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The friendship and professional military collaboration of George Washington and the Marquis de Lafayette is a commonplace of American historical scholarship. Most historians doubt that the disorganized and inexperienced Continental army could have won the war without the help of Lafayette and the aid that he coaxed from the French government.
David A. Clary, who teaches at Eastern New Mexico University, has set forth the whole story in engrossing detail in this book. His portrait of Washington does not stray far from the marble-statue heroic figure we have known all these years, but his Lafayette will surprise many. Driven by dreams of military glory from his childhood in the Auvergne region of France, orphaned early in life, married at 16 and prematurely wealthy, he arrived in America a young upstart with "more money than sense" and set out to learn the American way of war from Washington, his senior by 25 years.
It turned out that the learning flowed both ways. Lafayette's passionate hatred of slavery infected Washington fully as much as Washington's ideas about warfare influenced him.
Lafayette was a quick study. He learned from Washington that when you command a small, ill-trained, poorly equipped and undisciplined army against a powerful foe, you play a cat-and-mouse game, avoiding large-scale battles, chasing your foe around, nipping at his heels, wearing him down. Lafayette applied this lesson brilliantly, first against Lord Cornwallis in New Jersey, and triumphantly later against the same general in Virginia. It was Lafayette's mobile hit-and-run harassment that finally led Cornwallis into the fatal trap at Yorktown, effectively ending the war.
But military tactics are not the main thrust of Clary's story. He concentrates on his two main characters, perhaps even too much so, filling his book with page after page of the mushy letters that passed between them protesting their eternal admiration for each other in flowery prose. The French "boy general" must have been one of the most prolific letter-writers of all time; Clary says more than 30,000 of his letters are known. The acreage of them in his book can be a bit wearying.
Clary does bring a lively writing style and much thorough research to his task. We read of Lafayette "blowing his own horn," and having a "ringside seat" for battle, as well as being in "the royal doghouse" back home in France. There are also vastly entertaining physical descriptions and character sketches of an enormous supporting cast, American, French and British. His portrait of the German general Von Steuben, another Washington ally, stands out as a tiny gem. Knowing no English, Von Steuben was at pains to learn how to cuss at his troops in English. The first English word he learned was "goddam," and he would call upon aides to swear for him in English when the right oath was not at his tongue's tip. I'll bet you never learned that in high school history class.
With the war over, Clary follows Lafayette back to France just as his country was entering the horror chamber of the 1789 revolution. He was a national hero to the French people, but his sympathy for the despised royal family set the mob howling for his head and thrust him into prison. He was lucky to escape with his life. Clary concludes that even in maturity Lafayette acted with the impulsive rashness that Washington was never quite able to understand or control. He came back to America for a last reunion with his adored Washington, and on this side of the Atlantic he remains a venerated hero to this day, though he never made it onto our paper money.
--- Reviewed by Robert Finn (Robertfinn@aol.com)
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