Word: guedalla
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Died. Philip Guedalla, 55, best-selling British historian (The Second Empire, The Two Marshals, The Hundred Years); in London. An Oxford (Balliol College) brilliant (he was president of the Union [Debating] Society, testing ground of many a Prime Minister), swart, slick-haired Guedalla wrote biographies as brilliantined as his conversation, admired the tawry grandeur of the age he mocked best: the era of Bismarck and Napoleon III. His definition of biography: "a region that is bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary, and on the west by tedium...
...Marshals Historian Philip Guedalla (The Second Empire, The Hundred Days) reports the overlapping lives and military theories of these two unhappy warriors. He points out that the debacle of 1940 was merely a continuation of the debacle of 1870, that the same disintegrating social causes, politics, and even people, were at work in both periods...
...history, The Two Marshals is solemn. But Historian Guedalla is not. He has long picked his way gleefully among history's corpses. But even readers who dislike Guedalla's rather mincing urbanity will value The Two Marshals as a timely study of an important but neglected period of history...
...Bazaine saw with misgivings the Prussian invention of the needle gun, with its immense superiority of fire power. His conclusion: for France defensive war is better than offensive war. "It is better," he said, "to conduct operations systematically (i.e., defensively], as in the Seventeenth Century." "That delusion," says Author Guedalla, "was to cost France the loss of a second...
...Twenty-five years passed before Bazaine's military views reappeared in France. The debacle of 1870 led the disgusted French to put their faith in those who, like Foch, were fanatical believers in the "offensive at all costs." But Bazaine's faith in the defensive, says Author Guedalla, became the faith of Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain-the old man through whom "the abject philosophy of salvation by surrender . . . prevailed" in 1940, who "consummated a surrender far beyond the basest imputations of Bazaine's accusers...