An Instinct for War: Scenes from the Battlefields of History

In a graceful feat of imagination and trenchant analysis, Spiller (general editor of the Dictionary of American Military Biography) presents 13 mostly first-person parables, meditations on moments when the ""nature and conduct of war"" changed significantly. His narrators, invented almost from whole cloth or reconstructed from notable figures, reflect on the craft and meaning of war in settings ranging from Han China to a future North America. In ""The Testament,"" Greek historian and general Thucydides highlights the difficulty of learning from mishap and failure as he discusses Athens' losing struggle in the Peloponnesian War. ""La Noche Trieste,"" narrated by a conquistadora who fought with uncommon valor under the banner of Hernando Cortez against the Aztec empire, questions the brutality of imperialism. In ""The Final War,"" which details a post-WWII investigation of a Japanese general, Maj. Lewis Popper reflects uncomfortably on morality and the law in the context of a new kind of war. ""In Winter Quarters,"" perhaps the best executed piece in the collection, a Swiss officer compares the strategic heritage of Napoleon to the policies of Gen. George McClellan and the ""anti-strategist"" Abraham Lincoln. These inventive vignettes encompass a broad sweep of history and military thought.