John Keegan > Quotes

“For our purpose, however, what the soldiers did or did not read is irrelevant. For, if soldiers did not learn to fight their battles from reading books, neither is it likely that military historians learned to write their books from watching battles. Battles are extremely confusing; and confronted with the need to make sense of something he does not understand, even the cleverest, indeed preeminently the cleverest man, realizing his need for a language and metaphor he does not possess, will turn to look at what someone else has already made of a similar set of events as a guide for his own pen.”
― John Keegan

“In 1861, on the eve of the Civil War, Grant, aged thirty-nine, with four children at home and scarcely a penny in the bank, had made no mark on the world and looked unlikely to do so, for all the boom conditions of mid-century America. His Plymouth Rock ancestry, his specialist education, his military rank, which together must have ensured him a sheltered corner in the life of the Old World, counted for nothing in the New. He lacked the essential quality to be what Jacques Barzun has called a “booster,” one of those bustling, bonhomous, penny-counting, chance-grabbing optimists who, whether in the frenetic commercial activity of the Atlantic coast, in the emergent industries of New England and Pennsylvania or on the westward-moving frontier, were to make America’s fortune. Grant, in his introspective and undemonstrative style, was a gentleman, and was crippled by the quality.”
― John Keegan, The Mask of Command

“It is one of the many graveyards which are the Great War's chief heritage. The chronicle of its battles provides the dreariest literature in military history; no brave trumpets sound in memory for the drab millions who plodded to death on the featureless plains of Picardy and Poland; no litanies are sung for the leaders who coaxed them to slaughter.”
― John Keegan

“Mankind, if it is to survive, must choose its leaders by the test of their intellectuality; and, contrarily, leadership must justify itself by its detachment, moderation and power of analysis.”
― John Keegan, The Mask of Command

“The ANZACs, clinging lost and leaderless to the hillsides, began, as the hot afternoon gave way to grey drizzle, to experience their martyrdom.”
― John Keegan

“Of whatever class or nation, however, all successful participants in the repetitive and unrelenting stress of aerial fighting came eventually to display its characteristic physiognomy: skeletal hands, sharpened noses, tight-drawn cheek bones, the bared teeth of a rictus smile and the fixed, narrowed gaze of men in a state of controlled fear.”
― John Keegan, The First World War

“THE FIRST WORLD WAR was a tragic and unnecessary conflict. Unnecessary because the train of events that led to its outbreak might have been broken at any point during the five weeks of crisis that preceded the first clash of arms, had prudence or common goodwill found a voice; tragic because the consequences of the first clash ended the lives of ten million human beings, tortured the emotional lives of millions more, destroyed the benevolent and optimistic culture of the European continent and left, when the guns at last fell silent four years later, a legacy of political rancour and racial hatred so intense that no explanation of the causes of the Second World War can stand without reference to those roots.”
― John Keegan, The First World War

“Plans made without allowance for the intentions of the enemy are liable to miscarry.”
― John Keegan

“One of Picton's officers fell asleep the instant the halt was sounded and did not think of food until later in the night, when he woke to eat some chops cooked in the breastplate of a dead cuirassier (meat fried in a breastplate was very much à la mode in the Waterloo campaign, rather as rats spitted on a bayonet were to be in 1871 or champagne exhumed from chateau gardens in 1914).”
― John Keegan, The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme

“The Muslim world in general, the Arab world in particular was confirmed in its grievances, particularly that the West was prepared to use its overwhelming military superiority to keep Muslims subordinate. 'Europe', the Europe of the Franco-German plan to create a federal union strong enough to stand on terms of equality with the United States as a world power, had been humiliated by the failure of its efforts to avert the war. Liberal opinion, dominant throughout the European media and academia, strong also in their American equivalents, was outraged by the spectacle of raw military force supplanting reason and legality as the means by which relations between states were ordered.

Reality is an uncomfortable companion, particularly to people of good will. George H.W. Bush's proclamation of a new world order had persuaded too many in the West that the world's future could be managed within a legal framework, by discussion and conciliation. The warning uttered by his son that the United States was determined to bring other enemies of nuclear and regional stability to book - Iran, North Korea - was founded by his political opponents profoundly unsettling. The reality of the Iraq campaign of March - April 2003 is, however, a better guide to what needs to be done to secure the safety of our world than any amount of law-making or treaty-writing can offer.”
― John Keegan, The Iraq War

“[W]e are hardened to what we know, and we rationalise and even justify cruelties practised by us and our like while retaining the capacity to be outraged, even disgusted by practices equally cruel which, under the hands of strangers, take a different form.”
― John Keegan, A History of Warfare

“The Second World War, when it came in 1939, was unquestionably the outcome of the First, and in large measure its continuation. Its circumstances – the dissatisfaction of the German-speaking peoples with their standing among other nations – were the same, and so were its immediate causes, a dispute between a German-speaking ruler and a Slav neighbour.”
― John Keegan, The First World War

“Constantine, moreover, was not yet a Christian when he uttered the appeal to conquer in the sign of the cross; and while the warrior kings of Israel may have drawn strength from the old Covenant in their small and local wars, the Christians of the new Covenant were to agonise for centuries over the issue of whether warmaking was morally permissible or not. Christians, indeed, have never found unanimity in the belief that the man of war may also be a man of religion; the ideal of martyrdom has always been as strong as that of the justified struggle and remains strong to this day. The Arabs of the conquest years were not caught on that crux. Their new religion, Islam, was a creed of conflict, that taught the necessity of submission to its revealed teachings and the right of its believers to take arms against those who opposed them. It was Islam that inspired the Arab conquests, the ideas of Islam that made the Arabs a military people and the example of its founder, Muhammad, that taught them to become warriors.”
― John Keegan, A History of Warfare

“Visually Agincourt is a pre-Raphaelite, perhaps better a Medici Gallery print battle - a composition of strong verticals and horizontals and a conflict of rich dark reds and Lincoln greens against fishscale greys and arctic blues.”
― John Keegan, The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme

“Less than twenty years after the end of the Great War, the ‘war to end wars’ as it had come to be called at the nadir of hopes for its eventual conclusion, Europe was once again gripped by the fear of a new war, provoked by the actions and ambitions of war lords more aggressive than any known to the old world of the long nineteenth-century peace.”
― John Keegan, The First World War

“History lessons remind us that the states in which we live, their institutions, even their laws, have come to us through conflict, often of the most bloodthirsty sort. Our daily diet of news brings us reports of the shedding of blood, often in regions quite close to our homelands, in circumstances that deny our conception of cultural normality altogether. We succeed, all the same, in consigning the lessons both of history and of reportage to a special and separate category of "otherness" which invalidate our expectations of how our own world will be tomorrow and the day after not at all. Our institutions and our laws, we tell ourselves, have set the human potentiality for violence about with such restraints that violence in everyday life will be punished as criminal by our laws, while its use by our institutions of state will take the particular form of "civilised warfare.”
― John Keegan, A History of Warfare

“Blitzkrieg was a new and dynamic form of warfare, which applied the power of the tank, the aircraft, and the radio to devastating effect.”
― John Keegan

“There cannot be any hard and fast rules. But there can be suggestions and useful analogies. The most useful, to my mind, is that of the difference between the English and French judicial systems. In England (and America), the task of the court in criminal cases, which it devolves upon a jury, is to arrive at a verdict of ‘guilty’ or ‘not guilty’ on the evidence presented by prosecuting and defending counsel in turns. Trials are conflicts and verdicts are decisions; the two sides ‘win’ or ‘lose’. In France, and other countries which observe Roman Law, the task of the court in a criminal case is to arrive at the truth, as far as it can be perceived by human eyes, and the business of establishing the outlines of the truth falls not on a jury, which is strictly asked to enter a judgement, but upon a juge d’instruction. This officer of the court, unknown to English law, is accorded very wide powers of interrogation–of the suspect, his family, his associates–and of investigation–of the circumstances and scene of the crime–at which the suspect is often required to participate in a reconstruction. Only when the juge is satisfied that a crime has indeed occurred and that the suspect is responsible will he allow the case to go forward for prosecution. The character of these two different legal approaches is usually defined as ‘accusatorial’ (English) and ‘inquisitorial’ (French) respectively.”
― John Keegan, The Face of Battle

“Rundstedt, revered throughout the German regular officer corps as its last archetypal Prussian, refused to deal with detail or to look at small-scale maps, as if the fighting itself were distasteful to him, but spent his days reading detective stories and thrice resigned his command.”
― John Keegan, The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme

“The trenches', wrote Robert Kee fifty years later, 'were the concentration camps of the First World War'; and though the analogy is what an academic reviewer would call unhistorical, there is something Treblinka-like about almost all accounts of July 1st, about those long docile lines of young men, shoddily uniformed, heavily burdened, numbered about their necks, plodding forward across a featureless landscape to their own extermination inside the barbed wire. Accounts of the Somme produce in readers and audiences much the same emotions as do descriptions of the running of Auschwitz - guilty fascination, incredulity, horror, disgust, pity and anger - and not only from the pacific and tender-hearted; not only from the military historian, on whom, as he recounts the extinction of this brave effort or that, falls an awful lethargy, his typewriter keys tapping leadenly on the paper to drive the lines of print, like the waves of a Kitchener battalioon failing to take its objective, more and more slowly towards the foot of the page; but also from professional soldiers [...] Why did the commanders not do something about it? Why did they let the attack go on? why did they not stop one battalion following in the wake of another to join it in death?”
― John Keegan, The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme

“those professionally dedicated to preserving the peace. The tragedy of the diplomatic crisis that preceded the outbreak of the fighting in August 1914, which was to swell into the four-year tragedy of the Great War, is that events successively and progressively overwhelmed the capacity of statesmen and diplomats to control and contain them. Honourable and able men though they were, the servants of the chancelleries and foreign officers of the great powers in the July crisis were bound to the wheel of the written note, the encipherment routine, the telegraph schedule. The potentialities of the telephone, which might have cut across the barriers to communication, seem to have eluded their imaginative powers. The potentialities of radio, available but unused, evaded them altogether. In the event, the states of Europe proceeded, as if in a dead march and a dialogue of the deaf, to the destruction of their continent and its civilisation.”
― John Keegan, The First World War

“Foreknowledge is no protection against disaster. Even real-time intelligence is never real enough. Only force finally counts.”
― John Keegan, Intelligence in War: Knowledge of the Enemy from Napoleon to Al-Qaeda

“Heavily overweight”
― John Keegan, The First World War

“raising resistance against a regime imbued with self-righteousness, as Nazism was, would bring down vicious cruelty on those who opposed it.”
― John Keegan, Intelligence in War: Knowledge of the Enemy from Napoleon to Al-Qaeda

“The young have already made their decision. They are increasingly unwilling to serve as conscripts in armies they see as ornamental. The militant young have taken that decision a stage further: they will fight for the causes which they profess not through the mechanisms of the state and its armed power but, where necessary, against them, by clandestine and guerrilla methods. It remains for armies to admit that the battles of the future will be fought in never-never land. While the great armoured hosts face each other across the boundary between east and west, no soldier on either side will concede that he does not believe in the function for which he plans and trains. As long as states put weapons in their hands, they will show each other the iron face of war. But the suspicion grows that battle has already abolished itself”
― John Keegan, The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme

“By the forty-second day from mobilisation, the war in the west would have been won and the victorious German army freed to take the railway back across Germany to the east and there inflict another crushing defeat on the Russians.17”
― John Keegan, The First World War

“Thus”
― John Keegan, The First World War

“Given that that was so”
― John Keegan, The Face of Battle