Battles for Freedom

THE WAR OF THE REVOLUTION (2 VoLS.,989 pp.) -- ChrisTopher Ward -- Macmillan ($15).

In the igth century the best U.S. history was written by gifted amateurs; in the 20th century the professors took over, made history more scientific--and usually less interesting. Christopher Ward, a Delaware lawyer who died in 1943, was one of the last of the amateurs who, like Douglas Southall Freeman, have poked about in the national past for sheer love of it. Ward spent the last years of his life on a military history of the American Revolution, and the result, now published, is -a monumental affair, packed with battle detail as vivid as either scholar or layman could want.

The War of the Revolution should have been cut by at least 200 pages; at times, Author Ward seems intent on recording every musket shot between' 1775 and 1782, and when he gets lost in minor southern skirmishes, it does not -always seem certain that he will ever find his way to Yorktown. But the book is saved by Ward's gift for narrative and by his lucidity in presenting military problems. His perspective is not as broad as Freeman's in George Washington, but he is a better writer.

Pageant & Comedy. Ward shines in historical set-pieces: the pageantry of Burgoyne surrendering to Gates, the high comedy of the Hessians caught drunk and disheveled the day after Christmas in Trenton, the heroism of Benedict Arnold's almost successful march on Quebec. Ward tells what the soldiers ate. how discipline was enforced, which side did the better scouting. Most of the time, he concludes, the British outgeneraled and outfought the Americans.

In his judgment of military leaders, Ward frequently sees eye to eye with Freeman. While admiring Washington's stature and bravery, he indicts him for amateurish strategy throughout most of the war. British Commander Howe "outmaneuvered Washington repeatedly and won battle after battle"; with more boldness, he might have won the war. Only two American generals win Ward's unqualified approval as battle leaders: Benedict Arnold, who led troops with "headlong energy . . . intrepidity and dash," and Nathanael Greene, who showed himself a master of guerrilla tactics in the southern campaign after Horatio Gates proved a fiasco.

Marches for What? Though he writes with a calm reserve, Author Ward manages to get in some sharp verdicts. He doubts that the "Conway Cabal"* against Washington existed at all, he sharply criticizes both sides for cruelty in the Indian campaigns, and he declares the aborted Canadian campaign which Lafayette was supposed to lead in 1778 "one of the maddest of all mad projects."

The War of the Revolution is a solid chunk of scholarship, likely to endure as a classical work on its subject. What keeps it from being a great book is Author Ward's self-imposed narrowness of perspective. Had he occasionally fitted the military events into the larger political story, and shown the dependence of battles in Virginia on diplomacy in Paris, his book would have been greatly improved. And he could thereby have suggested that all the marches and musketry added up to the one revolution in modern history which ended not in tyranny but freedom.

-Major General Thomas Conway, second in command of Lafayette's projected expedition against Canada, along with other prominent men, supposedly plotted the removal of Washington and the succession of Gates as commander in chief of the Army.

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