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16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Best work on Marlborough around methinks, but a tad slow, 25 Mar 2001
By A Customer
The Duke of Marlborough is undoubtedly one of the top five military leaders Britain has ever produced (as to others, I'd say Nelson, Wellington, Cromwell, Richard the Lionheart, but there are other claimants)Having said that, there is a bit of a dearth of material on him currently available. The War of the Spanish Succession, where Marlborough was able to strut his not-inconsiderable stuff, does not fire the public imagination today like the Napoleonic era, or the 45 or even the Hundred Years War. It seems a very distant conflict played out with arcane rules of engagement. Nevertheless Chandler, the heavyweight of British military history, starts off at a blinding pace with a potted history of Marlborough as a young man, surviving, plotting and generally having a whale of a time in the late Stuart court, rising as the Duke of York's favourite. (He even manages a couple of good jokes. Chandler that is.) Then it all gets rather bogged down. There is a necessary - but rather clunky - chapter on "The Art of War" and by the time we get to campaigns in Flanders, the lightness of touch that the book started with is a distant memory. Keep a good map of Belgium by you and read slowly if you want to make sense of what is going on. (This book - a tiddly 335 pages - has taken me two weeks to read!) The Eighteenth century mode of warfare does lend itself to slow, indecisive manouveres (which is why the Revolutionary French armies had such fun with such organised forces at the end of the century) so maybe a slow narrative is fairly inevitable. But the recently published "Crucible of War" - on the Seven Years War - shows that the juxtaposition of politics and Eighteenthy century war can be fascinating. This book was first published in the early seventies when military history was, perhaps, destined for a narrower readership (pre 'Stalingrad' and all those TV programmes about History and war) therefore Chandler can make statements like 'the details of the battle of Sedgemoor are well-known and need not trouble us here'. Er....no, actually they're not, so please trouble away. At the end of it, I certainly felt I knew a lot more about Marlborough and why he was successful. This is not the paciest piece of military history, but patience is rewarded.
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by James Falkner
by Denis Gandilhon
by Alessandro Barbero
