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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 9e256cf | Alexander the Great would have found it difficult to succeed in forcing a breach in the German line in 1914-1915, and the defeats Haig's armies suffered in 1916 and 1917 - those notorious disasters on the Somme and at Passchendaele - should not obscure the fact that it was Haig who commanded the British armies that spearheaded the Allied victory in 1918 and showed the other armies how this war should be fought; even General Foch admitted th.. | Robin Neillands | ||
| 6e14f7c | Douglas Haig remained Commander-in-Chief of the British Armies in France until the end of the war but his reputation was blasted by the death toll on the Somme and took a further beating in 1917, after the losses of Passchendaele. Only now, more than 80 years after the Great War ended, has Haig's reputation begun to recover. This seems only fair, for many of the attacks on his character and reputation seem misguided. Haig was neither callou.. | Robin Neillands | ||
| 19cc3ae | The Somme began as an offensive; it ended as a battle of attrition. | Robin Neillands | ||
| d8165dc | At Neuve Chapelle in March 1915, the British lost almost 13,000 men in three days; at Loos in September, 59,000 men in six weeks, but most of them fell in the first two days; neither attack gained more than a few hundred yards of useless, shell-pitted, corpse-strewn ground. | Robin Neillands | ||
| e604d85 | This view - that Germany was not responsible for the outbreak of war - was maintained for the next two decades, during the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich, and was only finally refuted by the extensive researches made into the Wilhelmine archives at Potsdam by Professor Fritz Fischer, research which proved beyond any reasonable doubt that Germany had been planning a major European war for years and saw the Sarajevo incident, and the sub.. | Robin Neillands | ||
| 6399bba | The general feeling among the Entente nations at the end of 1916 seemed to be that unless Europe returned to the status quo ante, the terrible loss of life in the previous three years had been for nothing. | Robin Neillands | ||
| dc155a2 | During the Great War all armies lost men in quantity in the attack; the Germans at First and Second Ypres, the French in Champagne, on Vimy Ridge, in Artois and on the Chemin des Dames. Everywhere it was the same story: a failure to develop a breach in the enemy defences was common to all armies and, by the end of 1915, French and German losses far exceeded those of the British Empire. | Robin Neillands | ||
| f790ae5 | No one seemed able to accept that the war had been a terrible mistake and that ending it, on any reasonable terms, which must include the German evacuation of France and Belgium, was far less costly than letting it continue. | Robin Neillands | ||
| 44b1cc5 | People were like onions, made of lots of layers. The deeper you went, the rawer the layer. | L.J. Shen | ||
| e4196a7 | There was, however, a deeper failure, a failure to realize that the current conventional tactics were not working. The focus was on solving the shortages of men and guns and of increasing the weight of attacks - which only increased the scale of loss. | Robin Neillands | ||
| 795a293 | Despite arguments between Easterners, who wanted an offensive anywhere but France, and Westerners, who believed that an offensive anywhere else was a waste of effort, it was generally accepted that the Germans could only be decisively defeated on the Western Front, not least because that was where most of them were. | Robin Neillands | ||
| c08d0c6 | The late Barbara Tuchman, an American historian and the author of some fine books on the Great War, has written that while the human race has made great progress in many fields of endeavour - science, medicine, the arts - since the siege of Troy to the present day, it has made no discernible progress whatsoever in the field of government. She adds that nations will frequently adopt policies which are not only dangerous to their national wel.. | Robin Neillands | ||
| 01b49b2 | There were two views on how to conduct a frontal assault and they reveal the basic tactical argument of the Great War. Should the attacker go for 'bite and hold', seizing a small portion of the enemy line and hanging on to it, then bringing up the guns and the infantry before taking another bite, or should he concentrate on going for a full scale 'breakthrough'? | Robin Neillands | ||
| 22d155a | And so the war was fought with new weapons and old ideas and the result was a slaughter exceeding that of any previous war. In just four years, about 9,300,000 soldiers died on the battlefields of the Great War; 3,600,000 from the nations comprising the Central Powers and 5,700,000 from the nations of the Entente. | Robin Neillands | ||
| b4b117d | The generals, British, French and German, were unable to achieve a breakthrough because the defences were always too strong and the facilities available to reduce them were not fully developed, either technically or tactically. | Robin Neillands | ||
| 6e1e682 | By the turn of the century, all-out attacks by hosts of valiant French infantry, rather on the style employed by the Imperial Guard at Waterloo, were the received wisdom in French military circles, and would remain so until the losses of the Great War killed off its adherents and a million or so brave young men. | Robin Neillands | ||
| f198363 | the men of the French Army have never been short of guts. Clad in their brilliant uniforms, carrying swords and wearing white gloves, the officers of this gallant army led their men into the German machine-gun fire in 1914 . . . and then war was suddenly not glorious any more. A million men were killed or wounded trying to make this tactic work. | Robin Neillands | ||
| 6a71d5e | The secret of any advance through a well-defended and carefully prepared position in the Great War depended almost entirely on artillery. In spite of the popular image created by TV documentaries and military memoirs, the Great War was primarily an artillery war. Over 60 per cent of the casualties were caused by artillery, and only artillery - heavy artillery - could beat down the enemy defences, flatten the wire, stun his troops, knock out.. | Robin Neillands | ||
| 3bfe3c6 | There was, of course, another alternative to this endless, pointless killing - peace. Achieving peace depended on a recognition by all the participants that the war was not worth fighting, or that all that could be achieved had been achieved and the argument should be promptly transferred to the conference table. Given the benefit of hindsight and the losses so far, by the end of 1915 this seems the obvious alternative to more slaughter but.. | Robin Neillands | ||
| 4c04c6e | Peace negotiations began, or were at least initiated, almost as soon as the war began, but by 1915 they had led nowhere. The nations of Europe were not yet sick of killing and at the end of 1915 there was no doubt in anyone's mind that the fighting would go on. | Robin Neillands | ||
| 8af1d63 | Haig and Robertson were two of the most inarticulate officers in the British Army. Haig could write lucid notes and detailed instructions but was unable to express himself clearly at meetings or discussions, while Robertson's normal response to any query or criticism was either an explosive grunt or the dour comment 'I've heard different. | Robin Neillands | ||
| c69bda5 | Why was cultural group selection the key to the transition from forager to farmer? Because you cannot switch to farming when everybody else in your community is foraging. The whole group needs to shift together. It requires a new set of cultural norms and institutions shared by all. The most important such institution would have been property rights over the food that you have grown.157 The | Peter Turchin | ||
| 2746294 | Patrick Kirch concludes: "By the time of initial contact with Europeans, Hawaiians had taken the older Polynesian concepts of chiefship and rank, and subjected them to a form of hypertrophy, the logical extension of which was that their rulers, their kings, were now held to be divine. This was not simply a quantitative extension of the Ancestral Polynesian ranking system; it was truly a qualitative change by which Hawaiian society had enter.. | Peter Turchin | ||
| 90cc9d2 | The transition from egalitarian small-scale societies to archaic states did not happen as soon as people settled down in farming villages. Polynesians colonized Hawaii around 800 CE, and it took around eight centuries for archaic states to emerge.144 What's more, the Polynesians already had a lot of the cultural elements needed to develop a centralized, hierarchical society. Because agriculture arrived on the Pacific islands around 1500 BCE.. | Peter Turchin | ||
| 612b851 | Ashoka not only exhorted others to cultivate Dhamma, he practiced what he preached. He abolished human and animal sacrifice. He "made provision for two types of medical treatment: medical treatment for humans and medical treatment for animals." Wherever medical herbs suitable for humans or animals are not available, I have had them imported and grown. Wherever medical roots or fruits are not available I have had them imported and grown. Alo.. | Peter Turchin | ||
| f31c6a3 | But while Ashoka is unusual in his exceptional degree of care for the wellbeing of his subjects, he is not unique. In fact, he represents a new trend: all across Eurasia, rulers were getting interested in what today we would probably call social justice. In | Peter Turchin | ||
| 0c87272 | This is not to deny that there have been plenty of wicked kings in the past 2,500 years. Most likely they were in the majority. Nevertheless, the new trend was that rulers were at least supposed to be good. And many did try to govern in ways that benefited the common people, not just the ruling class. This remarkable turnaround happened virtually simultaneously in the Mediterranean, the Near East, India, and China. Why? The answer, simply p.. | Peter Turchin | ||
| eb828d5 | Around 2,500 years ago, we see qualitatively new forms of social organization--the larger and more durable Axial mega-empires that employed new forms of legitimation of political power. The new sources of this legitimacy were the Axial religions, or more broadly ideologies, such as Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, and Confucianism (and later Christianity and Islam). During this time, gods evolved from capricious projections of human desire (who as.. | Peter Turchin | ||
| 95151a1 | Such perfection endures. For more than two millennia after horse-riding was invented, the warhorse remained the most important military technology bar none. A plentiful supply of horses was critical even in the 19th century, well after firearms had replaced the bows and arrows. Have you ever wondered why Napoleon, who won all of his battles until 1812, lost one battle after another in 1813 and 1814, leading to defeat and abdication? The sur.. | Peter Turchin | ||
| d24da94 | In other words, theorists like van der Leeuw envision that a switch from hunting and gathering to agriculture creates a virtuous circle between problem-solving capacity and societal size, gradually leading to an increase of the scale of cooperation. I | Peter Turchin | ||
| 3a8d625 | find it difficult to believe that economic or information-processing advantages were the primary drivers of the transition to large-scale societies. Archaic-style states of which we have direct knowledge, such as Hawaii, did not have complex economies or specialized decision-making procedures (to deal with what kinds of problems?). The chiefs were involved with war and ritual; the economy worked well enough when left to the commoners. In an.. | Peter Turchin | ||
| dbc1793 | Two very clear indicators are the appearance of lavishly furnished burials and large, elaborate private residences. Skeletons can tell us that one segment of population ate much higher-quality foods and enjoyed better health than the rest. Based on such indicators, we know that large differentials between the rich and powerful few and the rest arose within a few thousand years of agriculture in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, Mexico, and the And.. | Peter Turchin | ||
| 664ec6b | Our oversized brains evolved, in large part, to detect and resist manipulation by those who want to get ahead at our expense. | Peter Turchin | ||
| 38f486d | For tens if not hundreds of thousands of years before agriculture, human societies had very effective social norms and institutions for controlling bullies. Why would they suddenly (in a few thousand years) replace them with institutions that gave the upstarts legitimacy? | Peter Turchin | ||
| 4ed09a8 | Clearly, you don't know much about horror, he said. Horror is premised on the experience of what we do not and cannot understand, whereas what you're talking about is mere low-class smut, which every schoolboy has encountered before he's in long pants. | smut | Paul La Farge | |
| 304035a | moral of this mathematical digression is that, on flat plains, with warriors using projectile weapons, any numerical superiority that an army can achieve over its enemy is magnified out of all proportion. In other words, Lanchester's Square Law yields an enormous return to social scale. If the opposing forces use a mix of ranged and shock weapons, numerical superiority will still be amplified, although not as much as with purely projectile .. | Peter Turchin | ||
| 0eba5ea | This is how upstarts succeed--by avoiding arrogance and cultivating modesty. But even more important, they need to demonstrate to the people that the hierarchical social order is preferable to the alternative. In the Roman case, it was the fatigue of persistent internal wars that led to the re-establishment of monarchy. Monarchies | Peter Turchin | ||
| 9f9c52c | Let's step back from this debate and consider how it affects the question we are currently investigating, the role of war in the rise of archaic states. While there is confusion resulting from competing definitions, and a great degree of controversy about evidence and how to interpret it, all parties agree on one thing: warfare was particularly vicious among pre-state farming societies. | Peter Turchin | ||
| e05f3e1 | call this the "bottom-up" theory of the evolution of social complexity, because it treats social complexity as a sort of "superstructure" on the material resource base. In other words, if you stir enough resources into your evolutionary pot, social complexity will inevitably bubble up. The problem with the bottom-up theory is that in several places where we can date the key stages in this process, we see a different sequence of events. The .. | Peter Turchin | ||
| 1515888 | The first cities and states arose 5,000 years ago. One of these archaic states, the Old Kingdom of Egypt (2650-2150 BCE), the one that built the Great Pyramid of Giza, had a population of between one and two million, which is beginning to approach the social scale of the most complex social insects, ants and termites. The | Peter Turchin | ||
| 9d09aab | For example, the populations of both the Roman Empire and Han China grew to 50-60 million people at the peak. This is the point when we surpassed the social insects. During the past two millennia no other animal anywhere has rivaled human societies in size and complexity. *** In | Peter Turchin | ||
| fb7ac4c | In other words, the important statistic is the risk of violent death for each person. To illustrate this point, there were 49 homicides in Denmark in 2012 (population: 5.6 million), so the chance of any particular Dane being murdered that year was less than one in 100,000. But in a typical small-scale society, with a population of, say, 1,000, 49 homicides would translate into one chance in 20 of being murdered. As | Peter Turchin | ||
| 5ca5d83 | The collapse of order brings in its wake the four horsemen of the apocalypse - famine, war, pestilence, and death. Population declines, and wages increase, while rents decrease. As incomes of commoners recover, the fortunes of the upper classes hit the bottom. Economic distress of the elites and lack of effective government feed the continuing internecine wars. But civil wars thin the ranks of the elites. Some die in factional fighting, oth.. | Peter Turchin | ||
| 6df6032 | Ranged weapons, together with the mastery of fire, literally made us human. They also defined what may be called the "human way of war." The distinguishing characteristic of human combat is the ability to strike from a distance coupled with mobility." | Peter Turchin |