Buy this book on-line SIMON, PIERRE-HENRI: : portrait of an officer - transl by Humphrey HareLONDON.SECKER & WARBURG,1961. ISBN No ISBN.
UK,8vo HB+dw/dj,1st edn.VG+/VG.No owner inscrptn but price-clipped dw/dj.Four (blue,red,white and black) colour block illustrated dw/dj by Anne Hickmott; with minimal shelf-wear and negligible creasing
to edges,front corners lightly rubbed with miniscule loss and a tiny,closed tear to each of front upper and lower edges,rear panel lightly grubbed.Top edge slightly dust-soiled and lightly aged and minimally foxed/spotted,fore-edge similar; contents bright,tight and generally clean.
Unblemished,plain black paper-covered boards with bright,crisp,stamped gilt latters to spine/backstrip and clean,plain white endpapers.UK,8vo HB+dw/dj,1st edn, 7-154pp includes half-title page which has some degree of off-set foxing from dw/dj's front inner flap,and title page.
Translated from the French by Humphrey Hare.
There is no nation in the world with a greater military tradition than the French,nor one with a greater spirit of inquiry.It should therefore be no surprise
to us that France,apart from her
theoreticians of war,her exponents of strategy and tactics,should also have been
profoundly concerned with the philosophy and psychology of war.In this book,the author has taken for his central
character Jean de Larsan,a young and brilliant professional soldier,the product of generations of country squires and warriors.
Larsan has spent his whole adult life at war.He is imbued with the traditional military virtues;courage,loyalty, abnegation and honour.Indeed,he exemplifies them.But his tragedy lies in the fact that he is too intelligent not to
be aware that these virtues are,
paradoxically,exercised by the soldier in essentially immoral and inhuman circumstances.As his personal story moves from a German Oflag to the Liberation of France,and from Cochin-China to Algeria today (then 1958),the moral conflict gradually gains form and weight: how can the dichotomy between the civilised conscience of the man and the innate and honourable professionalism of the soldier be resolved? The author explores this dilemma with a tragic sympathy and a gift for dramatic evocation which nevertheless concede nothing to the intellectual precision of his theme.This book, supremely Gallic in its intellectual approach and the clarity of its dialectic,
is probably the most important work on military psychology that has been published since Alfred de Vigny's Servitude et Grandeur Militaires, in 1835.
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