Doctors were admired, lawyers universally hated and mistrusted.
By such accident of the human mind, war, trade, and history are shaped. The
Between policy-makers in the capital and realities in the field lies an eternal gap whitened by the bones of failed and futile efforts.
As a young cavalry officer out of St-Cyr, de Mun first became acquainted with the lives and problems of the poor through the charitable work of the Society of St-Vincent de Paul in his garrison town....
Executions were meant as an exercise in frightfulness according to the theory developed by the Emperor Caligula: Oderint dum metuant (Let them hate us as long as they fear us).
Satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality.
Owing to the disabilities of the two major sovereigns, one incapacitated by alcohol and the other by insanity, the result was not what it might have been. Renewed madness was already darkening Charles...
Oversimplified perhaps, this in essence is the problem known to nineteenth-century diplomacy as the Eastern Question.
Moltke closed upon that rigid phrase, the basis for every major German mistake, the phrase that launched the invasion of Belgium and the submarine war against the United States, the inevitable phrase...
Many who lived through the next thirty days of mounting combat, agony, and terror were to remember the sound of endless, repetitious masculine singing as the worst torment of the invasion.
Lanrezac finally spoke. He gave the order for a general retreat. He knew he would be taken for a catastrophard who must be got rid of—as indeed he was. His own account tells that he said to one of his...
John Quincy Adams’ dictum that wherever the standard of liberty was unfurled in the world, there will be America’s heart … but she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.
Its insistent principle that the life of the spirit and of the afterworld was superior to the here and now, to material life on earth, is one that the modern world does not share, no matter how devout...
If Joffre’s plan were to work, it was essential that the BEF hold the space between Lanrezac and the newly forming Sixth Army. Under General Order No. 2 Joffre intended the BEF to conform to the gener...
Having won the Cross of St. George as a dashing young cavalry officer in the war of 1877 against the Turks, Sukhomlinov believed that military knowledge acquired in that campaign was permanent truth....
Hausen himself could not get over the hostility of the Belgian people. To discover how we are hated was a constant amazement to him. He complained bitterly of the attitude of the D’Eggremont family in...
For, as Professor Turner has pointed out, history originated as myth and becomes a social memory to which men can appeal, knowing it will provide justification for their present actions or convictions...
Although ship for ship it approached a match with the British and in gunnery was superior, the Kaiser, who could hark back to no Drakes or Nelsons, could never really believe that German ships and sai...
War, he stated, is a biological necessity; it is the carrying out among humankind of the natural law, upon which all the laws of Nature rest, the law of the struggle for existence. Nations, he said, m...
To achieve decisive victory, Schlieffen fixed upon a strategy derived from Hannibal and the Battle of Cannae. The dead general who mesmerized Schlieffen had been dead a very long time. Two thousand ye...