seize a military period, and these are not commonly given him. In
the second place, the historian, however much alive to the
importance of military affairs, too rarely presents them as part of
a general position. He will make his story a story of war, or
again, a story of civilian development, and the reader will fail to
see how the two combine.

In this short excerpt we catch a glimpse, not only of Mr. Belloc's
attitude towards military history, but also of his method in dealing
with it; and since this aspect of Mr. Belloc's work is of such capital
importance we may perhaps quote that passage which begins on page 142 of
_The French Revolution_ and is so illuminating in regard both to Mr.
Belloc's attitude and to his method:

The Revolution would never have achieved its object; on the
contrary, it would have led to no less than a violent reaction
against those principles which were maturing before it broke out,
and which it carried to triumph, had not the armies of
revolutionary France proved successful in the field; but the
grasping of this mere historic fact, I mean the success of the
revolutionary armies, is unfortunately no simple matter.

We all know that as a matter of fact the Revolution was, upon the
whole, successful in imposing its view upon Europe. We all know
that from that success as from a germ has proceeded, and is still
proceeding, modern society. But the nature, the cause and the
extent of the military success which alone made this possible, is
widely ignored and still more widely misunderstood. No other signal
military effort which achieved its object has in history ended in
military disaster--yet this was the case with the revolutionary
wars. After twenty years of advance, during which the ideas of the
Revolution were sown throughout Western civilization, and had time
to take root, the armies of the Revolution stumbled into the vast
trap or blunder of the Russian campaign; this was succeeded by the
decisive defeat of the democratic armies at Leipsic, and the superb
strategy of the campaign of 1814, the brilliant rally of what is
called the Hundred Days, only served to emphasize the completeness
of the apparent failure. For that masterly campaign was followed
by Napoleon's first abdication, that brilliant rally ended in
Waterloo and the ruin of the Fren