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a fast-moving bicycle paign ran its eccentric stalf-and-start and lamentably full-length course. Fresh air is pumped into the long- _ staled strategic arguments and new light is thrown on the tenting] Are =J _ e1t soe VCutad: GUpSs and deadfalls, of which, in luaiy, . there was-a plethora. But this is no study of war, made at bathyaphere depths. It is done kimono-sty!e, covering "all, while touching nothing closely. As light reading for the summer, preferably in a hammock on a hot day, it isrecommended. + His colleagues and others who respected his work sometimes questioned whether the late Douglas Southall Freeman truly wrote military history. Was his forte not ' rather the atudy of character and personality and of how one man rubs off against another? The military . backdrop gave breadth and definition to these portrait, : but his battles either didn’t quite come off or were seen : as by a bike rider whizzing past a tall picket fence. The method here is comparable for it secks to make " undersiandable the twists and trials of the Aled cam- paign in Italy by centering main attention on person- . ages, great and small, on both sides of the hill, or - caught in the middle. The list is highly selective, and _ quite number that were excluded, such as Generals _Aimez-vous Wagner? ee, . RICHARD WAGNER: The Man, His Mind, and His Music, | | | By Robert W. Gutman. Biustrated, Harcourt, Brace & World, 490 pp. $12.50. ‘ By Richard Freedman One responds to Wagner, as to no other composer, either with beady-eyed adulation or with the Tepugnance and contempt' befitting a man who both temperarmen- tally and intellectually was the archetypal Nazi. Both altitudes are justified, because Wagner was the supreme | example of the amoral artist — perhaps the most signif. ; Cant creative genius of the 1Sth century who at the same | time was almost consistently despicable as a man. He thus poses most acutely the aesthetic-moral ques- tion of how the creator of music as radiant as the “Iron Mike” O'Daniel, Troy Middleton, Raymond McLain and John Church, were key figures in crisis. Naturally enough, the oeatral figure is General Mark Wayne Clark, who commanded the U.S. Fifth Amny. His béte noire is Major Genera] Fred L. Walker, who com- manded the 36th Infantry. Division, and along with some few Texans never forgave Clark for the battering that outfit took in uying to cross the Rapido River. Walker made a career of harrying Clark thereafter sthough his own handling of the fight was no model for the Command School at Fi. Leavenworth. The one-sided debate (Clark saying nothing) as to who was victim and who villain has heen going on ever since and it runs the length of this book like a fugue theme. The authors raise the question: Was Clark a great general, an average commander or a mediocre publicity- secker? To answer, they have vigorously applied scis- sors and paste pot, direcily quoting assessments and sidelights from a medley of witnesses, tall and small, pro and con, some speaking then, some having their say now, others retching thelr bile under a cloak of anonymity. One of the fairest-spoken is rare Bill Maul- tf “hooligan” and Parsifal a “cretin.” He points out that Wagner is only part of the German spirit — the part that triumphed between 1933 and 1945 — but thet Goethe and Nietzsche represent « aaving remnant. i H > nny a Se ve Nietesche, for instance, underwent the full Wagnerian course. A youthful idolator, he said that “all things considered, I would never, have survived my youth < thet Reale tam. + din. So you pick and you choose, and it is ‘all quite unsatisfactory. Having been with Clark several times when he was under the heaviest of pressures, 1 add my two cents worth that, like a singed cat, he is better than he looks, at least in this book. Poesibly more than normally ambitious, a man of strong convictions, he still disagrees fairly, and will reverse himself when proved wrong. Whether lengthy quoting of witnesses pro and con be a valid way of writing history, one must doubt. Many of the subjects are or were my friends of many years, such as the late General Lucian Truscott. The consensus is invariably more confusing than was the man in the flesh. . Italy was a dirty campaign, a bending race of glit- tering prospect, tantalization and gloomy disappoint- ment. The near-disaster at Salerno, the bogging at Anzio, the battling and bombing at Cassino and the fall of Rome are all tremendous episodes and have inspired great writings. Here they are given the once- over-lightly go. Far better for reading than for refer. ence. " without Wagnerian music.” Then, courted by the Master in the hope that this brilliant young man would lend intellectual respectability to his own odious theo- rizing about life and art, Nietzsche found himeelf re- pelled by Wagner's arrogance and anti-Semitism, by the “alarming tendencies” of his work and by the horde of vulgar, sycophantic Wagnerites with whom be sur- rounded himself. a He ultimately came to prefer the “Mediterrancen sweetness and light” of Carmen to the Teutonic vapor- ings of Wagner's late works. Yet, toward the end of his life, Nietasche declared in Ecce Homo that “the world must be a poor place for one who has never been sick enough for this ‘voluptuousness of Hell!” Gutman’s attitude is similarly ambivalent. He is en- thralled by the epic decadence af W-—~-- -