Liddell hart sherman5/22/2023 By contrast, Holden Reid’s title, taken from Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address, is more ambivalent. Marszalek focussed on Sherman’s ‘passion for order’. For Liddell Hart, Sherman was a ‘soldier,’ a ‘realist’ and an ‘American’, this last often shorthand for patriot. Both of these hinted in their titles at their assessment of the man they were writing about. Liddell Hart and, more recently, a study by historian John F. These include an early assessment by military strategist Basil H. Holden Reid’s is the latest of several biographies of the general to have appeared over the years. Informed by the opinions of those Confederates whom he defeated at the time (and their progeny ever since) Sherman’s popular image has become emblematic of all we fear in modern war, of all we fear in ourselves as human beings with a propensity toward destruction. Sherman’s reputation, indeed, is in many ways ‘unenviable’, Brian Holden Reid notes in his introduction to this formidable biography, consisting as it does largely of exaggerated negatives: ruthlessness, heartlessness and brutality. Sherman’s approach to a conflict that, as far as public opinion is concerned, defined his career and his life, but not always in a positive way. Writing to his brother in the penultimate year of the American Civil War, the Union soldier Eb Allison observed that ‘Warfare, to be successful, is a thing that does not admit of any dilly-dallying about it.’ This comment might well serve as a summation of William T.
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