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By Root 842 0

for example, one can count thirty names to a page, all faceless. Michael Howard recently established himself as a leading military historian with a book on the Franco-Prussian War which one can open at random at any page and find sentences like the following: “The Emperor put Failly’s 5th Corps under his command and on 5th August while the divisions of 1st Corps concentrated around Froeschwiller and Felix Douay packed off Conseil Dumesnil’s division from 7th Corps by train from Belfort, Macmahon summoned Failly to bring his corps south through the Vosges.” In the next sentence we learn that Failly’s units were spread between Sarreguemines and Bitche and could not be moved until relieved by troops from Rohrbach. On the same page is a sketch map which shows none of these place names. I am sure Mr. Howard knows all there is to know about the Franco-Prussian War, and his book was highly praised, but it left this reader giddy. I did not gather from it a picture of the Battle of Froeschwiller but only how not to describe a battle.

Another difficulty peculiar to the Stilwell book, especially to the second half, was over-documentation. Besides Stilwell’s diaries and letters, bringing the scale of events down to a daily basis which I did not want, there was a mountainous mass of military and diplomatic records: messages, reports, memoranda, conference minutes, plus all the material of the China controversy—the White Papers, the Foreign Relations series, the interminable testimony before congressional investigating committees in thousand-page volumes. Ever since the advent of mechanical means of duplication there has been a multiplication of material that cannot be dealt with by less than teams of researchers. The twentieth century is likely to be the doom of the individual historian. (Actually, I do not really believe that. Though the doom seems logical, I believe somehow he will illogically survive.) Today we have the opposite problem from that of the researcher in ancient history who suffers from paucity of records and must work from coins, tombs, and artifacts. Beginning with Gutenberg, the sources expand. The nineteenth century is really the great period, with ample information of every kind, yet short of the over-supply of today.

With the appearance of the tape-recorder, a monster with the appetite of a tapeworm, we now have a new problem of what I call artificial survival. The effort needed to write a book, even of memoirs, requires discipline and perseverance which until now imposed a certain natural selection on what survived in print. But with all sorts of people being encouraged to ramble effortlessly and endlessly into a tape-recorder, prodded daily by an acolyte of Oral History, some veins of gold and a vast mass of trivia are being preserved which would otherwise have gone to dust. I should hastily add here that among the veins of gold two of the richest sources I found were two verbal interviews with General Marshall tape-recorded by Army historians in 1949. Marshall, however, was a summit figure worth recording.

As a result of over-documentation I was constantly struggling with the problems of scale in the Stilwell book. It was as if I had been a cartographer trying to draw a map on a scale of 100 miles to the inch while working from surveys detailed to a scale of one mile to the inch. Following in the track of the diary and the official documents, I would get caught up in some issue that was all-absorbing at the time, and spend days writing the developments from Tuesday to Friday when what I should have been doing was the over-all development from, say, May to November. I had to stop short and remind myself: What does this matter in the long perspective?

As a result pages went into the discard—for example, the Henry Wallace mission. Because he was Vice-President, Wallace’s visit and conversations with Chiang Kai-shek assumed enormous importance at the time and blew up a swirl of passions, intrigues, and, of course, prolific reports by everyone for miles around. The path of research widened out like the mouth of