Guy Chapman – författare

The history of the conquest of Gaul, it has been said, would be far more obscure if twenty of Caesar's generals had written commentaries. In June 1940 the armies of France, Great Britain and Belgium succumbed to the onslaught of the German armies in less than six weeks. How this could have come about has hardly been illuminated by the accusations and counter-accusations of prominent French politicians and senior officers. The crossfire of charges is as blinding as a hailstorm.This book is a bold attempt to clarify responsibilities and to answer the question of how an army-not greatly inferior to the enemy's and only ten years before believed to be the strongest in Europe- met such an ignominious defeat. First it tells the story of the reconstitution of the army after 1919 and of the French defence preparations. It shows the chiefs' of staff lack of imagination: how dull were their analyses of the recent war, how blind they were to the outside world, how negligent of such matters as the increase in speeds and range of armaments, how incurious as to their enemies, and how subservient to the politicians who courted an electorate which loathed war but was not ready to pay for peace, while an out-of-date armament industry existed on high protective tariffs. In 1939 France had an army and an air force trained for defeat.

Legal systems like to think of themselves as impartial and fair, dispensing the objective morality of Justice. But, from time to time, a court of law can be as political, prejudiced, and biased as any other arm of the State. The classic instance is the story of the trials of Alfred Dreyfus.In December 1894 a French military tribunal found Alfred Dreyfus guilty of high treason. Dreyfus was a Jew; the War Office was determined that at all costs the honour and good name of the Army must be upheld; and both left and right in the French Parliament used the convulsions of the case for what they believed to be their own advantage.The original verdict affected the Army, the Church, the Judiciary and the State over the following twelve years. Even now the case provokes arguments of fierce intensity.Guy Chapman's classic exposition of the long drawn-out trials has been out of print for many years and this present thorough revision incorporates the findings of recent scholarship; it is compellingly readable and unapproachably authoritative.The questions still remain - how far were the Dreyfus Trials the product of a conscious conspiracy, how far an unconscious conspiracy of silence, and how far did 'justice' prevail?