Marshall Field Quotes

The big bankers of the world, who practise the terrorism of money, are more powerful than kings and field marshals, even more than the Pope of Rome himself. They never dirty their hands. They kill no-one: they limit themselves to applauding the show.

History is the business of identifying momentous events from the comfort of a high-back chair. With the benefit of time, the historian looks back and points to a date in the manner of a gray-haired field marshal pointing to a bend in a river on a map: There it was, he says. The turning point. The decisive factor. The fateful day that fundamentally altered all that was to follow. There

After the princess challenged the Field Marshall of all Tranta, Korban had to speak to her. "Princess, have you thought about this challenge? You could have benefitted from much more training and practice." "I know that, Korban. I'm not stupid. This bloated man hasn't had a serious fight in...forever. I think I can win, even in my infant stage of martial skills.

Respect your deadline like it’s a field marshal.

Rule one on page one of the book of war, is: “Do not march on Moscow.” ’ Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery, House of Lords, May 1962

Please tell Field Marshal Goring for me, to stick his Swiss bank account up his fat ass.

Throughout my life and conduct my criterion has been not the approval of others nor of the world; it has been my inward convictions, my duty and my conscience.

It was a “severe” disappointment to Henry Wilson who laid it all at the door of Kitchener and the Cabinet for having sent only four divisions instead of six. Had all six been present, he said with that marvelous incapacity to admit error that was to make him ultimately a Field Marshal, “this retreat would have been an advance and defeat would have been a victory.

Field Marshal Slim wrote in World War II: “As officers,” he wrote, “you will neither eat, nor drink, nor sleep, nor smoke, nor even sit down until you have personally seen that your men have done those things. If you will do this for them, they will follow you to the end of the world. And, if you do not, I will break you.

There are some promotions in life, which, independent of the more substantial rewards they offer, acquire peculiar value and dignity from the coats and waistcoats connected with them. A field-marshal has his uniform; a bishop his silk apron; a counsellor his silk gown; a beadle his cocked hat. Strip the bishop of his apron, or the beadle of his hat and lace; what are they? Men. Mere men. Dignity, and even holiness too, sometimes, are more questions of coat and waistcoat than some people imagine.

It has been said that large staffs are the invariable sign of bad armies.

Naval heroes are seldom immodest, but soldiers quite often are. It is said of one gallant general that publication of his book was delayed because the printer ran out of capital I's.

The greatest good [a man] can do is to cultivate himself in order that he may be of greater use to humanity.

No plan survives contact with the enemy." —Field Marshal Helmuth Graf von Moltke

History judges you by your success or failure,” he pontificated. “That’s what counts. Nobody asks the victor whether he was in the right or wrong.” Before

It is a truism that all governments lie: they lie to each other, they lie to their own people, they frequently lie to themselves.

Buffett quoted Marshall Fields: “We waste half of the money we spend on advertising . . . the problem is we just don’t know which half.” From

If a rich man's entry into heaven seems as difficult as the camel's attempt to go through the eye of a needle; if the love of money is the root of all evil; then we must at least assume the most powerful men on earth to be the most Satanic. This applies to financiers, industrialists, popes, poets, dictators, and all assorted opinion-makers and field marshals of the world's activities.

First item in the crew roster is given name, so I'll input 'Skippy'. Second item is surname-" "The Magnificent." "Really?" "It is entirely appropriate, Joe." "Oh, uh huh, because that's what everyone calls you," I retorted sarcastically, rolling my eyes. Not wanting to argue with him, I typed in 'TheMagnificent'. "Next question is your rank, this file is designed for military personnel." "I'd like 'Grand Exalted Field Marshall El Supremo'." "Right, I'll type in 'Cub Scout'. Next question-" "Hey! You jerk-" "-is occupational specialty." "Oh, clearly that should be Lord God Controller of All Things." "I'll give you that one, that is spelled A, S, S, H, O, L, E. Next-" "Hey! You shithead, I should-" "Age?" I asked. "A couple million, at least. I think." "Mentally, you're a six year old, so that's what I typed in." "Joe, I just changed your rank in the personnel file to 'Big Poopyhead'." Skippy laughed. "Five year old. You're a five year old." "I guess that's fair," he admitted. "Sex? I'm going to select 'n/a' on that one for you," I said. "Joe, in your personnel file, I just updated Sex to 'Unlikely'." "This is not going well, Skippy." "You started it!" "That was mature. Four year old, then. Maybe Terrible Twos." "I give up," Skippy snorted. "Save the damned file and we'll call it even, Ok?" "No problem. We should do this more often, huh?" "Oh, shut up.

What are the attributes of leadership? The first, the primary, indeed the cardinal attribute of leadership is professional knowledge and professional competence. Now you will agree with me that you cannot be born with professional knowledge and professional competence even if you are a child of Prime Minister, or the son of an industrialist, or the progeny of a Field Marshal. Professional knowledge and professional competence have to be acquired by hard work and by constant study. In this fast- moving technologically developing world, you can never acquire sufficient professional knowledge.

Of course the people do not want war. . . . But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them that they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism. —GERMAN FIELD MARSHALL HERMANN GOERING, NUREMBERG, APRIL 18, 1946

So, what comes next for leadership? Absolute Honesty, fairness and justice – we are dealing with people. Those of us who have had the good fortune of commanding hundreds and thousands of men know this. No man likes to be punished, and yet a man will accept punishment stoically if he knows that the punishment meted out to him will be identical to the punishment meted out to another person who has some Godfather somewhere. This is very, very important. No man likes to be superceded, and yet men will accept supercession if they know that they are being superceded, under the rules, by somebody who is better then they are but not just somebody who happens to be related to the Commandant of the staff college or to a Cabinet Minister or by the Field Marshal’s wife’s current boyfriend. This is extremely important, Ladies and Gentlemen.

I was staring down thirty-five in a few months. While I might have thought forty was old when I was her age, I’d since decided to move that particular goal post down the field to somewhere around sixty. And I reserved the right to make it even older if I survived the next ten years.

And you, ye stars, Who slowly begin to marshal, As of old, the fields of heaven, Your distant, melancholy lines! Have you, too, survived yourselves? Are you, too, what I fear to become? You, too, once lived; You, too, moved joyfully Among august companions, In an older world, peopled by Gods, In a mightier order, The radiant, rejoicing, intelligent Sons of Heaven. But now, ye kindle Your lonely, cold-shining lights, Unwilling lingerers In the heavenly wilderness, For a younger, ignoble world; And renew, by necessity, Night after night your courses, In echoing, unneared silence, Above a race you know not— Uncaring and undelighted, Without friend and without home; Weary like us, though not Weary with our weariness.

The motto of this city should be the immortal words spoken by that French field marshal during the siege of Sebastopol, “J’y suis, j’y reste”—“I am here, and here I shall remain.” People are born here, they grow up here, they go to the University of Washington, they work here, they die here. Nobody has any desire to leave. You ask them, “What is it again that you love so much about Seattle?” and they answer, “We have everything. The mountains and the water.” This is their explanation, mountains and water. As much as I try not to engage people in the grocery checkout, I couldn’t resist one day when I overheard one refer to Seattle as “cosmopolitan.” Encouraged, I asked, “Really?” She said, Sure, Seattle is full of people from all over. “Like where?” Her answer, “Alaska. I have a ton of friends from Alaska.” Whoomp, there it is.

As supreme commander, Eisenhower had to balance political and personal rivalries, while maintaining his authority within the alliance. He was well liked by Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, and by General Sir Bernard Montgomery, the commander-in-chief of 21st Army Group, but neither rated him highly as a soldier.

What the King conquered, the Prince formed, the Field Marshal defended, the Soldier saved and unified

before they were to be married. They stayed

That was the sort of thing she found interesting, but she wouldn’t ask again. She wouldn’t beg to be taken seriously.

Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, victor of El Alamein and commander of land forces on D-Day, wrote extensively on The Art of War in his monumental A History of Warfare.

History judges you by your success or failure,” he pontificated. “That’s what counts. Nobody asks the victor whether he was in the right or wrong.

The troops must be brought to a state of wild enthusiasm. They must enter the fight with the light of battle in their eyes and definitely wanting to kill the enemy.

War is not an act of God. War grows directly out of the things which individuals do or fail to do. It is, in fact, the consequence of national policies or lack of policies.

Great field marshal, why bother to spur me on? I go all-out as it is.

When Ermolov, having been sent by Kutuzov to inspect the position, told the field marshal that it was impossible to fight there before Moscow and that they must retreat, Kutuzov looked at him in silence.

I worked for Marshall Field. That’s the World Book Company. And it was straight, up and down the line. No trade-ins, no deals, no dis- counts, no gimmicks, and we hired mostly teachers and preachers and housewives. So it was straight as an arrow. It was a great job. Pure selling. No wheeling and dealing. World Book, no deals. No trade-ins, no discounts, no gimmicks, nothing — cash. Cash. Money up front.

This is what you’re looking for. In fact, The Book of Five Rings is often placed alongside The Art of War by Sun Tzu, On War by General Carl von Clausewitz, Infantry Attacks by Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, and Patterns of Conflict by Colonel John Boyd. Each of these works has materially influenced military thinking, directly or indirectly influencing modern combat despite the fact that they were written decades or even centuries ago.

Whites reigned supreme. Within about three decades of Lee’s surrender, angry and alienated Southern whites who had lost a war had successfully used terror and political inflexibility (a refusal to concede that the Civil War had altered the essential status of black people) to create a postbellum world of American apartheid. Many white Americans had feared a postslavery society in which emancipation might lead to equality, and they had successfully ensured that no such thing should come to pass, North or South. Lynchings, church burnings, and the denial of access to equal education and to the ballot box were the order of the decades. A succession of largely unmemorable presidents served after Grant; none successfully marshaled the power of the office to fight the Northern acquiescence to the South’s imposition of Jim Crow. “We fought,” a Confederate veteran from Georgia remarked in 1890, “for the supremacy of the white race in America.” That was a war they won—and, in a central American irony, they did so not alone but with the aid and comfort of many of their former foes on the field of battle.

There was Brigade Major Montgomery, later Field Marshal Montgomery of El Alamein, who wrote of his Irish experiences: ‘My whole attention was given to defeating the rebels. It never bothered me a bit how many houses were burned.

As a young man, Montgomery was noted by his superiors for his strong abilities as an analyst. He began the war in 1914 as a Lieutenant leading a platoon of 30 men. Within only four years, he had become the Chief of Staff of a division by age 30.

Jemal hanged two Jewish spies in Damascus, then he announced the deportation of all Jerusalem’s Jews: there would no Jews left alive to welcome the British. “We’re in a time of anti-Semitic mania,” Count Ballobar noted in his diary before rushing to Field Marshal von Falkenhayn to complain. The Germans, now in control of Jerusalem, were dismayed. Jemal’s anti-Semitic threats were “insane,” believed General Kress, who intervened at the highest level to save the Jews. It was Jemal’s last involvement in Jerusalem.a

Like Montgomery, Musashi was a physically aggressive man who devoted his entire life to mastering the art of war. Also like Montgomery, Musashi was an independent thinker who believed a warrior needed to have a well-rounded intellectual background in order to truly master strategy.

He could bear even less the disaster which befell his beloved Fatherland in November 1918. To him, as to almost all Germans, it was “monstrous” and undeserved. The German Army had not been defeated in the field. It had been stabbed in the back by the traitors at home. Thus emerged for Hitler, as for so many Germans, a fanatical belief in the legend of the “stab in the back” which, more than anything else, was to undermine the Weimar Republic and pave the way for Hitler’s ultimate triumph. The legend was fraudulent. General Ludendorff, the actual leader of the High Command, had insisted on September 28, 1918, on an armistice “at once,” and his nominal superior, Field Marshal von Hindenburg, had supported him. At a meeting of the Crown Council in Berlin on October 2 presided over by Kaiser Wilhelm II, Hindenburg had reiterated the High Command’s demand for an immediate truce. “The Army,” he said, “cannot wait forty-eight hours.

PARIS, August 3 Hitler did what no one expected. He made himself both President and Chancellor. Any doubts about the loyalty of the army were done away with before the old field-marshal’s body was hardly cold. Hitler had the army swear an oath of unconditional obedience to him personally. The man is resourceful.

Indeed, after the war, German commanders being debriefed confirmed that they had been ordered to stop about eight miles outside Dunkirk. “My tanks were kept halted there for three days,” said Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt. “If I had had my way the English would not have got off so lightly. But my hands were tied by direct orders from Hitler himself.” When one of Rundstedt’s subordinate generals told Hitler in a small meeting that he did not understand why such an order was issued, Hitler replied that “his aim was to make peace with Britain on a basis that she would regard as compatible with her honour to accept.” However,

The idea of treating war as anything other than the harshest means of settling questions of very existence is ridiculous,” he challenged the army commanders. “Every war costs blood, and the smell of blood arouses in man all the instincts which have lain within us since the beginning of the world: deeds of violence, the intoxication of murder, and many other things. Everything else is empty babble. A humane war exists only in bloodless brains.” A field marshal who attended the conference reported Hitler warning them “that he would proceed against the Poles after the end of the campaign with relentless vigor. Things would happen which would not be to the taste of the German generals.

I don't like it when people with only a general education rush to solve problems best left to specialists; and that happens all of the time among us. Civilians like to have opinions on military matters, even those that concern a field marshal, while people educated as engineers more often than not have opinions on philosophy and political economy.

Later bad things will be said about Stalin; he’ll be called a tyrant and his reign of terror will be denounced. But for the people of Eduard’s generation he will remain the supreme leader of the people of the Union at the most tragic moment in their history; the man who defeated the Nazis and proved himself capable of a sacrifice worthy of the ancient Romans: the Germans had captured his son, Lieutenant Yakov Dzhugashvili, while the Russians had captured Field Marshal Paulus, one of the top military leaders of the Reich, at Stalingrad. When the German High Command proposed an exchange, Stalin responded with disdain that he didn’t exchange field marshals for simple lieutenants. Yakov committed suicide by throwing himself on the electrified barbed wire fence of his prison camp. *

In June of 1944, when Field Marshal von Rundstedt, the German commander in France, was told that the Allies were landing in Normandy, he knew exactly what to do. He went out into the garden and pruned his roses. Von Rundstedt knew that in war, early reports, regardless of whether the news is good or bad, are usually misleading. Reacting to them with instant analysis merely makes the problem worse.

aid an afflicted man to me, when I was last in a hospital like this, ‘Sir, I can frequently fly.’ I was half ashamed to reflect that so could I – by night. Said a woman to me on the same occasion, 'Queen Victoria frequently comes to dine with me, and her Majesty and I dine off peaches and maccaroni in our nightgowns, and His Royal Highness the Prince Consort does us the honour to make a third on horseback in a Field Marshal’s uniform.’ Could I refrain from reddening with consciousness when I remembered the amazing royal parties I myself have given (at night), the unaccountable viands I have put on table, and my extraordinary manner of conduction myself on those distinguished occasions? I wonder that the great master who knew everything when he called Sleep the death of each day’s life, did not call Dreams, the insanity of each day’s sanity

The trials continued week after week, until nearly all the old Bolsheviks who had formed the party during and after the October Revolution had been liquidated. In fact, of the nearly two thousand delegates to the 1934 party congress, half were arrested and many sent to the firing squad. The military fared no better. Three out of five field marshals were arrested, tried, and executed, as well as thousands of lesser grade officers.

He wanted to grind every Federation world into dust beneath his boot as his army blazed a trail of blood and corpses all the way to Seneca. He wanted to storm their inner sanctum and fire a laser into the skull of their Field Marshal while their Chairman watched, then fire a laser into the skull of their Chairman. He wanted to burn their bodies on a pyre and carry the ashes back to Deucali and spread them on his mother’s consecrated grave.

He had long recognized that his task was not to be a field marshal, but rather to orchestrate a fractious multinational coalition, to be “chairman of the board”—the phrase was his—of the largest martial enterprise on earth. The master politician Franklin Roosevelt had chosen him as supreme commander from among thirteen hundred U.S. Army generals because he was not only a “natural leader,” in the president’s judgment, but also a military man with exceptional political instincts.

Field Marshal, and soon-to-be-relieved commander of Army Group South, Erich von Manstein summed up how isolated his Führer had become: “Hitler… thought he could see things much better from behind his desk than the commanders at the front. He ignored the fact that much of what was marked on his far-too-detailed situation maps was obviously out of date. From that distance, moreover, he could not possibly judge what would be the proper and necessary action to take on the spot.”6 An

Marshall was watching her again, and Jane’s skin prickled under his perusal. That was when Jane realized she’d made a mistake. Those freckles, his background—they’d all misled her into thinking that he was a quiet little rabbit. He wasn’t. He was the wolf that looked as if he were lounging about on the outskirts of the pack, a lone hanger-on, when in truth he had adopted that position simply so that he could see everything that transpired in the fields below. He wasn’t solitary; he was waiting for someone to make a mistake. He looked willing to wait a very long time.

Flattery was a prime department store strategy for cultivating customers, and men got a heavy dose. Males could expect to be treated like busy executives and discriminating men of the world. Men’s sections, floors, and entire stores were designed to resemble opulent clubs, often outfitted with wood-paneled grills that women customers were not permitted to enter. Vandervoort’s and Filene’s went to somewhat unusual lengths in furnishing a men’s lounge and smoking room, oddly working against the prevailing assumption that men had no time to spare. In Halle’s new men’s store of the late 1920s, dark mahogany paneling and carved marble detailing created the ambience of a priestly inner sanctum. Filene’s furnished an indoor putting green in its men’s store of 1928. Wanamaker’s outdid itself in 1932, the unlucky Depression year it opened its luxurious six-story men’s store in the Lincoln-Liberty building, with stocks of British imports and an equestrian shop too. Both Wanamaker’s and Marshall Field sold airplanes. Lord & Taylor reserved its tenth floor in New York City for men, with heman departments for cutlery, the home bar, and barbecue equipment. Gimbels, Macy’s, and Hearn’s stuck to more basic appeals, using their large liquor departments to attract men.

Leftenant Gravey settled his wooden hand kindly on Charlotte’s shoulder. “Don’t let them do that to you, you nor your sister.” How had she never noticed that Gravey had such a lovely Northern accent, so like Tabitha’s? “Let who do what, Leftenant?” “Men. Dazzle you. They do it for advantage, no different from a field marshal gaining the high ground. You do the dazzling. You climb the hill. Or else you’ll be stuck down in the muddy marsh with the rest of us, and that’s no place to be.” “But I don’t know how to dazzle. I couldn’t dazzle a house fern.” Gravey kissed her forehead. He smelled like a warm autumn bonfire sparkling away. “Learn fast,” he said.

Field Marshall Helmuth von Moltke, the leading nineteenth-century Prussian strategist, was said to have laughed only twice: once when told that a certain French fortress was impregnable, and once when his mother-in-law died. Martin Heidegger, whom some regard as the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century but many find incomprehensible, was even more sparing of his mirth. He is recorded to have laughed only once, at a picnic with Ernst Jünger in the Harz Mountains. Jünger leaned over to pick up a sauerkraut and sausage roll, and his lederhosen split with a tremendous crack. Heidegger let out a shout of glee, but immediately checked himself, “and his facial expression reverted to its habitual ferocity.

We are glad to visit your beautiful country. It is prosperous—you all live far from the struggle. Nobody destroys your towns, cities, fields. Nobody kills your citizens, your sisters and mothers, your fathers and brothers. I come from a place where bombs pound villages into ash, where Russian blood oils the treads of German tanks, where innocent civilians die every day.” She caught herself up, exhaled slowly as she marshaled her next words. No one moved, least of all the marksman. “An accurate bullet fired by a sniper like me, Mrs. Roosevelt, is no more than a response to an enemy. My husband lost his life at Sevastopol before my eyes. He died in my arms. As far as I am concerned, any Hitlerite I see through my telescopic sights is the one who killed him.” A frozen silence fell over the room. Only the marksman’s eyes moved as he looked around the table, cataloging responses. The Soviet delegation leader sat clutching his butter knife, looking like he wanted to saw off her head and bowl it through the window into the White House gardens. The smart Washington women in their frills and pearls looked appalled. The First Lady looked . . . Embarrassed? the marksman wondered. Did that horsey presidential bitch look embarrassed? “I’m sorry, Lyudmila dear,” she said quietly, laying down her napkin. “I had no wish to offend you. This conversation is important, and we will continue it in a more suitable setting. But now, unfortunately, it is time to disperse. My duties are calling, and I understand

This is one of the great paradoxes of the Third Reich. At the very moment when Hitler stood at the zenith of his military power, with most of the European Continent at his feet, his victorious armies stretched from the Pyrenees to the Arctic Circle, from the Atlantic to beyond the Vistula, rested now and ready for further action, he had no idea how to go on and bring the war to a victorious conclusion. Nor had his generals, twelve of whom now bandied field marshals’ batons. There is, of course, a reason for this, although it was not clear to us at the time. The Germans, despite their vaunted military talents, lacked any grand strategic concept. Their horizons were limited—they had always been limited—to land warfare against the neighboring nations on the European Continent.

Herman and I have been doing a lot of talking about the cake the past couple of days, and we think we have a good plan for the three tiers. The bottom tier will be the chocolate tier and incorporate the dacquoise component, since that will all provide a good strong structural base. We are doing an homage to the Frango mint, that classic Chicago chocolate that was originally produced at the Marshall Field's department store downtown. We're going to make a deep rich chocolate cake, which will be soaked in fresh-mint simple syrup. The dacquoise will be cocoa based with ground almonds for structure, and will be sandwiched between two layers of a bittersweet chocolate mint ganache, and the whole tier will be enrobed in a mint buttercream. The second tier is an homage to Margie's Candies, an iconic local ice cream parlor famous for its massive sundaes, especially their banana splits. It will be one layer of vanilla cake and one of banana cake, smeared with a thin layer of caramelized pineapple jam and filled with fresh strawberry mousse. We'll cover it in chocolate ganache and then in sweet cream buttercream that will have chopped Luxardo cherries in it for the maraschino-cherry-on-top element. The final layer will be a nod to our own neighborhood, pulling from the traditional flavors that make up classical Jewish baking. The cake will be a walnut cake with hints of cinnamon, and we will do a soaking syrup infused with a little bit of sweet sherry. A thin layer of the thick poppy seed filling we use in our rugelach and hamantaschen, and then a layer of honey-roasted whole apricots and vanilla pastry cream. This will get covered in vanilla buttercream.

Said an afflicted man to me, when I was last in a hospital like this, ‘Sir, I can frequently fly.’ I was half ashamed to reflect that so could I – by night. Said a woman to me on the same occasion, 'Queen Victoria frequently comes to dine with me, and her Majesty and I dine off peaches and maccaroni in our nightgowns, and His Royal Highness the Prince Consort does us the honour to make a third on horseback in a Field Marshal’s uniform.’ Could I refrain from reddening with consciousness when I remembered the amazing royal parties I myself have given (at night), the unaccountable viands I have put on table, and my extraordinary manner of conduction myself on those distinguished occasions? I wonder that the great master who knew everything when he called Sleep the death of each day’s life, did not call Dreams, the insanity of each day’s sanity

Israel’s allegation that for Palestinians life is cheap has a long pedigree among Western imperialists. The words of General Westmoreland, quoted in the 1974 film Hearts and Minds about the Vietnam War, always stuck in my mind. Generalizing, the general opined, “The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. We value life and human dignity. They don’t care about life and human dignity.” Westmoreland is a worthy heir to the notorious lights of European empires, the likes of the Britons Cecil Rhodes (South Africa) and Lord Cromer (Egypt), and the French Field Marshal Bugeaud (Algeria). This history of dehumanizing the “Orientals” still lurks below the surface in Western culture, despite the anti-colonial struggles and the Civil Rights Movement in the United States that made it impolitic to voice such unalloyed prejudice publicly. The need for “Orientals,” for barbarians, as a “kind of solution,” persists. Today they are the Arabs and Muslims, and the Israeli information section of the Operations Manual feeds on and into the latent racism.

Baron, Baroness Originally, the term baron signified a person who owned land as a direct gift from the monarchy or as a descendant of a baron. Now it is an honorary title. The wife of a baron is a baroness. Duke, Duchess, Duchy, Dukedom Originally, a man could become a duke in one of two ways. He could be recognized for owning a lot of land. Or he could be a victorious military commander. Now a man can become a duke simply by being appointed by a monarch. Queen Elizabeth II appointed her husband Philip the Duke of Edinburgh and her son Charles the Duke of Wales. A duchess is the wife or widow of a duke. The territory ruled by a duke is a duchy or a dukedom. Earl, Earldom Earl is the oldest title in the English nobility. It originally signified a chieftan or leader of a tribe. Each earl is identified with a certain area called an earldom. Today the monarchy sometimes confers an earldom on a retiring prime minister. For example, former Prime Minister Harold Macmillan is the Earl of Stockton. King A king is a ruling monarch. He inherits this position and retains it until he abdicates or dies. Formerly, a king was an absolute ruler. Today the role of King of England is largely symbolic. The wife of a king is a queen. Knight Originally a knight was a man who performed devoted military service. The title is not hereditary. A king or queen may award a citizen with knighthood. The criterion for the award is devoted service to the country. Lady One may use Lady to refer to the wife of a knight, baron, count, or viscount. It may also be used for the daughter of a duke, marquis, or earl. Marquis, also spelled Marquess. A marquis ranks above an earl and below a duke. Originally marquis signified military men who stood guard on the border of a territory. Now it is a hereditary title. Lord Lord is a general term denoting nobility. It may be used to address any peer (see below) except a duke. The House of Lords is the upper house of the British Parliament. It is a nonelective body with limited powers. The presiding officer for the House of Lords is the Lord Chancellor or Lord High Chancellor. Sometimes a mayor is called lord, such as the Lord Mayor of London. The term lord may also be used informally to show respect. Peer, Peerage A peer is a titled member of the British nobility who may sit in the House of Lords, the upper house of Parliament. Peers are ranked in order of their importance. A duke is most important; the others follow in this order: marquis, earl, viscount, baron. A group of peers is called a peerage. Prince, Princess Princes and princesses are sons and daughters of a reigning king and queen. The first-born son of a royal family is first in line for the throne, the second born son is second in line. A princess may become a queen if there is no prince at the time of abdication or death of a king. The wife of a prince is also called a princess. Queen A queen may be the ruler of a monarchy, the wife—or widow—of a king. Viscount, Viscountess The title Viscount originally meant deputy to a count. It has been used most recently to honor British soldiers in World War II. Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery was named a viscount. The title may also be hereditary. The wife of a viscount is a viscountess. (In pronunciation the initial s is silent.) House of Windsor The British royal family has been called the House of Windsor since 1917. Before then, the royal family name was Wettin, a German name derived from Queen Victoria’s husband. In 1917, England was at war with Germany. King George V announced that the royal family name would become the House of Windsor, a name derived from Windsor Castle, a royal residence. The House of Windsor has included Kings George V, Edward VII, George VI, and Queen Elizabeth II.

newer marshals,” Newman added. “I was glad when they invited them to teach you new guys. That much field experience shouldn’t go to waste.” “A lot of them are stake-and-hammer guys though,” Newman said. “Old-fashioned doesn’t begin to cover their methods.” “The hunter that taught me the ropes was like that.” “I thought Forrester was your mentor. He’s known for his gun knowledge,” Livingston said. “You get that off his Wikipedia page?” I asked. “No, he worked a case that a buddy of mine was on. My friend is a gun nut, and he loved Forrester’s arsenal. He said that Forrester even used a flamethrower.” “Yep, that’s Ted,” I said, shaking my head. “So, he wasn’t your first mentor?” “No, Manny Rodriguez was. He taught me how to raise zombies and how to kill vampires.” “What happened to him?” Newman asked. “His wife thought he was getting too old and forced him to retire from the hunting side of things.” “It is not a job for old men,” Olaf said. “I guess it isn’t, but I wasn’t ready to fly solo when Manny retired. I was lucky I didn’t get killed doing jobs on my own at first.” “When did Forrester start training you?” Livingston asked. “Soon enough to help me stay alive.” “Ted spoke highly of you from the beginning,” Olaf said. “He does not give unearned praise. Are you being humble?” “No, I don’t . . . I really did have some close calls when Manny first retired, or maybe I just missed having backup.” Hazel brought our coffee and my Coke. “I’ll be back to fill those waters up, and with the juice,” she said before she left again. I so wanted to start questioning her, but this was Newman’s warrant and everyone else besides Olaf was local. They knew Hazel. I didn’t. I’d let them play it for now. The coffee was fresh and hot and surprisingly good for a mass-produced cup. I did add sugar and cream, so it wasn’t great coffee, but I didn’t add much, so it wasn’t bad either. Olaf put in way more sugar than I did, so his cup would have been too sweet for me. He didn’t take cream. I guessed we could be snobby about each other’s coffee habits later. “But it was Forrester who taught you how to fight empty hand?” Livingston asked. “I had some martial arts when we met, but he started me on more real-world training that worked outside of a judo mat or a martial arts tournament.” “I thought he was out of New Mexico,” Livingston said. “He is.” “And you’re in St. Louis, Missouri.” “I am.” “Hard to train long-distance.” “I have people I train with at home.” “How often do you train?” Kaitlin asked. “At least three times a week in hand-to-hand and blade.” “Really that often?” Newman asked. “Yeah. How often do you train?” “I go to the range two, three times a month.” “Any martial arts?” I asked. “I go to the gym three times a week.

As Prussian field marshal Helmuth Karl Bernhard Graf von Moltke said, “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.

chief

William (Marshal n.n.) gained great credit and patronage by his determined defense of Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine… He was largely supported by royal patronage… serving the Young King (Henry, son of Henry II) on the field of tournament and at court. The latter role may have been the more dangerous: his biographer claims that enemies falsely accused him of adultery with the wife of the Young King; some think it was a romantic invention… If an accusation was in fact made, Marshal solved it as he did later when charges were brought against him at the court of King John: by challenging his accusers to fight, a challenge that they prudently avoided. It is fascinating to note that Lancelot, with a roughly contemporary beginning to a career in imaginative literature, would respond in just this fashion to charges against him. And the Young King, needing William`s martial skills (as Arthur needed those of Lancelot in romance), soon retained the great warrior in his service again.

By this point, the Red Army had commenced its long-feared major offensive in the east. Much more so than at Margival, things got tetchy when Rommel demanded that Hitler draw the political consequences and try to negotiate a settlement to end the war in the west so as to hold the front in the east. This time Hitler’s reaction was more brusque: he told his field marshal that he was only to speak on military matters. When Rommel pressed the point, the Führer banished him from the room.

The Sufi poet Rumi once wrote, “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right-doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

In 1944, Field-Marshal Sir William Slim, Commander of the British/Indian 14th Army, faced a major Japanese offensive from Burma into India, aimed at capturing the base at Dimapur. Slim had the option of fighting from his positions or falling back to Kohima. After careful deliberation, he opted for the latter course despite strong political pressure not to abandon any Indian territory and give the Indians the impression that the Allies were losing. He stood firm and based his plans entirely on military considerations. Had he fought from his forward positions on the Chindwin River, his Lines of Communication would have been long and tenuous. A defeat would open the way to the plains of Assam. His decision to fall back and shorten his lines, and to a better killing ground at Kohima, forced the Japanese Commander, General Mutaguchi, to extend his lines. By standing fast at Kohima despite being invested, till the outbreak of the monsoons, victory was assured. The Japanese could not maintain their forces and had to retreat. The defeat was so overwhelming that Field-Marshal Slim followed up his Kohima victory with the classic pursuit operation to Rangoon itself, which fell in May 1945.

Chevy SUV

Institutionalization and ‘special housing' At the time of the passage of the ADA, states still had laws on the books requiring people with mental disabilities to be institutionalized. Not even slaves had been so restricted. "Spurred by the eugenics movement," write legal historians Morton Horwitz, Martha Field and Martha Minow, "every state in the country passed laws that singled out people with mental or physical disabilities for institutionalization." The laws made it clear that the state's purpose was not to benefit disabled people but to segregate them from "normal" society. Thus, statutes noted that the disabled were segregated and institutionalized for being a "menace to society" [and] so that "society [might be] relieved from the heavy economic and moral losses arising from the existence at large of these unfortunate persons." "The state of Washington made it a crime for a parent to refuse state-ordered institutionalization," they wrote; "once children were institutionalized, many state laws required parents to waive all custody rights." Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote in the 1985 Cleburne Supreme Court decision (the decision saying that people with mental retardation did not constitute a "discrete and insular" minority) that this "regime of state-mandated segregation and degradation [had] in its virulence and bigotry rivaled, and indeed paralleled, the worst excesses of Jim Crow. Massive custodial institutions were built to warehouse the retarded for life." Yet they continue today. In 1999, the Supreme Court in its Olmstead decision acknowledged that the ADA did in fact require states to provide services to people with disabilities in the "most integrated setting"; but institutionalization continued, because federal funds  -- Medicaid, mostly  -- had a built-in "institutional bias," the result of savvy lobbying over the years by owners of institutions like nursing homes: In no state could one be denied a "bed" in a nursing home, but in only a few states could one use those same Medicaid dollars to get services in one's home that were usually much less expensive. Ongoing battles were waged to close down the institutions, to allow the people in them to live on their own or in small group settings. But parents often fought to keep them open. When they did close, other special facilities cropped up.

Why will politicians never learn the simple principle of concentration of force at the vital point,

Modern developments, such as wireless and telephones, may constitute serious dangers for a commander in the field, if these systems are made use of by politicians to endeavour to influence operations without being conversant and familiar with the circumstances prevailing in that theatre of operations. Wellington was indeed fortunate!

We worked from day to day, a hand to mouth existence with a policy based on opportunism. Every wind that blew swung us like a weathercock. As I was to find out, planned strategy was not Winston’s strong card. He preferred to work by intuition and impulse.

be without him, but God knows where we shall go with him!

Lunched with de Gaulle a most unattractive specimen

Timoshenko arrived drunk and by continuous drinking restored himself to sobriety by 5 am.

Stalin turned to Anthony and said: ‘Do your Generals also hold their drink so badly?’ Anthony, the complete diplomat, replied: ‘They may have a better capacity for drink, but they have not the same ability for winning battles!

To be honest, my spirits dropped after that, and I got pretty quiet and introspective, but I will say this: the peak of Denali ain’t a bad place to take a moment for private reflection. At the top, you realize how high you are: above twenty thousand feet, you see these extraordinarily huge glaciers going on for miles. Off the side, there’s the Great Gorge of Ruth Glacier, one of the deepest canyons in the world, filled with ice and twice the size of the Grand Canyon. Far off in the distance, you can see greenery, but it’s twenty to thirty miles away. You are a speck on an enormous chunk of white ice, settled into the vast field of our world, nestled into but one corner of our inconceivably huge universe. I like that feeling—we humans are so small, so insignificant, but part of something mind-blowingly enormous. It is a paradoxical expansion and contraction, a contradictory sense of insignificance and greatness, of finiteness and boundlessness, of solitude and connectedness.

The Sufi poet RUmi once wrote, "Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right-doing, there is a field. I'll meet you there.

and had every intention of using sprayed mustard gas on the beaches.

Dudley Pound is quite the slowest and most useless chairman one can imagine. How the PM abides him I can’t imagine.

not be surprised to see a thrust into Russia.

My own opinion at the time, and an opinion that was shared by most people, was that Russia would not last long, possibly 3 or 4 months, possibly slightly longer.

I had seen enough of him to realize his impetuous nature, his gambler’s spirit, and his determination to follow his own selected path at all costs, to realize fully what I was faced with.

The more I see of politicians the less I think of them! They are seldom influenced directly by the true aspects of a problem and are usually guided by some ulterior political reason!

One of his first acts, however, was virtually to convert that democracy into a dictatorship! Granted that he still was responsible to a Parliament, and granted that he still formed part of a Cabinet; yet his personality was such, and the power he acquired adequate, to place him in a position where both parliament and Cabinet were only minor inconveniences to be humoured occasionally, but which he held in the palm of his hand, able to swing both of them at his pleasure.

the human mind is like the 6 inch pipe running under a culvert, it is only constructed to take a certain volume of water, in a flood the water flows over the culvert.

Field-Marshal von Hindenburg

History is the business of identifying momentous events from the comfort of a high-back chair. With the benefit of time, the historian looks back and points to a date in the manner of a gray-haired field marshal pointing to a bend in a river on a map: There it was, he says. The turning point. The decisive factor. The fateful day that fundamentally altered all that was to follow.

Selborne [responsible for SOE] there pleading for more aircraft for his activities. He asked PM to approach President with a view to securing more Liberators. PM replied, ‘What you are after is for me to pull the teat off the cow’!!!

Smuts appeared having arrived in the morning, he raised the interesting point as to whether we really wanted to dismember Germany now, or whether a strong Germany in the future might not assist in balancing power in Europe against Russia. He said he had no doubts last year about dismembering Germany, but now was doubtful about it.

We were next shown a parachuting display by over 600 parachutists. Only 3 casualties

However it is not sufficient to see something clearly. You have got to try and convince countless people as to where the truth lies when they don’t want to be acquainted with that fact. It is an exhausting process and I am very very tired, and shudder at the useless struggles that lie ahead.

If a man says he is not afraid of dying, he is either lying or is a Gorkha

As it turned out, Moss and the Patriots were hotter than the game-time temperature of 84 degrees. They ran the Jets off the field in a 38–14 rout highlighted by Moss’s 51-yard touchdown against triple coverage and 183 receiving yards on nine catches. “He was born to play football,” Brady said of his newest and most lethal weapon. The quarterback had it all now. He was getting serious with his relatively new girlfriend, Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bündchen (his ex-girlfriend, actress Bridget Moynahan, had just given birth to their son, Jack), and now he was being paired on the field with a perfect partner of a different kind. Brady wasn’t seeing the Oakland Randy Moss. He was seeing the Minnesota Moss, the vintage Moss, the 6´4˝ receiver who ran past defenders and jumped over them with ease. Brady had all day to throw to Moss and Welker, who caught the first of the quarterback’s three touchdown passes. He wasn’t sacked while posting a quarterback rating of 146.6, his best in nearly five years. Man, this was a great day for the winning coach all around. On the other sideline, Eric Mangini had made a big mistake by sticking with his quarterback, Chad Pennington, a former teammate of Moss’s at Marshall, when the outcome was no longer in doubt, subjecting his starter to some unnecessary hits as he played on an injured ankle. Pennington was annoyed enough to pull himself from the game with 6:51 left and New England leading by 17. “That was the first time I’ve ever done that,” Pennington said. Mangini played the fool on this Sunday, and Belichick surely got the biggest kick out of that. But the losing coach actually won a game within the game in the first half that the overwhelming majority of people inside Giants Stadium knew absolutely nothing about. It had started in the days before this opener, when Mangini informed his former boss that the Jets would not tolerate in their own stadium an illegal yet common Patriots practice: the videotaping of opposing coaches’ signals from the sideline. The message to Belichick was simple: Don’t do it in our house. It was something of an open secret that New England had been illegally taping opposing coaches during games for some time, and yet the first public mention of improper spying involving Belichick’s Patriots actually assigned them the collective role of victim. Following a 21–0 Miami victory in December 2006, a couple of Dolphins told the Palm Beach Post that the team had “bought” past game tapes that included audio of Brady making calls at the line, and that the information taken from those tapes had helped them shut out Brady and sack him four times. “I’ve never seen him so flustered,” said Miami linebacker Zach Thomas.

This day is a good example of the way Winston’s impetuosity was apt to delay matters and waste one’s time. If only he had given us time to consider this wire before meeting him we should not have wasted half the morning, nor would his time and that of Eden, Attlee and Lyttelton also [have] been wasted. We could easily have stated the time by which we should have been ready, much confusion would have been avoided and time saved. Unfortunately he always wished to stick his fingers into a pie before it was cooked!

filled with sympathy for him when one realized the colossal burden he was bearing and the weight of responsibility he shouldered. On the other hand if we had not checked some of his wild ideas, heaven knows where we should be now!

He is the most difficult man I have ever served with, but thank God for having given me the opportunity of trying to serve such a man in a crisis such as the one this country is going through at present.

It must be remembered that Eisenhower had never even commanded a battalion in action when he found himself commanding a group of armies in North Africa! No wonder he was at a loss as to what to do, and allowed himself to be absorbed in the political situation at the expense of the tactical. I had little confidence in his having the ability to handle the military situation confronting him, and he caused me great anxiety.

I am afraid that Eisenhower as a general is hopeless! He submerges himself in politics and neglects his military duties, partly, I am afraid, because he knows little if anything about military

remarks about Eisenhower are pretty drastic! My opinion, however, never changed much as regards his tactical ability or his powers of command. In these early days he literally knew nothing of the requirements of a commander in action…. Where he shone was in his ability to handle allied forces, to treat them all with strict impartiality, and to get the very best out of an inter-allied force…. As Supreme Commander, what he may have lacked in military ability he greatly made up for by the charm of his personality.

A false idea of his value, consequently some difficulty in making him realize that he had reached his ceiling. Then Beckett back from Malta with long talk why Gort had better be relieved. Then Andy McNaughton to discuss employment of Canadians. Then QMG and DCIGS to discuss rate of arrival which could be contemplated as maximum for American divisions and date of departures of Tank Brigade for Tunisia. From there to S of S and finally with PM for 6.30 to 8.15 pm. Back to flat with lots of work after dinner. This is a dog’s life!!

We have now at last received their paper and are to discuss it tomorrow. I shudder at the results.

I find it very hard even now not to look on your North African strategy with a jaundiced eye!!’ I replied, ‘What strategy would you have preferred?’ To which he answered, ‘Cross Channel operations for the liberation of France and advance on Germany, we should finish the war quicker.’ I remember replying, ‘Yes, probably, but not the way we hope to finish it!

Winston did not like the plan for the capture of Burma, and produced one of his priceless sentences by saying, ‘You might as well eat a porcupine one quill at a time’!

I remember that when I was discussing the matter with Wavell and trying to stop him from sending in his resignation, I told him that if I were to take offence when abused by Winston and given to understand that he had no confidence in me, I should have to resign at least once every day! But that I never felt that any such resignations were likely to have the least effect in reforming Winston’s wicked ways! I think this argument fortunately convinced him that it was a bad step to take.

Eden’s support of de Gaulle will go near losing the war for us if we do not watch it.

This must not be considered as the end, it may possibly be the beginning of the end, but it is certainly the end of the beginning.’!!

Had to turn down a very bad plan for the capture of Sardinia worked out by Eisenhower. It never went beyond the landing on the beaches and failed to examine the operations required after the landing is completed. A typical bit of work of the Combined Operations department of Mountbatten’s. Instructed Joint Planners to work out complete plan.

Eisenhower evidently became aware of this manoeuvre and with his high quality of impartiality rid himself of Clark as his Deputy Commander and sent him back to command the reserve forces in Morocco. Through this action Ike greatly rose in my estimation.

Patton had been of great interest. I had already heard of him, but must confess that his swash-buckling personality exceeded my expectation. I did not form any high opinion of him, nor had I any reason to alter this view at a later date.

We were also shown latest aircraft without propellers, driven by air sucked in in front and squirted out behind! Apparently likely to be the fighter of the future.

Running a war seems to consist in making plans and then ensuring that all those destined to carry it out don’t quarrel with each other instead of the enemy.

The trouble is that the American mind likes proceeding from the general to the particular, whilst in the problem we have to solve we cannot evolve any form of general doctrine until we have carefully examined the particular details of each problem. The background really arises out of King’s desire to find every loophole he possibly can to divert troops to the Pacific!

To a highly literate and mechanized culture the movie appeared as a world of triumphant illusions and dreams that money could buy. It was at this moment of the movie that cubism occurred, and it has been described by E. H. Gombrich (Art and Illusion) as “the most radical attempt to stamp out ambiguity and to enforce one reading of the picture — that of a man-made construction, a colored canvas.” For cubism substitutes all facets of an object simultaneously for the “point of view” or facet of perspective illusion. Instead of the specialized illusion of the third dimension on canvas, cubism sets up an interplay of planes and contradiction or dramatic conflict of patterns, lights, textures that “drives home the message” by involvement. This is held by many to be an exercise in painting, not in illusion. In other words, cubism, by giving the inside and outside, the top, bottom, back, and front and the rest, in two dimensions, drops the illusion of perspective in favor of instant sensory awareness of the whole. Cubism, by seizing on instant total awareness, suddenly announced that the medium is the message. Is it not evident that the moment that the sequence yields to the simultaneous, one is in the world of the structure and of configuration? Is that not what has happened in physics as in painting, poetry, and in communication? Specialized segments of attention have shifted to total field, and we can now say, “The medium is the message” quite naturally.

A famous Russian Field Marshal and opponent of Napoleon, Count Alexander V. Suvorov (1729–1800), once said, ‘Train hard and fight easy.’ It has become a famous Army quotation, often repeated. He got it spot on, especially where the SAS is concerned.

The Extra Mile. Underneath that was a typed quotation from The Art of War by Sun-tzu: To fail to take the battle to the enemy when your back is to the wall is to perish. Alongside that in the margin was a penciled addendum in what I guessed was Vassell’s handwriting: While coolness in disaster is the supreme proof of a commander’s courage, energy in pursuit is the surest test of his strength of will. Wavell. “Who’s Wavell?” Summer said. “An old British field marshal,

In May 1936, Field Marshall Cyril Deverell became the new CIGS and continued his predecessors policies in regard to accelerated mechanization efforts. When Deverell took over, the British Army still had 13,000 horses and it was spending as much on new recounts as it was on new tank prototypes.

The line between the Rebel and Union element in Georgetown was so marked that it led to divisions even in the churches. There were churches in that part of Ohio where treason was preached regularly, and where, to secure membership, hostility to the government, to the war and to the liberation of the slaves, was far more essential than a belief in the authenticity or credibility of the Bible. There were men in Georgetown who filled all the requirements for membership in these churches. Yet this far-off western village, with a population, including old and young, male and female, of about one thousand—about enough for the organization of a single regiment if all had been men capable of bearing arms—furnished the Union army four general officers and one colonel, West Point graduates, and nine generals and field officers of Volunteers, that I can think of. Of the graduates from West Point, all had citizenship elsewhere at the breaking out of the rebellion, except possibly General A. V. Kautz, who had remained in the army from his graduation. Two of the colonels also entered the service from other localities. The other seven, General McGroierty, Colonels White, Fyffe, Loudon and Marshall, Majors King and Bailey, were all residents of Georgetown when the war broke out, and all of them, who were alive at the close, returned there. Major Bailey was the cadet who had preceded me at West Point. He was killed in West Virginia, in his first engagement. As far as I know, every boy who has entered West Point from that village since my time has been graduated.

It is little remembered that there was a second Pearl Harbor. Ten hours after being alerted to the first, Japanese planes struck Clark Field in the Philippines, destroying one hundred and two planes, including all but three of General Brereton’s B-17s. He had pleaded with MacArthur to attack Japanese air bases in Formosa. MacArthur replied through his aide, Major General Richard K. Sutherland, that he had been ordered not to make “the first overt act.” What was Pearl Harbor if not an overt act? Brereton demanded. While the debate went on, the Japanese, at first delayed by fog, hit near high noon, finding MacArthur’s planes nearly lined up in rows like the shooting gallery it was. “What the hell!” roared Air Corps chief Hap Arnold when he heard about it. • • • • • At 1458 in Honolulu, Tadeo Fuchikami finally made his delivery of Marshall’s alert to the “Commanding General” at Fort Shafter. It was thrown in a wastebasket without carrying out the request to pass it on to the Navy. “For a while I thought the Day of Infamy had been my fault,” Fuchikami mused many years later. Then I realized I was just one of the sands of time.” The Pearl Harbor attack had left eighteen warships sunk or damaged, including five battleships, and one hundred and eighty-eight planes destroyed. The raid killed two thousand four hundred and three Americans. The Japanese lost twenty-nine planes and fifty-five fliers. Kido butai returned home with three hundred and twenty-four surviving planes.

In the ancient world the intuitive awareness of break boundaries as points of reversal and of no return was embodied in the Greek idea of hubris, which Toynbee presents in his Study of History, under the head of “The Nemesis of Creativity” and “The Reversal of Roles.” The Greek dramatists presented the idea of creativity as creating, also, its own kind of blindness, as in the case of Oedipus Rex, who solved the riddle of the Sphinx. It was as if the Greeks felt that the penalty for one break-through was a general sealing-off of awareness to the total field. In a Chinese work—The Way and Its Power (A. Waley translation)—there is a series of instances of the overheated medium, the overextended man or culture, and the peripety or reversal that inevitably follows: He who stands on tiptoe does not stand firm; He who takes the longest strides does not walk the fastest … He who boasts of what he will do succeeds in nothing; He who is proud of his work achieves nothing that endures. One of the most common causes of breaks in any system is the cross-fertilization with another system, such as happened to print with the steam press, or with radio and movies (that yielded the talkies). Today with microfilm and micro-cards, not to mention electric memories, the printed word assumes again much of the handicraft character of a manuscript. But printing from movable type was, itself, the major break boundary in the history of phonetic literacy, just as the phonetic alphabet had been the break boundary between tribal and individualist man.

In America, the intensely visual culture, TV has opened the doors of audile-tactile perception to the non-visual world of spoken languages and food and the plastic arts. As an extension and expediter of the sense life, any medium at once affects the entire field of the senses, as the Psalmist explained long ago in the 113th Psalm: Their idols are silver and gold, The work of men’s hands. They have mouths, but they speak not; Eyes they have, but they see not; They have ears, but they hear not; Noses have they, but they smell not; They have hands, but they handle not; Feet have they, but they walk not; Neither speak they through their throat. They that make them shall be like unto them; Yea, every one that trusteth in them.

In Forster’s novel the moment of truth and dislocation from the typographic trance of the West comes in the Marabar Caves. Adela Quested’s reasoning powers cannot cope with the total inclusive field of resonance that is India. After the Caves: “Life went on as usual, but had no consequences, that is to say, sounds did not echo nor thought develop. Everything seemed cut off at its root and therefore infected with illusion.

In May 1936, Field Marshall Cyril Deverell became the new CIGS and continued his predecessors policies in regard to accelerated mechanization efforts. When Deverell took over, the British Army still had 13,000 horses and it was spending as much on new remounts as it was on new tank prototypes.

Yet so much of the fighting was chaotic that the great German field marshal Helmuth von Moltke would describe the four long years of war as presenting “two armed mobs chasing each other around the country, from which nothing could be learned.

mastery in any single field is conducive to further mastery, because there are universal principles of learning, execution, and mastery.

Dropping out of university after one’s sophomore year to do a startup, especially if you were studying in a field that has largely good career outcomes (say, engineering or computer science), is a very Romantic move. Most startups fail, but the ones that succeed, succeed big. Dropping out to get into entrepreneurship increases both your chances of large failure and large success.   Getting a degree in medicine or law, on the other end of the spectrum, would be highly Classical – you’re investing 7+ years of study to reasonably assure yourself of a good salary. It maximizes the minimum gain, nearly guaranteeing some floor of credibility, earning potential, and career outcomes.

I can’t stress how important this is, and how liberating.  Your results in a new discipline will likely be the baseline results of that field. If you take up running, you’ll get injured at the rate that new runners get injured. If you’ve been incredibly durable in the past, then you’ll get injured at the rate that incredibly durable people get injured.  Why is this important? Because it sets realistic expectations, and then you can mitigate the risks and improve your statistical odds.

Pour le Mérite

Schmidt growled back: “You’ll find there are always two possible decisions open to you. Take the bolder one—it’s always best.

While some biographers claim Rommel had retrieved the goggles from an abandoned British vehicle, stating that “even a general was allowed a little booty,” a 2015 Daily Mail article claims that a British POW actually gave his goggles to the general.  After his capture, Major General Michael Gambier-Parry was invited to supper with Rommel, where he informed the field marshal that his hat had been stolen by a German soldier.  Rommel investigated, and returned Gambier-Parry’s hat, but asked if he could keep the British-issue goggles that the general had left in his staff car.[83]  They became part of his signature appearance, and he was rarely photographed without them after 1941.   Rommel would also receive his moniker, the Desert Fox, in the weeks following his victories there.  In German “Wustenfuchs,” it described a “small fox with a habit of burrowing quickly into the sand to escape predators, affording human occupants of the desert only an occasional fleeting glance.

In the first instance it would carry the American Seventh Army under the celebrated gun-toting General George S. Patton and the British Eighth Army under General (later Field Marshal) Sir Bernard Montgomery.

They had robbed banks and trains for the most part in their journey westward. More than one posse had taken out after them, but none had returned with any of the Taggart men. One posse tracking them from a town near Abilene, Kansas had been found in a Missouri farmer’s wheat field where the gang had taken the time to dump their bodies. Six men, one of them a seasoned lawman. All of the men had been shot several times. Wyn had heard from a man he trusted that the Marshal had been gutted, his entrails stuffed in his mouth. The image kept Wyn alert.

Throughout the decades after Independence, the political culture of the country reflected these ‘secular’ assumptions and attitudes. Though the Indian population was 80 per cent Hindu and the country had been partitioned as a result of a demand for a separate Muslim homeland, three of India’s eleven presidents were Muslims; so were innumerable governors, cabinet ministers, chief ministers of states, ambassadors, generals, and Supreme Court justices. During the war with Pakistan in 1971, when the Pakistani leadership was foolish enough to proclaim a jihad against the Hindu unbelievers, the Indian Air Force in the northern sector was commanded by a Muslim (Air Marshal, later Air Chief Marshal, I. H. Latif); the army commander was a Parsi (General, later Field Marshal, S. H. F. J. Manekshaw), the general officer commanding the forces that marched into Bangladesh was a Sikh (General J. S. Aurora), and the general flown in to negotiate the surrender of the Pakistani forces in East Bengal was Jewish (Major-General J. F. R. Jacob). They led the armed forces of an overwhelmingly Hindu country. That is India.

Marshall Field

History is the business of identifying momentous events from the comfort of a high-back chair. With the benefit of time, the historian looks back and points to a date in the manner of a gray-haired field marshal pointing to a bend in a river on a map:

Anna Freud’s book The Ego and Mechanisms of Defense (1936) was a partial response to this problem. It became a psychoanalytic field marshal’s handbook, documenting and illustrating various unconscious defensive strategies of the ego, alerting the clinician to telltale signs of their operation in the patient’s psyche. Reorienting

The department stores also imposed a new, very American kind of democracy, in which everyone was equal as long as they had the money to pay. (Marshall Field instructed his clerks to call all customers “ladies,” no matter what their dress or manners.) Even poor women enjoyed the stores’ big, carefully decorated windows, with displays that changed regularly.

THE MAIN PIECE of the body lay on the ground, on its back in the middle of a smooth grassy field. In the predawn gloom everything looked gray, but there were scuffed and paler places around the field; I think we were standing in the middle of a softball field. The “we” was Edward, U.S. Marshal Ted Forrester, and me, U.S. Marshal Anita Blake.

armour in battle. I am also thankful for Captain Peter Stocking and Dr Justin Pepperell for ensuring I was factually correct in medical and surgical aspects. Finally, Mr Norman Franks was kind enough to lend his deep expertise on air power and help me comprehend the air contribution to the campaign. I have hugely appreciated the large number of veterans who have ensured that my historical understanding of the Army of 1944 has stayed on track. A full list of those who have helped is enclosed at the back of this book, but I would particularly like to single out Sydney Jary, Joe Lawler, Jon Majendie, Ian Hammerton, Ken Tout and Jack Swaab. Most of all I am indebted to Field Marshal the Lord Bramall

She realized she’d never really been taken seriously—listened to—and by a man she respected to this extent.

and offered them little in any event. There was even talk of pressuring North Korea to demilitarize significantly. The Chinese wished for peace, not conflict, in the region and James Marshall was the president’s man to make it happen. Lifelong friends, they had both excelled in their fields, President Jack King in the military and James Marshall in business. When James had announced his retirement on his fifty-fifth birthday, President King had pounced; Marshall was perfect to obtain the treaties that would secure the Far East. Jack loved and trusted him like a brother. With over four hundred million dollars in the bank, all James Marshall had wanted was to enjoy life but he’d never let Jack down and he’d certainly never

(Von Rundstedt) was not a man of great original thought nor an intellect, but never tried to conceal this. On the other hand, he had much commonsense, an ability to see both sides of an argument, and was possessed with clarity of thought, especially when it came to reducing a problem to its fundamental essentials quickly. He also had, at least until his later years, a capacity for hard work. - pg. 309-310

If only I could dine with Stalin once a week, there would be no trouble at all,”10 Churchill told Field Marshal Montgomery during a picnic lunch on the Normandy beaches a few days after D-Day, one of several informal picnics that Churchill held with his military commanders.

Instead of further mucking around in the Middle East, Brzezinski is seeking to marshal all remaining US-UK resources for a final onslaught on Moscow, Beijing, and the other countries of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the main focal point of world resistance to London and Washington. This is Brzezinski’s new Operation Barbarossa. The financiers who control Brzezinski are now fielding Obama as the plausible public face for a new era of brutal and bellicose imperialist subversion and geopolitics which will be advertised on the basis of multiculturalism and dignity through selfdetermination attained through the subversion, balkanization, partition and subdivision of existing states, instead of the narrow and venomous Islamophobia which has been the constant and strident note of the Bush-Cheney neocons.

Implicit Communication The German organizational climate encouraged people to act, and to take the initiative, even during the terror and chaos of war. Within this climate, the principles of mutual trust and intuitive competence make much of implicit communication, as opposed to detailed, written instructions. The Germans felt they had no alternative. As the Chief of the Prussian General Staff in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke, observed in the mid-1800s, the greater risk is the loss of time that comes from always trying to be explicit.61 Or as General Gaedcke commented about his unit in WW II, if he had tried to write everything down, “we would have been too late with every attack we ever attempted.”62

Give the lady what she wants.” —Marshall Field

Planning is everything. Plans are nothing." —Field Marshal Helmuth Graf von Moltke

When all is said and done the greatest quality required in a commander is “decision”; he must be able to issue clear orders and have the drive to get things done. Indecision and hesitation are fatal in any officer; in a [commander-in-chief] they are criminal. —FIELD MARSHALL MONTGOMERY OF EL ALAMEIN

Shed sweat—not blood,

...Marshall Field's Department Store....I spent - in more ways than one - the afternoon shipping in the vast and famous old store downtown....And then I had them mail a catalog home, too, jus tin case I'd missed something.

Flow is a state of self-forgetfulness, the opposite of rumination and worry: instead of being lost in nervous preoccupation, people in flow are so absorbed in the task at hand that they lose all self-consciousness, dropping the small preoccupations—health, bills, even doing well, of daily life. In this sense moments of flow are egoless. And although people perform at their peak while in flow, they are unconcerned with how they are doing, with thoughts of success or failure—the sheer pleasure of the act itself is what motivates them. A child who is naturally talented in music or movement, for example, will enter flow more easily in that domain than in those where she is less able. That initial passion can be the seed for high levels of attainment, as the child comes to realize that pursuing the field, whether it be dance, math, or music, is a source of the joy of flow. And since it takes pushing the limits of one's ability to sustain flow, that becomes a prime motivator for getting better and better; it makes the child happy. Pursuing flow through learning is a more humane, natural, and very likely more effective way to marshal emotions in the service of education.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right-doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

There is a long history of this growing promiscuity, from the glorification of daily life and its irruption within the historical dimension - up until the implacable immersion into the real all too real, into the human all too human, into the banal and residual. But the last decade saw an extraordinary acceleration of this banalization of the world, by the relay of information and universal communication -and above all by the fact that this banality has become experimental. The field of banality is no longer merely residual; it has become a theatre of operations. Brought to the screen, as is the case with Loft Story, it becomes an object of experimental leisure and desire. A verification of what Marshall McLuhan stated about television: that it is a perpetual test, and we are subjected to it like guinea pigs, in an automatic mental interaction.

Field Marshal Brooke once wrote in his diary: ‘It is astonishing how petty and small men can be in connection with questions of command.

Glasgow did have the occasional statue of a scientist or whatever, but it was largely mass murderers. Field Marshal Lord Roberts, the plinth said, hero of the Indian Rebellion of 1858.This was Britain, and if you killed enough foreigners, they let you ride a metal horse into the future.

You shall serve Yahweh your God, and I shall bless your bread and your water, and I will take sickness from your midst. 23:25 None shall miscarry their young, nor be barren in your land, and I will give you the full measure of your days. 23:26 I will send fear of me before you, and I will destroy all the people to whom you come. I will make your enemies turn their backs to you. 23:27 I will send hornets before you, which shall drive out the Hivite, the Canaanite and the Hittite, from before you. 23:28 I will not drive them out in one year, lest the land become desolate and the beasts of the field multiply against you. 23:29 Little by little I will drive them out from before you, until your numbers increase, and you inherit the land. 23:30 I will set your boundaries from the Red Sea to the sea of the Philistines, and from the desert to the river. And I will deliver the inhabitants of the land into your hand, and you shall drive them out. 23:31 You shall make no covenant with them, nor with their gods. 23:32 They must not dwell in your land, lest they make you sin against me. For if you serve their gods, they will surely ensnare

As an eagle stirs her nest and flutters over her young, as she takes them up and bears them upon her wings, 32:11 so did Yahweh alone lead Jacob. There was no other god with him. 32:12 He brought him to the mounts and valleys of earth, that he might eat the crops of the fields. He gave him honey from rock, and oil from flint. 32:13 He gave you butter of cows, and milk of sheep, and fat of lambs, and rams of the breed of Bashan, and goats, and kernels of wheat, and you drank the pure blood of the grape.

O mais fácil teria sido Marshall Field fazer exatamente o que seus companheiros fizeram. Quando a situação era difícil e o futuro parecia desanimador, eles partiram e foram para onde parecia mais fácil. Marque bem essa diferença entre Marshall Field e os outros comerciantes. É a diferença que distingue aqueles que alcançam o sucesso dos que fracassam.

A general may succeed for some time in persuading his superiors that he is a good commander: he will never

Our main danger lies in being drawn into Belgium for political reasons to support the Belgians, instead of holding positions we have been preparing.

Lord Milne, whose mind is as clear as ever, he was very much of the same opinion as I was. He also expressed the view that from a military point of view he considered we were wrong to advance into Belgium.

the Maginot line is a stroke of genius. And yet! It gave me but little feeling of security, and I consider that the French would have done better to invest the money in the shape of mobile defences

Without him England was lost for a certainty, with him England has been on the verge of disaster time and again.

democracy is at a great disadvantage against a dictatorship when it comes to war. Secondly a government with only one big man in it, and that one man a grave danger in many respects, is in a powerless way.

Party politics, party interests, still override larger war issues. Petty jealousies colour discussions and influence destinies. Politicians still suffer from that little knowledge of military matters which gives them unwarranted confidence that they are born strategists!

He certainly had a much easier time of it working with Roosevelt, he informed me that he frequently did not see him for a month or six weeks. I was fortunate if I did not see Winston for 6 hours.

went to see the organization for breaking down ciphers [Bletchley Park] – a wonderful set of professors and genii! I marvel at the work they succeed in doing.

Sixth Army and elements of the Fourth Panzer Army had been encircled in an offensive that was an ominous sign for the Wehrmacht. Joachim Wieder wrote: ‘We have never imagined a catastrophe of such proportions to be possible.’ The Sixth Army was in dire straits. Caught with no winter clothing and little food and fuel, it was too weak to try to break out of its confines. But Hitler did not want Paulus to break out and instead directed him to establish ‘Festung Stalingrad’ – Fortress Stalingrad – and to ‘dig in and await relief from outside’. Although he was placing this formation in a desperate situation, Hitler demanded that the Sixth Army pin and fix as many Soviet troops as possible around the Volga in order to give Army Group A the best possible chance to extract itself from the Caucasus. In the meantime, Field Marshal Erich von

Spies aren’t like soldiers, Field Marshal. A soldier has loyalty, yes, but at the end of the day he does what he does for a full belly and a month’s wages. Spies do it because they love the game. They love their country, or their king.

feathers projecting from her hat as of the bellhops dragging her luggage behind her. But what guaranteed her position as the natural center of attention were the two borzois she had on leash. In an instant the Count could see that they were magnificent beasts. Their coats silver, their loins lean, their every sense alert, these dogs had been raised to give chase in the cold October air with a hunting party hot on their heels. And at day’s end? They were meant to sit at the feet of their master before a fire in a manor house—not adorn the hands of a willow in the lobby of a grand hotel. . . . The injustice of this was not lost on the dogs. As their mistress addressed Arkady at the front desk, they tugged every which way, sniffing about for familiar landmarks. “Stop it!” the willow commanded in a surprisingly husky voice. Then she yanked in a manner that showed she had no more familiarity with the wolfhounds on her leashes than she had with the birds that had feathered her hat. The Count gave the situation the shake of the head it deserved. But as he turned to go, he noticed with some amusement that a slender shadow suddenly jumped from behind a wingback chair to the edge of one of the potted palms. It was none other than Field Marshal Kutuzov attaining higher ground to take measure of his foes. When the dogs turned their heads in unison with their ears upright,

The colonel had better reason than the brigadier for knowing that the Russians were hunky-dory, for once, in Jugoslavia, he had watched a Soviet division capture in a few hours from the Germans a bridge which the 386th Division could not have taken in under a week. Down the hill those flaxen-haired boys had marched, laughing and singing, and the bullets had come tearing at them, smashing their tibias, cracking their femurs, opening their bellies, gouging their eyes, grounding them, scorching them. As, through his field-glasses, the colonel had watched them swept from the bridge into the river, it had not seemed to him that they could really be suffering, as he himself had suffered in 1914, with the big angry red thing up against him, and he had to make and effort of will to understand that each of these boys had died his own death, smash up against the Christ he didn't believe in, with his bowels gushing out over his boots as he thought for the last time of his mother, and with his hair still young in the sun. And still others had come on, laughing and singing, as they marched to kill and to be killed by other boys with lineless faces, because it was sweet and decorous to die for one's country. Yes, the Russians were hunky-dory all right, provided they were fighting on the same side as you were.

As he grew older his passion to reach the lost grew stronger, his vision widened and his purpose narrowed. The walls of his office were hung with huge maps over which he pored for hours like a field marshall. Every issue of his magazines contained maps, he lectured with maps before him and he always talked of places and people who waited for the light.

Credibility precedes great communication. There are two ways to convey credibility to your audience. First, believe in what you say. Ordinary people become extraordinary communicators when they are fired up with conviction. Field Marshal Ferdinand Foch observed, “The most powerful weapon on earth is the human soul on fire.” Second, live what you say. There is no greater credibility than conviction in action.

If you must be a fool, be one quickly.

We had no clue as to getting on the train and had our first experience with the station Zugmeister (Train Master).  This guy had enough gold braid on his hat to be a Field Marshal and there was no doubt that he was in charge.

WWII interrupted the plans of many explorers, although a secret Nazi expedition in 1938–39, led by Alfred Ritscher, was dispatched to Antarctica by Field Marshal Hermann Göring. Göring was interested both in claiming territory and in protecting Germany’s growing whaling fleet. The expedition used seaplanes to overfly vast stretches of the ice sheet, dropping 1.5m darts inscribed with swastikas to establish sovereignty

I was put in charge, made a general, and sent into Serbia, where, by dint of my own ingenuity, we served honorably but did not kill a soul. And that, believe me, is very hard with the Serbs, because they are very ingenious themselves, and they have a passion for martyrdom. "I've been a field marshal for two years. I have so many medals that when I wear them I look like a window in a junk shop.

How, in good conscience," Alessandro asked, "can you ride across the countryside in perfect safety, as if you were on holiday, stopping mainly to swim and eat oysters, while men are crushed and pulverized in the filth of the trenches?" "Because the object of war is peace, and I have merely thrown out the middle. If everyone did the same, no one would be crushed and pulverized in the filth of the trenches." "Everyone doesn't have the privilege. You do because you're a field marshal in command of a microscopic unit." "I realize that," Strassnitzky answered, "and, given such a rare opportunity, of which most men cannot even dream, I would be unforgivably remiss if I failed to seize it, would I not? I exploit it to the full.

I was not aware of the weaver fish, with its highly poisonous spines, whose venom can cause acute agony, even death when untreated. The wife of Field Marshal Montgomery is thought to have died in this way, after paddling with her children off the east coast. The victor of Alamein was then an unknown major. He is reported never to have mentioned her name again, and he never looked at another woman.

One of the seven essential ingredients of effective military leadership laid down by Field Marshal Montgomery was, “He must have the power of clear decision.” The apostle Paul, as a spiritual field commander, fully qualified in this category of leadership. Indeed this was a key feature of his character which he displayed at the very time of his conversion. When the heavens burst open and he saw the exalted Christ, his first question was, “Who are you, Lord?” The answer, “I am Jesus of Nazareth, whom you are persecuting” (Acts 22:8), toppled his entire theological universe, but he immediately accepted the implications of his discovery. An absolute capitulation to the Son of God was the only possible response, and, with his newly completed soul, he decided on the spot that he needed to have unreserved allegiance and obedience. This led to his second question, “What shall I do, Lord?” (Acts 22:10). Vacillation and indecision were foreign to Paul’s training. Once he was sure of the facts, he moved to swift decision. To be granted light was to follow it. To see his duty was to do it. Once he is sure of the will of God, the effective leader will go into action regardless of consequences. He will be willing to burn his bridges behind him and accept responsibility for failure as well as for success. Procrastination and vacillation are fatal to leadership. A sincere though mistaken decision is better than no decision. Indeed, no decision is a decision—a decision that the present situation is acceptable. In most decisions the difficulty is not in knowing what we ought to do, but in summoning the moral purpose to come to a decision about it. This resolution process was no problem to Paul.

Now he became obsessed with details, telling his commanders what to do at every turn. No order could be given without Hitler’s specific approval. Said Field Marshal von Rundstedt, “The only troops I could move without permission were the sentries outside my door.” Here too amphetamines may be relevant. Hitler likely had, as previously noted, obsessive tendencies, reflected in his fixation on personal hygiene and cleanliness. This trait may have worsened with amphetamine use, which is well known to cause or worsen symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

The Second World War has swept over Europe. The Führer is dead. The Greater German Reich has been smashed. German cities lie in ruins. The German folk has been surrendered to the interest slavery of its enemy. As in the First, so in the Second World War, too, English, American and Russian soldiers have been the executors. But who is the real victor of this war? Is it the folks from whom those soldiers had come? The takeover of the government by the Führer in 1933 was for World Jewry the signal to attack. The World Jewish press agitated for the global boycott against Germany. Germany’s reply was the 24 hour boycott of Jewish businesses on April 1, 1933. No Jew lost his life in the process, and no Jewish business building was damaged. The counter-boycott, ordered by the party leadership and carried out under my leadership, was supposed to warn World Jewry against challenging National Socialist Germany. Since that time, malicious attacks against National Socialist Germany have appeared in the world press again and again. It was unmistakable that with that propaganda in the world, carried out without interruption, the view was supposed to be bred that the existence of a National Socialist Germany meant a danger for the other folks. The Jewish writer Emil Ludwig, who emigrated to France, spoke especially clearly about Jewish wishes and intentions in the magazine „Les Annales”: „Hitler does not want war, but he will be forced to it.” The Polish ambassador in the USA, Count Potocky, wrote at a time when in Europe nobody thought a Second World War would come or must come, to his government in Warsaw that he had gained the impression that influential Jews in Washington would work toward a new world war. (See the German White Book.) The report of the Polish Ambassador Potocky, whom nobody can reproach with bias against World Jewry and who also was no friend of National Socialist Germany, would alone suffice to be able to thoroughly answer the question of war guilt. The guilt for the Second World War, too, was born at the moment when god Jehovah, through the mouth of Field Marshal Moses, gave the Jewish folk the instructions: „You should devour all the folks!” With the defeat of National Socialist Germany in the Second World War, World Jewry has won the greatest victory in its history.

the Rommel diary records an edict that was typical of him: “While the overflowing POW cage on the airfield is being set up, South African officers demand to be segregated from the blacks. This request is turned down by the C in C. He points out that the blacks are South African soldiers too—they wear the same uniform and they have fought side by side with the whites. They are to be housed in the same POW cage.

Churchill is the very archetype of a corrupt journalist,” sneered the Führer. “He himself has written that it’s incredible how far you can get in war with the help of the common lie. He’s an utterly amoral, repulsive creature. I’m convinced he has a refuge prepared for himself across the Atlantic. . . He’ll go to his friends, the Yanks.

Almost at once the telephone call came, ordering him to stand by. That evening, the phone rang again in the railroad station waiting room where he had set up his office. “The invasion begins tomorrow, 4:50 A.M.” Thus the Second World War began. Nobody, least of all Erwin Rommel, could foresee that the military operations that began on September 1, heralded by a ranting and self-justificatory Reichstag speech by the Führer, would inexorably involve one country after another; would last six years; would leave 40 million dead and all Europe and half Asia ravaged by fire and explosives; would destroy Hitler’s Reich, ruin the British Empire and end with the creation of new weapons, new world powers and a new lawlessness in international affairs.

Paul von Hindenburg was a popular Prussian field marshal, statesman, and politician during World War I. In 1919, Hindenburg, who was a proud, self-assured general officer, was subpoenaed to appear before the Reichstag commission, which can be thought of as Germany’s Congress. He cautiously avoided answering any questions about who was responsible for Germany’s defeat in the “World War of 1918.” Instead of a direct answer, he read a prepared statement that had been carefully scrutinized in advance by his attorney. Hindenburg, ever mindful of his legacy, testified that the German Army had been on the verge of winning the war in the autumn of 1918, and that the enormous defeat had been caused by a Dolchstoß, a traitorous blow. By saying this he deflected any personal fault for the war, by insinuating that treacherous individuals and unpatriotic left- leaning socialist politicians were to blame for the demoralizing and embarrassing defeat. Despite being threatened with a contempt citation by the Commission for refusing to respond to questions, Hindenburg, after reading his statement, simply walked out of the hearings. He successfully relied on his status as a nationalist and conservative war hero to provide him with protection from additional hearings or prosecution. It turned out that Hindenburg was actually right in his assessment, and he was never indicted for walking out on the Reichstag. In 1925, Hindenburg then became the second Weimar President.

Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die —ALFRED TENNYSON

Whereas the Soviets were content with the simplicity of sheer brute force strategy and tactics, and the Germans were depending on their technological superiority to make up for their deficiencies in production capacity, the Allies were building a systematic way of waging war, akin to a machine, one that would, if given sufficient time, integrate formations, units, and weapons types, land, air, and sea into an irresistible force. One that would still be subject to the mental and physical limitations of the flesh-and-blood creatures who had to operate and guide it, but that had been fundamentally designed from the beginning to fight battles in the way the Allies intended to fight them. As Rommel saw it, the Wehrmacht could not defeat that machine, therefore the Gemans must find a way to make it too expensive for the Allies to continue to operate it. That process, he believed, could begin in Tunisia.

A good general not only sees the way to victory; he also knows when victory is impossible. —POLYBIUS

For more than two years he stayed on the slaughterhouse battlefields of France. In September at Varennes he was wounded by a ricocheting rifle bullet in his left thigh—characteristically for him, he was confronting three French soldiers alone and with an empty rifle. He was awarded the Iron Cross, Second Class. When he returned to the 124th Infantry from the hospital on January 13, 1915, it was fighting in grueling trench warfare in the Argonnes forest. Two weeks later he crawled with his riflemen through 100 yards of barbed wire into the main French positions, captured four bunkers, held them against a counterattack by a French battalion and then withdrew before a new attack could develop, having lost less than a dozen men. This bravery won Rommel the Iron Cross, First Class—the first for a lieutenant in the entire regiment.

Had the Allies invaded, the result would have been much like how the Marhathas recollected the capture of Ahmednagar in 1803: “They came here in the morning, looked at the wall, walked over it, killed the garrison, and returned to breakfast!

IN 1944 ROMMEL was already a living legend. He was known as a great commander in the field, distinguished by that rare quality, a feeling for the battle. Bold, dashing and handsome, he was relentless in combat, magnanimous in victory and gracious to his vanquished enemies. He seemed invincible. Where he was, there was victory: he attacked like a tornado, and even when he withdrew, his enemies followed very gingerly indeed.

He took no delight in the death of an enemy soldier. A Montgomery would order: “Kill the Germans wherever you find them!” An Eisenhower would proclaim: “As far as I am concerned, any soldier that is killing a German is somebody for whom I have a tremendous affection, and if I can give him something so he can kill two instead of one, by golly I am going to do it.” Rommel never descended to such remarks. He outwitted, bluffed, deceived, cheated the enemy. It was said that his greatest pleasure was to trick his opponents into premature and often quite needless surrender.

Rommel reached the wood at Cerfontaine on May 16, 1940. He wanted to get through it fast, so as to reach the bunkers themselves before dark—but how, without alerting the bunkers that he was coming? Rommel took the microphone and quietly ordered all tank commanders to drive through the woods, this time without firing a single shot. Their crews—gunner, radio operator, loader and commander—were to ride outside the tanks and wave white flags. He himself rode Colonel Rothenburg’s Panzer IV. Ulrich Schroeder recalled: “The enemy was in fact so startled by this carnivallike procession that instead of shooting at us they just stood back to either side and gaped.

Despite everything,” she wrote to Erwin on September 4 from Wiener Neustadt, “we were all hoping to the very end that a second world war could be avoided—we all hoped that reason would prevail in Britain and France. . . . Now the Führer has left last night for the Polish front.

Next day Hitler again made a “fabulous speech” to the Reichstag, this time formally offering peace to Britain and France (now that Poland no longer existed