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  • Henry Lloyd and the Military Enlightenment of Eighteenth-Century Europe
  • Armstrong Starkey
Henry Lloyd and the Military Enlightenment of Eighteenth-Century Europe. By Patrick J. Speelman. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. ISBN 0-313-32160-4. Maps. Illustration. Notes. Selected bibliography. Index. Pp. xiv, 219. $79.95.

Patrick Speelman has rescued from anonymity the eighteenth-century soldier of fortune and military intellectual Henry Lloyd (c.1729–83). In a century in which French authors dominated military thought, Lloyd was Britain's only really creative contributor to the military enlightenment. If being British were not enough to marginalize him, his Welsh background, his lack of influential connections, and his Jacobitism combined to bar him from the British army and advancement in his native land. As a result he saw service in continental armies, including those of France, Austria, and Russia, seeking advancement through merit. He achieved reasonable success, rising to the rank of divisional general in Russia, but failed in his goal of a British army appointment. Lloyd's career provided him with a wealth of varied military experience and exposed him to the powerful intellectual currents of the Enlightenment, including friendship with Pietro Verri. Lloyd's literary work was a product of these influences as well as a way by which a poor officer without great patrons might secure his future.

Eighteenth-century military thought has sometimes been dismissed as arid, abstract, and Newtonian, and its writers have been portrayed as being [End Page 1205] as much divorced from reality as the residents of Jonathan Swift's island of Laputa. Authors such as Lloyd, however, were deeply rooted in experience and sought to understand the principles of war that might free commanders from the indecision of linear warfare. Lloyd provided a firm empirical and historical base for his philosophy of war, developed in his Continuation of the History of the Late War in Germany (1781), a follow-up to his account of the Seven Years' War based on his service in the Austrian and Brunswickian armies. Speelman identifies four general themes in the later work: the role of moral forces, war's political nature, the influence of the socio-economic structure, and the material and economic causes of Europe's indecisive warfare. The result was a rich and insightful work on the cutting edge of the era's psychological thought. Lloyd's new system was the first to consider the role of genius in shaping a great commander and to recognize that success resulted from arousing the moral forces and passions of the soldiers. In his exploration of national character and his insistence that the social and economic context shaped a country's military potential, Lloyd paved the way for the next generation.

Speelman offers an excellent appendix that outlines Lloyd's principles of war. Two are often regarded as central to Napoleonic warfare: (1) The Principle of Interior Lines: "It is owning to this circumstance [interior lines] that the King [Frederick the Great] was able to support both countries [Saxony and Silesia] during the whole war, by marching from one to the other;" (2) La manoeuvre sur les derrières: "that no army however strong, can keep its ground if you advance against it in front, and at the same time send a powerful corps to act on its flank and rear." Then there is the Clausewitzian fog of war: "Whatever is possible, a general should think probable, and take his measures accordingly, that like old women he may not say; who would have thought it?" (pp. 127–28).

Speelman provides a clear and insightful reading of all of Lloyd's work and places it in context. That is very much the strength of this book for most discussions of eighteenth-century military writers occur in surveys that lack sufficient depth for a full appreciation of an individual writer. In this regard, Speelman's work compares favorably with Jean Chagniot's excellent biography of Folard. One hopes that they point the way to studies of other authors. Specialists will profit from this biography of Lloyd and will agree that it has restored him to his proper place as "the father of military sociology" and "possibly the most...

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