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Telephone Mountview 4326.
16, North Hill Highgate, N.6.
23. V. 30
Dear Buchan,
My warmest thanks for sending the copy of your lecture. It's the finest deposition of leadership I have read, & every line strikes a chord. I only query one claim - that he was Cromwell's superior as a general. And even here I do so with some hesitation, preferring to wait until I have explored
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[right page:] Cromwell's campaigns more deeply & to determine whether he himself deserves the full credit for the art which I find suggested in his Preston[,] Dunbar, & Worcester campaigns. With Montrose in contrast I feel that I know all that is to be known, through your book, & that one can thus access him exactly. Superb as he was in exploiting mobility & original in his tactical "mechanism" I did not find that subtle art in entrapping the opponent which seems to me [left page:] the highest element in the art of Generalship. And I can feel sure that your book would have brought it out if it had been there. But as a leader & a man how splendid, how appealing, & here your lecture distils the essence of those qualities which your book "sprayed" so convincingly over the reader's mind.
Yours very sincerely
BH Liddell Hart
P.S. I have just seen your review of "The
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Real War" in the Week-end Review. I appreciate most deeply both the compliments & the review in general, & feel proud that you should have paid so generous a tribute to it.
One petty correction - you don't actually remember me as a "2nd Lieut" during the Somme, for I ceased to be that rank in April 1915. But I am much more pleased that you should remember me from that time than that you should remember, or fail to rememer, my actual rank
Again, my warmest thanks
BHLH
