With the present assumption that literary people and other aesthetes are by their very nature caring humanitarians and consequently hostile to such an ungentle activity as war, I constantly astonish people by telling them that Cervantes, author of Don Quixote - far from "Dreaming the Impossible Dream" as on Broadway - fought fiercely against the infidel Turk at the giant Battle of Lepanto, that Spain's greatest playwright, Lope de Vega, sailed in the Spanish Armade against England, and that Dante, author of The Divine Comedy, fought for the White Guelphs against the Black Guelphs as an officer of the Florentine cavalry.
Even the reflective Rene Descartes, generally considered the father of modern philosophy - the cogito, ergo sum man - spent much of his early life, not only as soldier, but as a soldier of fortune. The politics of France being quiet at the time, Descartes, aged twenty-one (at about the time of the founding of the Plymouth Bay Colony), took up a commission in the Dutch army. With the coming of the Thirty Years' War and the shifting of all action to the east, he joined the army of Frederick of Bavaria, then an independent state friendly to France. Although much has been written about Descartes' valor in combat, we do not know if he took part in the monumental siege of Prague. But in 1628, by then thirty-two, he went to battle once again - this time under the colors of his own country. A practicing and in his way devout Catholic, he joined the King's army, which at the close of France's guerres de religion was besieging the last Protestant stronghold at La Rochelle - without which the United States would have had to struggle on without a New Rochelle, New York.
The man who writing Discourse de la Methode, in which he endeavored de novo to construct for the modern world a complete philosophic edifice, plainly considered war an edifying experience. It has been said of Descartes that he joined these various armies in his early years to learn about "life." Like any gentleman of his time, Descartes never went forth into the streets without his sword at his side, and on one recorded occasion drew it and threatened to run through two thuggish boatmen on the Ems in Germany if they did not carry him to his destination.
War as an Edifying Experience
Looked at from this historical perspective, it is not entirely surprising that one of France's most famous novels, Laclos' Les Liaisons Dangereuses - now enjoying a great success on Broadway in a stunningly deceitful stage adaptation by Britain's Royal Shakespeare company - should have been written by a military man, and by one of Napoleon's generals at that. Given prevailing attitudes and knowledge of history among what has disparagingly been called "Broadway intellectuals," it is no less surprising (although infinitely embarrassing) that not a single New York theater critic should seem to be aware of this. It is a particularly shaming deceit on the part of the British adapters since Choderlos de Laclos was a lifelong French army officer and famous military theoretician, and since military thinking is widely thought in France to be central to his novel. In an American context, it is as if General William Tecumseh Sherman (the one who went "Marching through Georgia") had written a play, and the Broadway theater critics had never heard of General Sherman.
As one of Napoleon's generals, in fact, Laclos' name is boldly inscribed on Paris' Arch of Triumph,
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