Although 1870 proved the corollary of the theory and practice of terror, that it deepens antagonism, stimulates resistance, and ends by lengthening war, the Germans remained wedded to it.
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).
When those who have the title of shepherd play the part of wolves, said Lothar of Saxony, heresy grows in the garden of the Church.
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...
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.
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.
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...
Heeding Clausewitz’s warning that military plans which leave no room for the unexpected can lead to disaster, the Germans with infinite care had attempted to provide for every contingency. Their staff...
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....
For belligerent purposes, the 14th century, like the 20th, commanded a technology more sophisticated than the mental and moral capacity that guided its use.
Fateful moments tend to evoke grandeur of speech, especially in French.
Every incident in the Old Testament was considered to pre-figure in allegory what was to come in the New.
Eventually the United States became the latter arsenal and bank of the allies, and acquired a direct interest in allied victory that was to bemuse the post war apostles of economic determinism for a l...
Each soldier carried sixty-five pounds: rifle and ammunition, knapsack, canteen, extra boots, entrenching tools, knife and a multiplicity of implements and kits strapped to his coat. In one bag was hi...
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....
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...
Satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality.
Oversimplified perhaps, this in essence is the problem known to nineteenth-century diplomacy as the Eastern Question.
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...