
BooK
REVIEWS
195
distinction
between
"attitudinal
opposition"
and
"active
defence".
Since
I
have
no access
to
the
Chinese
material,
I
cannot say
what
term
the
Chinese
used
to
denote
active
defence,
though I
suspect
that
it
would
be
something
like
ti-.ang.
K'ang-yi
means
"to
protest".
The
book
was
prepared
as
part
of
the programme
of
research
un-
dertaken
for
the
United
States
Air
Force
by
the
RAND
Corporation.
Ottawa
T.
M.
PoPE
THE
EDGE
OF
THE
SWORD.
By
Charles
de
Gaulle.
1960.
(New
York:
Criterion
Books.
Toronto:
Nelson
Foster
&
Scott.
128pp.
$4.25.)
After
publication
of
the
General's
War
Memoirs,
quite
apart
from
the
infrequent
public
statements
and
quasi-royal
press
conferences, one
might
suppose
there
is
little
to
learn
about
his
personality.
If
this
is
true,
however,
the
brevity
of
the
first
chapter
in
The Call
to
Honour
and
the
inadequacy
of
existing
biographies
make
the
translation
of
some
of
de
Gaulle's
earlier
writings
welcome.
Twenty-eight
years
have
gone
by since
Le
fil
de
V'dp&e
was
published,
and
the
fortunes
of
its author
have
waxed
and
waned
and
waxed
again.
The
values
and
ideas
he
then
wrote
of
are
with
him
still.
To some
considerable
extent the
life
of
the
frustrated
Army officer,
the
rebel
General,
and
the
Presidential
saviour
is
all
of
a
piece.
One's
first
impression,
on
looking
once
more
at
The
Edge
of
the
Sword,
is
that
the
essays
are
hardly
distinguishable
from the mass
of
military
writings
poured
out
by
peacetime officers
in the western
world,
bored
by
their
routine
commands,
stultified
by
the
hierarchy,
condemned
to
live
out
their
unheroic
lives
in
a
thousand
wretched
provincial
gar-
rison
towns.
One
sees
in
the
mind's
eye
that
ocean
of
uninspired
writ-
ing,
laced
with
quotations
from
Clausewitz,
Caesar,
Napoleon.
When
one
read
it
first
in
the
library
stacks,
the
pages
yellowed
and
brittle
at
the
edges, one
wondered
whether
anyone took
it
seriously
at
the
time.
Yet
here
again,
freshly
printed
in
a
handsome
small
volume,
are
such
essays.
Only
there
is
a
difference.
There
is
a
quality
about
de
Gaulle's
writing
which
was mostly lacking in
others.
It
is
not
that
he
neglected
his
Caesar
(or
Psichari),
or
failed to
give
vent
to his
sense
of
boredom
and
frustration.
Like
the
others,
he inveighed
against
the
mediocrity
of
peacetime ways,
the
hostility
of
the
civilians
to
the military.
But
there
is
a
nobility
to
this writing,
quickened,
of course, by
the
reader's
aware-
ness
that
this
is
not
Lieut.
X
or
Capt.
Y,
but
rather
"a
somewhat
fabu-
lous
personage"
(the
description
is
de
Gaulle's
own
in
Salvation).
The
essay
here
on
"Character"
is
patently an
essay
on
de
Gaulle
himself. In
fact,
the
whole
book
is
about
himself.
It
was
then,
1932,
no
one
will
re-
member,
dedicated
to
Marshal
P~tain.
Those
were
days
when
still
their
regard
for
each
other
was considerable. The
seeds
of
their
disunion
are
to
be
seen
in
the
essay
on
"Doctrine".
The
dedication has
now
gone,
and
there
is
no
word
of
explanation.
It
would
be
unnecessary.
The younger
man
displaced
the
older,
in
every
sense.
De
Gaulle
was
an
infinitely
superior
human
being to
the
old
Marshal,
less
complex,
less
warm,
less
unreliable,
but
straighter
and
loftier.
The
old
Marshal
was
a
composite
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