By Shirley Hazzard
From the introduction: “Nations from time to time assume that it is allowable and inevitable for them to fall upon each other on some pretext or other.“ So the historian Jakob Burckhardt wrote, more than a century ago, at the onset of the Franco-Prussian War—warning that “the most ominous thing is not the present war, but the era of wars upon which we have entered.” In the same fateful year of 1870, Gustave Flaubert wrote to George Sand: “Within a century, shall we see millions of men kill each other at one go?* The acceleration and incoherence of social and economic change, the transformations wrought by scientific discovery, the growth of populations, and of their enfranchised discontent—all these raised, in the minds of reflective men and women, a sense of moving toward some dread culmination, propelled by factors never before present in human etpcrience. Over these apprehensions, the discrepancy between the narrow thinking of statesmen and the huge scale of the mounting crisis cast—as it does today—the shadow of a prodigious incongruity.”
NY. Viking Penguin. 1990. 196p.