Books in Brief: The War Game: Ten Great Battles Recreated from History

The War Game: Ten Great Battles Recreated from History, edited by Peter Young (Dutton, 128 pp., $10). This book has got to delight the military buff, and ought to impress even the casually interested. As Aram Bakshian Jr. (well-known to NR readers) says in his introduction, war has always been man’s most dangerous game, nor has its increasing horror diminished the “undeniable fascination” war exerts on the imagination. Ten famous battles are described here, from Thermopylae to El Alamein—none from World War I, significantly, no doubt because senseless slaughter is not the point. The authors write with the war-game enthusiast in mind; the text is profusely illustrated with fine maps and drawings, plus many pictures of finely detailed models of the appropriate soldiers and equipment for each battle. The idea is you might want to use this book to construct your own war game, and—if that’s the kind of thing you like—you will be mightily tempted. The book’s main defect is that the text is too compressed: You must maintain almost total recall of each developing situation or you’ll become a mental straggler just when the action is hottest. J. P. MCFADDEN