The Road to War: America, 1914-1917
by
[Houghton Mifflin, $3.00]
WALTER MILLIS was just old enough to get into uniform before the World War ended and, of course, only knew the Spanish-American War as something that had happened before he was born and about which odd tales lingered to intrigue him as a child. Yet in The Martial Spirit he wrote the best book in existence about the affair of 1898. As an editorial writer for the Herald Tribune, too, his articles upon world affairs have won him recognition as one of the ablest American commentators on international affairs.
What Millis says about events in Europe and in Asia is always sane, objective, and valuable. Possessing, himself, the rare gift of detachment, he is thus qualified to pass judgment upon others, and this he has done in a new book which examines the steps by which the United States moved to war between 1914 and 1917. At a moment when a new European war is visibly making, the volume has obvious timeliness, as it also possesses the merit of documentation and the charm of good writing.
Tracing the gradual evolution of American policy from neutrality to belligerency, Millis finds the phenomenon quite incomprehensible. Judging our generation by the standard of his own, he can only explain what happened as due to the skill of British propaganda, the instinctive sympathy with British ideas of one section of our public men and editors and the absence of critical sense on the part of others. Quoting from an editorial of mine on July 25, 1914, he notes with regret my later lapse from scientific objectivity to partisanship.
All that, Millis says is true, but what he misses is the cumulative effect upon a contemporary American mind of German deeds. For him the invasion of Belgium, the sinking of the Lusitania, the sacking of Louvain, are military episodes, which he sees as one whose foreground is the post-war period and whose background is the war itself. His is the hard-boiled appraisal of a generation whose experience has had little to do with the liberal ideas and ideals of the pre-war era. What happened he sees clearly and coolly. What the effect of these events was upon those who felt their impact immediately he cannot understand.
The result is an attempt to explain emotion by means of a post-mortem examination. All the evidence is at hand save the spirit, but that has disappeared irrevocably. With the departure of the spirit, however, understanding becomes impossible. To understand a period of history like that of the World War it is necessary to live it day by day, to feet its realities vividly and vitally when they are a part of the news and not details in the record. Millis rationalizes at a distance, whereas we lived at close range. What he produces, therefore, is a clinical chart, winch may well support the judgment the future will pass upon the men and events of 1914—1917, but does not even remotely touch the reality of what they felt. His book demonstrates how completely the imponderables of one era escape detection in the next. In making the war period intelligible for the future he has rendered it unrecognizable to those who lived it.
FRANK H. SIMONDS