SLAUGHTERHOUSE.(The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare As We Know It)(Book review)

In "The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare As We Know It" (Houghton Mifflin; $27), David A. Bell, a professor at Johns Hopkins, tries to restore military history to the center of history. This ambition may come as a surprise to amateur readers, for whom military history is probably already at the center of history. But academics tend to regard it either as old-style history, where seven key battles change everything, or as hobbyist's history, where Tom Clancy types look up from the pages to buy Blue and Gray fighting action figures. Real history is the slow-crawl study of small changes, from clan loyalties to price ratios--gradually shifting ...