Empty Victory

A DAY or BATTLE--Vincent Sheean-- Doubleday, Doran ($2.50).

On May 11, 1745, at the base of a hill, between a dense woods and the River Scheldt in Flanders, the battle of Fontenoy was fought. From foggy morning to midafternoon the French Army (with Irish and Scottish allies), commanded by Marshal Maurice de Saxe, and an equal English force (aided by Dutch and Hanoverians), commanded by the Duke of Cumberland, engaged in confused and bitter slaughter. About noon, the English infantry broke through the French centre, obtained a foothold within the disorganized French lines, formed a hollow square against which French cavalry charged repeatedly in vain. When the English were nearly exhausted, de Saxe ordered a general attack and threw in his Irish reserves. Within ten minutes the English abandoned the position which had cost them the best part of their army to gain.

It was a great French victory. But, as Vincent Sheean says, "it was a victory of lost causes; it raised hopes which were never to be satisfied," it seemed that France had vanquished England, and that the hopes of the Irish exiles, of "Bonnie Prince Charlie," were to triumph. But the English fleet still ruled the seas, and French colonies in Canada and India were soon to be lost despite Fontenoy. In A Day of Battle, Sheean (Personal History) set himself the difficult task of both describing the brilliance of this victory and illustrating its historic unimportance.

A Day of Battle begins with a picture of the Irish troops preparing for battle, quarreling, boasting of the wonders of the old country, sneering at the French, saying Mass as the artillery of the English opens across the plains. It ends, 304 pages later, with the Irish resting in the same position at nightfall. Between these episodes Mr. Sheean has packed much historical enlightenment into a little space: pictured the luxury of the court of Louis XV, who traveled to the front with innumerable servants, 600 horses and 28 cooks; given a glimpse of Voltaire and Madame de Pompadour at Etioles; sketched the life history of Maurice de Saxe (best character in the book), royal bastard and master of strategy, who had planned a battle at Fontenoy 13 years before, and on the day that it was fought, was carried, suffering from dropsy, to the battlefield in a chair.

Most impressive part of A Day of Battle is its account of the strategy of the two generals, one of the most lucid of recent fictional accounts of military maneuvers, apparently modeled on the greater panoramas of Tolstoy's War and Peace. Mr. Sheean's proof of the historical unimportance of the French victory is more tenuous, principally in the soliloquies of the French Foreign Minister, D'Argenson, who reflects as he leaves the field that the French aristocracy had won only with the help of "the savage exiled Irish," that there could be no real victory until "men might learn to fight for themselves instead of for the confusion and greed of those who governed them."

A Day of Battle, a far better book than Mr. Sheean's last novel, Sanfelice, is compact and tightly organized instead of sprawling and discursive. But having acknowledged the historical unimportance of the victory, Mr. Sheean's triumph with A Day of Battle sometimes resembles the triumph of the French at Fontenoy.

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