The First World War by John Keegan (Introduction) w/Jesan Sorrells

0:01 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.

0:42 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

1:06 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.

2:05 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.

2:43 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

3:31 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.

3:58 SAM.

4:39 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.

5:44 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.

6:34 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

6:52 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.

7:28 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.

8:48 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.

10:04 SA.

10:44 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?

11:43 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.

12:41 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.

13:25 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

13:55 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.

14:40 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.

15:19 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.

15:54 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.

16:29 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.

17:31 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.

18:28 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.

19:22 Sam,

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21:27 Now back to the show.

21:34 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

22:14 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.

22:45 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.

24:00 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.

24:51 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.

25:32 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.

26:22 Sam.

26:49 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.

27:34 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.

28:16 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.

29:09 And and Haig was a man who, as he paraphrased there, who would be framed as Olympian.

29:19 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.

30:03 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?

30:48 SAM.

31:33 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?

32:26 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.

32:55 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.

33:53 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.

34:30 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.

35:16 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

36:04 indicated that they had kept the wrong promises.

36:11 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.

36:56 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?

37:40 To the people at the bottom who are doing the work or to the shareholders in the boardroom who control the capital flows?

38:43 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,

39:01 111 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.

39:37 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.

40:07 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.

40:45 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.

41:37 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.

42:22 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.

43:07 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.

43:59 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.

44:45 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.

45:12 We're going to talk to Tom more about all of this and kind of see where this goes. But for right now, well,

45:21 that's it for me.

45:45 Sam.

46:13 Thank you for listening to the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast today. And now that you've made it this far, you should subscribe to the audio version of this show on all the major podcast players, including Apple, iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, music, and everywhere else where podcasts are available. There's also a video version of our podcast on our YouTube channel like and subscribe to the video version of this podcast on the Leadership toolbox channel on YouTube. Just search for Leadership Toolbox and hit the subscribe button there on YouTube.

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