The Standard Reader

Set largely in England and the Continent in the first years of the eighteenth century, Stephenson’s saga relates its characters’ attempts to bring on a new System of the World, one in which English classical liberalism offers an alternative to the centralized government the French are perfecting. This new System will allow the people some say in how they are governed, and it welcomes economic, scientific, and technological advances. It seems to have arisen organically, built up by “the ineffable workings of Money,” but an opponent sees it as “truly a monster, an abomination, only possible because of the unnatural distortions that Money has wreaked on the world.”

Stephenson is fair to all sides, though he clearly supports the Whigs, and he is careful to note that the new system inevitably failed–primarily because, as one character notes, the modern doctrines of science, and the metaphysics behind them, encourage people “to question the existence of God, the divinity of Christ, the authority of the Church, the premise that we have souls endowed with Free Will.”

The only solution, Stephenson suggests, is to recognize both science and religion as true, which can be done only through a saving act of faith, exemplified in one character’s redemption through the taking of the Eucharist. With a plot as complex and satisfying as that of Tom Jones, and a strong grasp of the issues and history involved, The System of the World provides an imaginative and intellectually sophisticated conclusion to Stephenson’s magnum opus.

–S.T. Karnick

Intelligence in War: Knowledge of the Enemy from Napoleon to Al-Qaeda by John Keegan. (Knopf, 387 pp., $30). Keegan’s seventeenth book is singularly apposite in both timing and subject. This lucid study is an attempt to answer what would seem a simple question: How useful is intelligence in a war? In answer, Keegan presents case studies, starting in the age of Admiral Nelson (when the difficulty was acquiring timely information at all) and ending with al Qaeda (when the sheer volume of intelligence threatens to swamp its value).

In the end, Keegan decides, “victory is an elusive prize, bought with blood rather than brains. Intelligence is the handmaiden, not the mistress, of the warrior.” Far from applauding the dashing, romantic spy of fiction, he says flatly that treason is an intrinsically repulsive activity. Still, Keegan doesn’t hold all the men who spy for their country entirely in contempt. He feels the British developed over some two centuries a kind of philosophy of secret warfare in which duplicity and the heroic ethic are wed. He commends that British tradition, largely formed in the days of the Empire, in which local warriors and young officer-sportsmen who had learned the language and adopted the costume mingled harmoniously with considerable advantage to their motherland.

Keegan opens his case studies with a quotation from the Duke of Wellington–“No war can be conducted successfully without early and good intelligence”–followed by one from George Washington, a near contemporary, who agreed: “The necessity of procuring good intelligence is apparent and need not be further argued.” Keegan whips back to Alexander the Great, then to the pharaohs of the Twelfth Dynasty, and then again on to Julius Caesar. He makes the point that there was little change throughout the five centuries of Rome’s greatness. Reconnaissance throughout this time was by hearing and sight, communication by word of mouth or written dispatch. And so it would remain in the world for another 1,500 years.

Real-time intelligence has always been hard to acquire. In the mid-eighteenth century, the French general Maurice de Saxe commented on the importance of observing how the sun’s rays fell on swords and bayonets, “if the rays are perpendicular, it means that the enemy is coming at you; if they are broken and infrequent, he is retreating.” Wellington in India came to depend on and develop the system of the harkaras, taken from the Moghul rulers, allying the writing skills and knowledge of the learned classes with the athletic skills of tribal and low-caste people. Keegan adds that this form of long-distance message-running endured well into the 1920s, and the Indian appetite for news may well have made India the largest and only real democracy in the Third World precisely because of its citizens’ thirst for information.

And yet, his case studies include the German airborne descent on Crete in May 1942–which demonstrates how even the best intelligence will not avail if the defense is too weak to profit by it. The campaign of Stonewall Jackson in the Shenandoah and Napoleon’s Mediterranean campaign are examples of war conducted without the benefit of signal intelligence. Keegan concludes: “A wise decision would be that intelligence, while generally necessary, is not a sufficient for victory,” and, at last: “Foreknowledge is no protection against disaster. Finally only force counts.”

–Cynthia Grenier