Question about a Stendhal reference?

Question

In Michael Herr's book about the Vietnam War, [*Dispatches*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispatches_(book)), he describes Operation Pegasus—the relief of the besieged USMC garrison at Khe Sahn in 1968—in the following way:>Pegasus was almost elegant in its tactics and scope. Stendhal would have loved it (he would have called it "an affair of outposts")Can anyone explain what it was about Stendhal that would have prompted a remark like that: "he would have called it an 'affair of outposts'"?

Answer 1

Consider the ethos of Stendhal's protagonists in The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma. His heroes are generally upstarts, rogues, adventurers. He lionizes the crafty, resourceful, and fearless individual. Even if you may not be able to attribute the expression "an affair of outposts" directly to Stendhal, it does fit the ethos of his heroes.

Answer 2

The phrase “affaire des avant-postes”, or "affair of outposts" does not appear in Stendhal’s published work, so it is hard to say exactly how he would have used it, but Operation Pegasus involved tens of thousands on each side, making it comparable in scale to battles like Tarutino itself, and not to skirmishes like the “affair of outposts” that preceded it, so it is unlikely that Stendhal would have said what Herr makes him say. Therefore, from the expert of a French language professional, I can say that it would not actually be an accurate presumption of Stendhal's commentary, but rather along the lines of his personal train of thought leading to a similar comment.