While reading Herbert Butterfield's Christianity, Diplomacy and War recently, I was struck as much by some marginal notations a previous reader had left behind as by the masterful text itself (published in 1953). One notation was the word “Vietnam” scribbled in the margin next to Butterfield's treatment of the Korean War. I remembered suddenly an experience I'd had during the Korean War period. I was helping then to care for an elderly gentleman, and we used to listen regularly to radio broadcasts from the battlefield. The old man, whose capacity to differentiate between past and present had failed him, would ask for further news on the war: “And how are the Central Powers doing?” World War I and Korea had for him collapsed into a single struggle.