No Solution

THE VIOLENT PEACE by Carl and Shelley Mydans. 478 pages. Atheneum. $12.50.

Once when old Otto von Bismarck's demands had set much of Europe atremble, he was asked if he wanted war. He replied, "Certainly not. What I want is victory." His remark reflected the attitude of countless uncomplicated ages when men waged their wars with relatively simple weapons for a single purpose. Using every available resource, adversaries simply beat at each other until one side ultimately collapsed and surrendered.

All that, of course, was before the Bomb. Since World War II ended, not a single war has been formally declared. Yet it has been a period of almost continuous violence. Besides Korea and Viet Nam, there have been at least 50 other conflicts of major proportions. In this big handsome book, Author-Photographer Carl Mydans and his wife Shelley, both of whom have distinguished themselves as TIME-LIFE combat correspondents, examine a China torn by civil war, the bloody and futile efforts of the French to hang on to a lost empire in Indo-China, the insurrection in Greece, the partition riots in India. In a litany of violence, they tick off wars and disorders in Palestine, Malaya, the big conflict in Korea, Quemoy-Matsu, Algeria, Hungary, Suez, South Arabia, Cyprus, Colombia, Cuba, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, the Congo, Angola, Indonesia, the Philippines, Laos, Viet Nam, and the third violent clash between Israel and the Arabs.

They draw on eyewitness accounts of battle from 44 TIME-LIFE correspondents, and have culled memorable pictures from TIME and LIFE files. Some of the reports remain lodged in memory. There is, for example, Photographer David Douglas Duncan's report of how a howling mob of Hindus and Sikhs in Delhi flailed to death a six-year-old Moslem girl carrying her baby brother; TIME Correspondent James Bell's terse account of weary American troops fighting for No Name Ridge in Korea; Photographer Andrew St. George's file on a Castro patrol's foolhardy attempt to blow up an armored car with a crude bomb.

Proxy Wars. Since the major nuclear powers are deathly afraid of a head-on clash, the Mydanses believe that only total derangement on one or both sides will bring back all-out war. Instead, wars of the future will follow the pattern established since World War II--a conflict fought with limited means and often ending indecisively.

The major powers will continue to test one another's will and strength indirectly on distant battlefields. The authors believe this may be more of a strain on the U.S. than on the U.S.S.R. "Americans tend to look on war as a great moral struggle and are apt to be more receptive to the idea of outlawing it than of merely restricting it. If a war does not involve some high and all-encompassing ideal such as freedom, democracy, a war to end war, Americans are reluctant to go into it . . . To the Communist nations, limited war has an altogether different dimension. In fact, inspiring and supplying 'wars of national liberation' which they intend to keep as limited wars has been a declared national policy of the U.S.S.R. for years."

If there is not much promise of a lasting peace, the Mydanses have no doubt about man's durability--even in defeat. They cite the answer Israel's Moshe Dayan gave to a questioner who asked why he did not dispose of his enemies once and for all. "I don't think that in war there is any such thing as 'once and for all.' " Small comfort--but perhaps the best there is in an untidy world.

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