The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald.
#Von clausewitz quotes law abiding citizen professional#
For professional military historians and theorists, however, it should be highly useful.Įlie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. Napoleon envisioned all possibilities and was prepared to adapt, though his victories were less decisive after 1809 because other armies copied his methods.Ī thoroughly detailed scholarly work, somewhat repetitious and not for the merely curious or casual reader. His readings supplied the former, and the latter was part of his natural character.
Napoleon himself said that the qualities essential in a general are an educated intuition and determination. As he writes about grand tactics and Napoleon’s views of his troops, Colson succeeds in portraying Napoleon’s military genius as well as his broad intellectual abilities. Napoleon personifies Clausewitz’s formula: political objective determines military objective. His views on battle are easy to grasp: attack should be swift and simple artillery should open lanes for infantry and moral strength, not numbers, determines victory. Colson points out that peace was incompatible with his personality, likely because it included trust and self-limitation. Napoleon felt that monarchy was, by nature, at war against republics. The author prioritizes ideas over events as he writes about Napoleon’s understanding of war and how he viewed it over the years. In doing so, Colson exhibits the similarities of their considerations on the theory and character of war, even as the infantryman, Clausewitz, and the artilleryman, Napoleon, disagreed on the importance of their elements. Carl von Clausewitz’s reflections on the Napoleonic Wars, On War, inserting Napoleon’s writings on subjects such as the nature, theory, and strategy of war and explanations of engagement, attack, and defense. The author has a masterful knowledge of military history, strategy, and tactics, and he uses the structure of Prussian Gen. Editor Colson (History/Universite de Namur, Belgium) closely examines the military concepts and strategies of “the greatest warrior of all time,” whose “mastery of mass warfare and his ability to raise, organize, and equip numerous armies dramatically changed the art of war.”
0 kommentar(er)
