The endless battle hymn

Yet Van Creveld is not content with merely listing the universal and millennium-long intersections between culture and war. He also assails those who would challenge his ideas. Ruthlessly targeted are those scholars who chart the culture-war connection's decline in the post-World War II period. "To argue that humanity is losing its taste for war and that war itself is on its way to the dustbin of history is worse than misrepresenting the truth," Van Creveld counters, noting that some 226 wars were fought between 1946 and 2002 and that the number of refugees has quadrupled in the last 40 years alone. Indeed, the reduction in the number of wars between modernized countries -- less the result of pacifism, he insists, than of the fear of nuclear holocausts -- merely obscures the undiminished number of conflicts among developing nations. Ignoring that trend, Van Creveld maintains, "amounts to a crime against that very humanity that is beyond the pale." He also overturns the widely held assumption that democracies never make war on one another, citing the two Anglo-American wars of 1776 and 1812 and the American Civil War between the democratically elected Union and Confederate governments.

Far from dry, Van Creveld's writing is studded with historical gems: that the ancient Greeks regarded their warships as feminine, for example, or that World War I aces occasionally painted their planes in dazzling colors, sacrificing safety for bravura. His prose, in which a U.S. Army jeep can become a "frowning garbage can turned on its side and provided with wheels," is often original. But some readers might be incredulous to read that the U.S. Navy toughens its recruits by "limiting" them to seven hours of sleep per night, that Egyptian Field Marshall "Hakim El Amar . . . was convicted and sentenced to death" for failing in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war (Abdel Hakim Amer was, in fact, neither tried nor condemned) or that Christianity in America "has lost its teeth." Men might balk at his assault on novelist Tom Clancy for depicting Americans as "upright people who never let down their country, their friends, or their family," and women would surely bristle at lines like "Alas, for many men, the time when they could capture an enemy woman, take her home, sleep with her, and breed her are gone." Such glitches in an otherwise impressive work might be overlooked, if not for its final chapters.