It was ninety-seven degrees when the French arrived in their heavy woollens.) The thesis, though, is what’s startling: that the practice of “total war” is a modern and ideological invention, born in the French Enlightenment, and first realized fully by Napoleon-a millennial idea before it was a murderous activity. (The problem that the French Army had in Russia, he points out, was not just the cold but the heat, too. His subject is Napoleon’s wars, and he goes into great and often riveting detail about the tangles of Marengo and Moscow, all offered with a gift for storytelling and a flair for the weird, unfamiliar fact.
He wants to make military history respectable by enfolding it into intellectual and cultural history. GOYA, “HE DESERVED IT,” FROM “THE DISASTERS OF WAR” (1810-14)/BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARYĪgainst this notion, Bell believes that understanding warfare, its practice and its particulars, is necessary to understand modernity-those mountain peaks really are the places that give you the longest view. A new form of regimented carnage, reflected in images like Goya’s “The Disasters of War,” was meant to produce enduring peace.
