In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [62]
will be accompanied or followed, it is not immaterial to consult, not so much the announcements issued by the High Command, which may be intended to deceive the enemy, to mask a possible setback, as the manual of field operations in use in the country in question. We are always entitled to assume that the manoeuvre which an army has attempted to carry out is that prescribed by the rules in force for analogous circumstances. If, for instance, the rules lay down that a frontal attack should be accompanied by a flank attack and if, this flank attack having failed, the High Command claims that it had no connexion with the main attack and was merely a diversion, there is a strong likelihood that the truth will be found by consulting the field regulations rather than the statements issued from Headquarters. And there are not only the regulations governing each army to be considered, but their traditions, their habits, their doctrines. The study of diplomatic activity, which is constantly acting or reacting upon military activity, must not be neglected either. Incidents apparently insignificant, misinterpreted at the time, will explain to you how the enemy, counting on support which these incidents prove to have been denied him, was able to carry out only a part of his strategic plan. So that, if you know how to read your military history, what is a confused jumble for the ordinary reader becomes a chain of reasoning as rational as a painting is for the picture-lover who knows how to look and can see what the person portrayed is wearing, what he has in his hands, whereas the average visitor to a gallery is bewildered by a blur of colour which gives him a headache. But just as with certain pictures it isn’t enough to observe that the figure is holding a chalice, but one must know why the painter chose to place a chalice in his hands, what it’s intended to symbolise, so these military operations, quite apart from their immediate objective, are habitually modelled, in the mind of the general who is directing the campaign, on earlier battles which represent, so to speak, the past, the literature, the learning, the etymology, the aristocracy of the battles of today. Mind you, I’m not speaking for the moment of the local, the (what shall I call it?) spatial identity of battles. That exists also. A battlefield has never been, and never will be throughout the centuries, simply the ground upon which a single battle has been fought. If it has been a battlefield, that was because it combined certain conditions of geographical position, of geological formation, even of certain defects calculated to hinder the enemy (a river, for instance, cutting it in two), which made it a good battlefield. And so what it has been it will continue to be. You don’t make an artist’s studio out of any old room; so you don’t make a battlefield out of any old piece of ground. There are predestined sites. But, once again, that’s not what I was talking about so much as the type of battle a general takes as his model, a sort of strategic carbon copy, a tactical pastiche, if you like. Battles like Ulm, Lodi, Leipzig, Cannae. I don’t know whether there’ll ever be another war, or what nations will fight in it, but, if a war does come, you may be sure that it will include (and deliberately, on the commander’s part) a Cannae, an Austerlitz, a Rossbach, a Waterloo, to mention a few. Some people make no bones about it. Marshal von Schlieffen and General von Falkenhausen have planned in advance a Battle of Cannae against France, in the Hannibal style, pinning their enemy down along his whole front, and advancing on both flanks, especially on the right through Belgium, while Bernhardi prefers the oblique advance of Frederick the Great, Leuthen rather than Cannae. Others expound their views less crudely, but I can tell you one thing, my boy, and that is that Beauconseil, the squadron commander I introduced you to the other day and who’s an officer with a very great future before him, has swotted up a little Pratzen attack of his own which he knows inside out and is keeping