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= ; \ paign ran its eccentric staland-start and lamentably full-length course. Fresh air is pumped into the long- _ staled strategic arguinents and new light is thrown on the tactical dumps and deadfalls, of which, in Italy, . W. there was.a plethora. But this is no study of war, made at bathyaphere depths. It is done kimono-style, covering all, while touching nothing closely. As light reading for the summer, preferably in a hammock on a hot day, it isrecormmended. + His colleagues and others who respected his work sometimes questioned whether the late Douglas Southall Freeman truly wrote military history, Was his forte not rather the study of character and personality and of how one man rubs off against another? The amilitary backdrop gave breadth and definition to these portraits, but his battles either didn't quite come off or were seen as by a bike rider whizzing past a tall picket fence. The method here is comparable for it seeks to make understandable the twists and trials of the Allied cam. paign in Italy by centering main attention on perzon- + ages, great and small, on both sides of the hill, or - caught in the middle. The list is highly selective, and quite a number that were excluded, such as Generals a fast-moving bicycle “Iron Mike” O'Daniel, Troy Middleton, Raymond McLain and John Church, were key figures in crisis. Naturally enough, the central figure is General Mark ‘ayne Clark, who commanded the U.S. Fifth Army. His béte noire is Major General Fred L. Walker, who com- manded the 36th Infantry Division, and along with some few Texans never forgave Clark for the battering that outfit took in uying to cross the Rapido River. Walker made a career of barrying Clark thereafter sthough his own handling of the fight was no model for the Command School at Fi, Leavenworth. The one-sided debate (Clark saying nothing) as to who was victim and who villain has been going on ever since and it runs the length of this book like # fugue theme. The authors raise the question: Was Clark a great general, an average commander or a mediocre publicity- seeker? To answer, they have vigorously applied scis- sora and paste pot, directly quoting assessments and sidelights from a medley of witnesses, tall and small, Pro and con, some speaking then, some having their say now, others retching their bile under a cloak of anonymity. One of the fairest-epoken is rare Bill Maul- t _Aimez-vous Wagner? Rg iiscysenpyueiginpaaemrnsemnces ee RICHARD WAGNER: The Man, His Mind, and His Music, | By Robert W. Gutman. Dusirated. Harcourt, Brace & World. 490 pp. $12.50. ; By Richard Freedman : _ One responds to Wagner, as to no other composer, either with beady-eyed adulation or with the Tepugnance and contempt’ befitting a man whe both temperamen- | tally and intellectually was the archetypal Nazi. Both i) | altitudes are justified, because Wagner was the supreme | example of the amoral artist — perhaps the most signifi- ] Cant ereative genius of the 19th century who at thesame | time was almost consistently despicable as a man. He thus poses most acutely the aesthetic-moral ques- _ tion of how the creator of music as radiant as the “hooligan” and Parsifa! a “cretin.” He points out that Wagner is only part of the German spirit — the part that triumphed between 1933 and 1945—but that Goethe and Nietzsche represent a saving remnant. Nietzsche, for instance, underwent the full Wagnerian course. A youthful idolator, he said that “all things considered, 1 would never, have survived my youth din. So you pick and you choose, and it is ‘all quite unsatisfactory. Having been with Clark several times when he was under the heaviest of pressures, I add my two cents worth that, like a singed cat, be is better than he looks, at least in this book. Possibly more than normally ambitious, a man of strong convictions, he still disagrees fairly, and will reverse himself when proved wrong. ern Hanh quoting. of witnemes pro and con he em a valid way of writing history, one must doubt. Many of the subjects are or were my friends of many years, auch as the late Generel Lucian Truscott. The consensus is invariably more confusing than was the man in the flesh. : Italy was 2 dirty campaign, a bending race of glit- tering prospect, tantalization and gloomy disappoint. ment. The near-disaster at Salerno, the bogging at Anzio, the battling and bombing at Cassino and the fall of Rome are all tremendous episodes and have inspired great writings. Here they are given the once- over-lightly go. Far better for reading than for refer. ence, . Cc without Wagnerian music.” Then, courted by the Master in the hope that this brilliant young man would lend intellectual respectability to his own odious theo- rizing about life and art, Nietrche found See 5 pelled by Wagner's arrogance anti-Semifi: Fin ering dence af bis wa ed pe ee of vulgar, sycopbantic Wagnerites with whom be sur- rounded himself. . He ultimately came to prefer the “Mediterrancen sweetness and light” of Carmen to the Teutonic vapor- ings of Wagner’s late works. Yet, toward the end of his life, Nietzsche declared in Ecce Homo that “the world taust be a poor place for one who has never been sick enough for this ‘voluptuousness of Hell’!” Gutman’s attitude is similarly ambivalent. He is en- thralled by the epic decadence af Wa—- -