Sublime

diffidence

“There is no doubt that we are a very cruel people,” Winston Churchill wrote home from the front. “Severity always,” went the British motto, “justice when possible.”

“All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act out their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.” Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence of Arabia

If leadership depends purely on seniority you are defeated before you start. You give a good leader very little and he will succeed; you give mediocrity a great deal and they will fail. —George C. Marshall, 1941, to the Truman Committee

As Pershing’s chief of operations for the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) during World War I, Fox Conner directed the development and successful deployment of American combat forces in France. Pershing considered Conner to have been “a brilliant soldier” and “one of the finest characters our Army has ever produced.” Pershing paid tribute to Con

Once again, preinvasion estimates proved worthless. Within hours of learning of the Allied landings, Hitler had ordered frontline German troops into Tunisia.

He wanted to appear familiar with the men. He even worked at it, insisting on having exactly the same treatment, food, and clothing. He went out of his way to demonstrate his willingness to do the menial chores, such as taking his turn as “Peggy” to get the mealtime pot of hoosh from the galley to his tent. And he occasionally became furious when h

The classics were their comic books; they’d grown up on Plutarch’s Lives—“the bible for heroes,” as Emerson declared—and came of age with their heads buried in the adventures of Odysseus and Richard the Lionheart and Sigurd the Dragonslayer. They understood that in ancient Greece, entire wars could pivot on the performance of one or two extraordina