Because understanding great literature is better than trying to read and understand
yet another business book on the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books
Podcast, we commit to reading, dissecting and analyzing the great
books of the Western canon. You know, those
books from Jane Austen to Shakespeare and everything else in
between that you might have fallen asleep trying to read in high
school. We do this for our listeners, the owner, the
entrepreneur, the manager, or the civic leader who doesn't have the time
to read, dissect, analyze and leverage insights from
literature to execute leadership best practices in
the confusing and chaotic postmodern world we all now
inhabit. Welcome to the rescuing of Western
Civilization at the intersection of literature
and leadership. Welcome to the Leadership Lessons from
the Great Books Podcast. Hello, my name
is Jesan Sorrells and this is Leadership Lessons from the
Great books podcast, episode
168
postmodern leaders, particularly in the west, are
increasingly a literal yet not literary
and even barely literate people. They this
means we miss the forest for the trees, our
expectations of other people don't match their inherent and obvious
capabilities or lack of capabilities, and we
arrange social, political, cultural and business systems to
minimize as much risk to ourselves as possible.
And when all that delicate arranging, organizing and planning fails,
we are either paralyzed into inaction or or we run and
hide in dopaminergic distraction, or we
lash out in anger at others, which
of course creates the circumstances that lead to interpersonal conflict
based on hurt feelings, disordered desires and
appetites, and of course the ever present loss
of face. We are
obsessed with leadership on this show. Sure, it's a literary
and book focused show, but at the core
of the show is the tension between leadership and book
topics that appear on the surface to be antithetical to entire
practices and assumptions inherent within
postmodern leadership practices which are
designed to reinforce that delicate balance I was just talking
about or practices that are oriented towards creating
a new heaven and and a new earth
with the same old followers we've always had. Rather than informing
leaders and informing followers of tragic truths and
the consequences of not heeding them,
the book we are introducing today is one that while on the surface may
seem to not be about leadership, is
at the end of the volume, a book about nothing but the
tragic truths of leadership and and the long term consequences
of not heeding the ignorance or the dismissal
of those truths, today
on this episode of the podcast we will be
introducing and discussing one particular
core theme from John Keegan's
the First World War
Leaders. No reference to the Second World War can be made without
talking about the exegesis of the First World War for sure.
And no reference to any of the civilizational
problems in our postmodern era can be made without
deep understanding of the causes, the execution and
of course, the tragic results of the First World
War.
SAM.
And we open with an examination of
our volume, the First World War by
John Keegan. The the book
is set up in an interesting way, by the way, the version that we have
is, is published by Vintage Books, a division of Random House,
published back in 1998. And so of course,
as with all books that are under copyright, we will not be reading
directly from the book. However, I do want to give you a brief overview of
what you can expect when you open up this,
this volume. So the there
are 10 chapters in the First World War War
by John Keegan, starting off with
Beginning with A European Tragedy, where
he puts forth his initial thesis
that the war that
was called the First World War was a tragic and
unnecessary conflict.
He goes further in stating that the
crisis that led to the First World
War could have been avoided and that
the suffering that was inflicted upon
the Germans, the British and the French, and of
course, many others worldwide could have been
avoided. It could have been ameliorated in
the crisis or during the crisis of 1940,
14, during that summer.
Then he goes into talking about the battles, the
frontiers and the Marne, the battles that are
in or that occurred in the east between Germany and Russia,
the stalemate of battles and the war beyond
the Western Front. And that's one of the things that we tend to forget about
World War I. We tend to really focus on the European
nature of the Western Front, that long swath
of land that went from,
from, from south
eastern France all the way to,
all the way to Holland and into, into the Netherlands.
We tend to really focus on the trench warfare that occurred in that area. And
we tend to forget that there were colonial powers
that were involved, not there were colonial powers. We tend to forget that the major
players were colonial powers and that as a result
their colonies got involved in the war. We also tend to forget the
Ottoman Empire and of course the Arab revolt that
occurred there that was documented by a favorite of our
show, Thomas Edward Lawrence, T.E. lawrence, in his book The Seven
Pillars of Wisdom. We also tend to forget that this war
was a war beyond the Western Front that also
occurred in the form of submarine
warfare and naval battles between the
Germans and the Eng. And of course
we forget about the role that Russia had in the,
in the war in World War I, primarily because
through the wonderful tender mercies of Germany
who allowed Lenin to pass through their country and
through Finland Finland Station to
Petrograd in 1916, effectively removing
millions of Russian soldiers from from the field of battle on the
Eastern Front and technically speaking, winning, if that
term can really be used, the war for Germany on the
east, we tend to forget Russia's contributions to World War I.
Then we move into the year of battles and the breaking of armies,
where Guy Keegan talks or writes very
coherently about generalship and about the nature of
morale as the war ground on into nineteen
six through nineteen sixteen and into nineteen seventeen and finally
America's entry into the war. America and
Armageddon. That's the chapter that focuses on America's entry into
the war in 1917 and the nature
of America bringing to bear millions
and millions of men to
fields that had been bled red
with the blood, soaked red with the blood of British,
British, French and German
warriors for the previous three years.
World War I is indeed or was indeed a European
tragedy. But the
world that we live in today, the world that we
take for granted 111 years later,
the social and cultural and even, or especially
the geopolitical arrangements that we think are quote, unquote,
normal, had their beginning
in the killing fields of World War
I.
SA.
Back to the book, Back to the First World War by John
Keegan. So when you open up the book, the
first three chapters lay out
Keegan's assertion, lay out some of the King's, Keegan's
basic assertions about the causes of the First
World War. And he asserts
several that we're going to talk about in
toto or in aggregate here today. And then one that we're going to
focus on specifically in the next
couple of sections or the next couple of segments of, of
the show. So he opens up in his first three
chapters, chapter one, a European tragedy, chapter two, war plans, and
chapter three, the crisis of 1914, by laying out
in, in order all of the
reasons Europe had Pre
World War I, Europe had to not go to war,
right? But then he also lays out these same
reasons as reasons that that would
inexorably prove to drive
Europe and European powers to war.
So one of the first things he lays out is that the
folks in Europe, both the civilians and the political class
during the time previous to World War I,
had an abstract understanding of war due to
a long peace that actually began in
1870 and continued with fewer hiccup,
with few hiccups into 1914
that created almost a generation
and a half of people who had not known a
Major continental struggle, sure,
Napoleon and Wellington and all that had happened earlier in
the, in the 19th century. And yes, there were the
Russian wars in the middle part of the 19th century.
And of course, America had had her civil war,
which none of the European powers paid very much attention to,
as they viewed it as an internal struggle in
America between 1861 and
1865. But beyond that, there hadn't
been a major world enveloping great
power, enveloping conflagration for
a generation and a half previous to
World War I. So people were lulled. This is, this is Keegan's
point. People were lulled. Politicians were lulled, Leaders were lulled into a
false sense of security. The second factor
that led to this European tragedy being played out in
World War I was the fact of
men under conscription, men under the
control of folks who could make them march, make
them dig, and claim that it was all for
the protection of a nation state. There was an
entirely militaristic society that. Existed
underneath the European power structure. And Keegan points this out, that
actually allowed militaries, allowed great powers
to think of and to consider how they would mobilize
hundreds of thousands of men and bring the force
of those hundreds of thousands of men to bear against hundreds of
thousands of other men. Military society also,
or the creation of a military society, a military subculture
in and amongst the European powers of the British, the French and
most, of course, notoriously the Germans, allowed
politicians and generals
more so generals and politicians to make war plans.
And war planning was something that Keegan points out had become
more formalized during the back half of the 19th
century. As he points out in the first three chapters, when he talks about
Schlieffen's plan that was eventually adopted
by Moltke in Germany and eventually
executed by the generals, the German generals in World
War I, to stalemate results.
These war plans were created by men who had very
little actual practical work, war experience,
right? And so when you have actual practice, we have very little actual practical
war experience. Most of your war planning at war
colleges, where your subordinates are going to be, who are going to
execute these war plans if they are ever to come to fruition.
Also, that's going to be based on theory. And at a certain point,
as we pointed out when we covered why don't we ever learn from
history? At a certain point, you have to move from theory
to actuality, because things change
when plans change, when they make first
contact with reality. There were two
other factors that Keegan talks about. The first three chapters in the
lead up to the First World War that were critical to the
First World War occurring. And the first one of these two is
technological change. There was rapid technological change that was. Occurring
at the beginning of the. The 20th century. The
Telegraph, the telephone, radio,
airplanes, these kinds of. And of course, trains,
these kinds of technologies were coming to the forefront
and were being used not only for transporting people
and communications, but they were also, or could be. They
also could be used for making
war, and they would be used to make war during World
War I with tragic results.
Because, unfortunately, it wasn't just the technologies that
were advancing. It was also the
mindsets of the people that were going to be
leveraging these technologies that had to be examined
as well. And when Keegan looks at the mindsets, one of the points that
he makes in his very dry British historian, with
his very dry British historian sense of
exactitude, the point that he makes here in the first three
chapters, is that the politicians, the
ambassadors, the diplomats, and fundamentally later on during
the war, the generals came from a certain
class structure in Europe that we cannot appreciate
here in the 21st century and really
couldn't appreciate in the end of the. The
20th century. When Keegan was writing this book,
the aristocratic class of sensitive men
who were class conscious
was rife throughout European capitals. In particular,
as I said before, the British, the French, and
of course, the Germans, we
in America Post World War II, post
Vietnam, post Korea, post Iraq, post
Iraq, too, we have fallen
into the grip of egalitarianism, and we believe in the
power of the demos. But the aristocratic
class, the kings and the princes and the people that they
appointed to run their wars and expand their colonial
empires believed in the right to rule, and
they believed that it was also a burden.
And so a person with an
aristocratic mindset who is faced with new
technologies that they don't fully understand or appreciate,
faced with a long piece in an abstract
understanding of war among their populaces, but
also having access to the greatest resource
of military mind can possibly think is the greatest
possible resource. Bodies and plans.
There is certain level of inexorability that comes along
with all these factors that ground the
Europeans towards an
apocalyptic tragedy.
Sam,
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So what are we to take from all of those ideas that Keegan
puts forth in the first three chapters of his
one volume overview of the First World
War? Well, there's a great quote
actually in in the book, and
it sort of summarizes a larger idea
in a very British fashion that I want to
I want to talk about. And it's, it's in his
section marked, marked A Europe of soldiers are labeled a
European, A Europe of soldiers. And it says this
There was admittedly a fear of war in the
abstract he's talking about in Germany, but
it was as vague as the perception of what form modern war
itself might take. Stronger by far,
particularly among the political classes in every major country,
was the fear of the consequences of failure
to face the challenge of war itself.
That's an interesting idea to me, because
enveloped inside of that idea
are concepts of honor, integrity,
ethics, truth, and just how
far population
or leader is willing to take their population in order
to fulfill all of those social
contracts. The
idea of not being able to meet the
moment that war would require is one that is
foreign sounding to our postmodern ears
and to our postmodern psychology. It even it sounds
brutal and it sounds unfortunate, and it
sounds savage. This is because we live in a
time where not meeting the moment that X would
require or Y would require is such a common
occurrence that we have had an explosion in the number of lawyers
minted by law schools in the last 40 years, ensuring
that people will meet the moment that X requires
or else there will be contractual consequences.
Failing to quote, unquote, beat the moment, of course, comes from an inability to
understand that ethics, morality, personal accountability,
and this idea of social coherence are bound together
in ways that we as individuals cannot understand
fully. There's a great line from
BH Liddell Hart in his book why Don't We Learn From History,
which I would like to quote from here. And I quote, although
they political leaders up to and during World War
I may have been fools in disregarding the conditions necessary for the
effective fulfillment of pledges, they at least show showed
themselves men of honor and in a long view, thinking
towards the causes of World War II, of more fundamental common
sense than those who argued we should give aggressors a free hand
so long as they left us alone. Close quote. That's from
BH Ladell Hart, why don't we learn from history, page 74.
Which one is better? This is a huge question for
leaders. Is it better to appease, to miss the moment,
or is it better to worry about
failing to meet the moment and work yourself up into a froth in
order to meet the moment? Failing to meet the moment the
conflict sometimes requires is a failure we all struggle with in our
own comparatively geopolitically peaceful, postmodern
era. In business, of course, we call this failure to meet the
moment imposter syndrome when we feel it personally.
But there is no term other than maybe cowardice
or appeasement to describe it when we see it
in others. This is one
of the major disconnects between us reading the history
of World War I right now in 2025
and the folks who actually experienced World
War I in the early part
of the 20th century.
Sam.
Right back to the book, Back to the First World War by John
Keegan. So I'd like to bring up a point here
that really, I hope not really, but that I hope
will buttress a larger point that I'm going to close out the
the show with. So I
talked initially in a previous segment about the
aristocratic cadre of class sensitive men
who were the diplomats, the ambassadors, the kings, and especially the
generals who ran the First World War.
Hagen points this. Sorry, Hagen. Keegan points this
out in his chapter entitled the
Breaking of Armies. There's an interesting
paragraph here that I'm going to quote a line from,
and I quote, would changes in command, however, change
anything, talking about the number of deaths in the Western Front?
The generalship of the First World War is one of the most contested issues of
its history historiography. Good generals and bad generals
abound in the war's telling, and so do critics and champions of this
man or that among the ranks of its historians.
This is the, this is the key quote here. In their time, almost all the
leading commanders of the war were seen as great men, the imperturbable
Joffre, the fiery Foch, the Titanic, Hindenburg,
the Olympian Hague. Between the wars, the
reputations crumbled largely at the hands of memoirists
and novelists Sassoon, Remarque,
Barbuse, whose depiction of the realities of
war from below relentlessly undermined the standing of
those who had dominated from from above,
close quote Then, of course, Keegan
goes on later on in the paragraph to talk about and to quote or to
paraphrase from British historians who framed British
generalship as, quote unquote, donkeys leading lions.
And of course, this is follow up to a previous chapter in the
Year of Battles where he talks about Haig, Doug
Haig, the British general, the leader
of the British Expeditionary Force at the Somme.
And and Haig was a man who, as he
paraphrased there, who would be framed as Olympian.
But he also points out, Keegan does
this line and I want to make, I want to make this point as well.
He says, he says the successful generals of the First World War,
those who did not crack outright or decline gradually into pessimism, were a
hard lot as they had to be, with the casualty figures accumulating on their
desks. Some nevertheless managed to combine toughness of mind with some
striking human characteristic. Joffrey imperturbability,
Hindenburg gravity, folk fire, Kamel certainty.
Haig, in whose public manner and private diaries no concern
for human suffering was or is discernible, compensated for his
aloofness with nothing whatsoever of the common
touch. Close quote
JOHN keegan, the First World War.
How can you lead people? And this is a question that has
become even more sharp or gotten sharper and
sharper as we have gotten away from mass casualty in the
military and as fewer and fewer grown men have
served in the armed forces, at least in America, than ever before.
How do you lead men if you have no
common touch?
SAM.
So what are we to do with that piece, right?
How are we to square the circle with
the aristocratic leadership and the
lack of, well, the ability to
be hard hearted right in the face of casualty figures or in the face of
bad things, the ability
to stare disappointment in the face
consistently over a long period of time and not flinch.
What is the one thing that sort of binds
folks together, that allows
the top and the bottom to
work together during times when
mass casualties are happening in a war or when
maybe mass firings are happening in a business?
Well, in order to make a civilization, we have to agree on
what is at the root of of a civilization,
what is the thing that binds us, what is the what is
the. The act that binds us all together. And
BH Liddell Hart made the point
in. In his book why don't we learn from history that
civilization is built on the keeping of promises.
We can see that this began to break apart after World War I
and has continued to break apart, first in
our political class and now even interpersonally between
all of us in 2025,
eroding like sand on the beach
because of the nature of the way World War I was
fought, where people who were given a lot of
trust, those aristocratic generals and kings,
proved to have very little humanity when it came
to stopping the casualties and
preventing even more casualties at the Somme and the
Verdun and at Marne, at Gallipoli and
even east at Lemberg
when the time came for there to be no more
dead bodies.
I'm not the first person to point this out, this. This breaking of
trust from another, according to John Keegan,
anyway, less impressive historical writer who lived during that
time, T.E. lawrence, who we have talked about on this
show, comes this sentence from the introduction to his World
War I memoir, I guess is what Keegan would
say of the Arab revolt. The seven pillars of
wisdom, and I quote, we were fond together
because of the sweep of the open places, the taste of wider winds, the
sunlight and the hopes in which we worked. The
moral freshness of the world to be intoxicated us. He's talking
about the people who joined up with him to engage
in the Arab revolt from the Mecca of Sharif
all the way down to the average man who were
suffering under the yoke of the Ottoman Empire
back to the quote. We were wrought
up in ideas inexpressible and vaporous, but to be
fought for. We lived many lives in those whirling
campaigns, never sparing ourselves. And this is the money
quote. Yet when we achieved and the new world dawned,
the old men came out again and took
our victory to remake in the likeness of the former
world. They knew youth could win,
but had not learned to keep and was pitiably weak
against age. We stammered that we had
worked for a new heaven and a new earth, and
they thanked us kindly and made
their peace. Close
quote. Yeah. Those old
men who thought that they had not lost trust, those old
men who believed that they had behaved
with honor and had kept the political and
cultural and civilizational promises to others in Europe,
didn't quite realize that the
millions of dead
indicated that they had kept the wrong
promises.
The genuine guarantee, the only guarantee of civilization, is built on the
rock of keeping promises. And the one thing you could say about all the
players in World War I, from the Kings and the princes to the
generals and even the ambassadors, was that they were trying
to keep promises, or at least to avoid committing to new
ones. But the mistake they made
was that they didn't realize when those promises should be
broken. And this concept that promises
given by men of honor to other men of honor, regardless of
class, status or wealth, this concept that those promises mean
something, was one that died terribly and
tragically in the fields of the Western Front battles of the Somme and the
Verdun. In the Verdun, the Eastern Front battles at
Lemberg, and away from the Western Front in places like
Gallipoli and Mesopotamia. But
this concept that promises means something was not
fully destroyed until after Vietnam and well into
our own era. We are still
eating out on the last seed corn of a high
trust society. And this,
this is something worth defending, this
is something worth withholding up. If you run a
business, this is where it relates to you. And you have
shareholders, to whom do you owe your
trust? To the people at the bottom who are doing the
work or to the shareholders in the boardroom
who control the capital flows?
So what are we to make of John Keegan's book the First World War?
What lessons are we to take from this book and apply to Our
leadership lives 111 plus years after
the end of the war? After the beginning of the war, actually,
111 years after the guns started up and then fell silent?
What are we to take from the First World War?
What are we to take from Keegan's writing about it
as a Britisher writing about a British war? What are we to
take as American leaders from this? Well, we're going to go,
we're going to do a deep dive into some of these other topical areas that
we didn't really focus on in this introductory episode when we talk with
Tom Libby in our next episode?
169. So I would encourage you to check that out.
But there are some things I think that we can glean about
civilization from this book, some lessons that I
think will be helpful for us as leaders, whether we are leading in a
small business, leading in a community, leading in a family,
or even leading a larger enterprise, a larger
business, where the decisions are
much more, well,
weighty and potentially even difficult.
A couple of things to point out, though. In some ways we are
returning now in our own time, and I think this is part of what's
flummoxing us in our own time. We are returning to the world that
existed before any of us listening or hosting this podcast
were even born. We are returning. In many ways, we
are turning back to a pre World War I world
of power politics, honor being more important than
words and treaties, civilizations
that are relying on trust to keep
going. This feels fragile to us when I say
it out loud. And it also sounds delusional because it is
unknown and also because we
are in a world where all of that kind of
pre World War I stuff seems.
Seems so. Seems so abstract,
right? And seems to be fragile and
lacking robustness because, well, we
fundamentally, culturally frame the reality of our lives in a
Post World War II context of supernational
institutions, mega corporations,
and quote, unquote, gee whiz technology, where everyone,
even the poorest among us, gets richer and fewer and
fewer people have anything to fight about or anything much
to fight about anymore.
This thinking, of course, this post World War II
focused thinking has its dissenters, and
the minority report on such thinking is based, such as it were, in the
Pre World War I mindset that.
That encompasses strict hierarchies, martial
obedience, minimal egalitarianism, and
limited democracy. Because
the demos, as all of those Pre World War
I ambassadors, kings, generals,
queens and leaders and politicians
knew the demos are loud. They are confused.
Fundamentally, they are stupid.
Hmm. And we don't like.
We in the demos don't like being called stupid.
The tension between both those polls, of course, is reflected
in the minor leadership struggles at the minor levels that we
have today. Sure, we use terms from the
military, like Vuca or Frontline or Service,
interchangeably with other civilian terms to
describe what the actions are that people are making in our
organizations. But with fewer and fewer of us in the west
having either carried a gun and marched or having killed someone to gain
a strategic position, we don't really know what
we're talking about. And of course,
I was just reading an article on Substack about the potential
about. Well, that was asking the question, are we in America
currently in a civil war? And then you go and read
the comments. By the way, here's a pro tip. Never
read the comments on a Substack article or read the
comments on anything else on the Internet. What you read
there is the. Is the
assertions of people who've never
actually had to shoot anybody in anger, who don't
understand where a martial spirit winds up at,
but also people who feel
that we are in a declining society.
I don't know how we solve those tensions, and I
don't know that. Keegan, if you were writing a book today,
if you were Even still alive 25 years on from the publication
of the First World War, I don't know that he would have anything to tell
us. I do know that if we return
to a pre World War I world, at least in
mindset and maybe in leadership,
maybe that ameliorates some things.
But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe our technology is too far gone,
our mindsets are too much changed and
colored by the exigencies of the Second World
War, a war that would not have happened without the First
World War. And maybe,
maybe we have nothing to look forward to
other than a continuation of
experiencing the consequences of that
first horrible European tragedy at the
beginning, at the beginning of,
well, of the, of the last century.
We're going to talk to Tom more about all of this and
kind of see where this goes. But for right now, well,
that's it for me.
Sam.
Thank you for listening to the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast today.
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