The Guns of August Quotes

“So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of 1910 when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII of England that the crowd, waiting in hushed and black-clad awe, could not keep back gasps of admiration. In scarlet and blue and green and purple, three by three the sovereigns rode through the palace gates, with plumed helmets, gold braid, crimson sashes, and jeweled orders flashing in the sun. After them came five heirs apparent, forty more imperial or royal highnesses, seven queens - four dowager and three regnant - and a scattering of special ambassadors from uncrowned countries. Together they represented seventy nations in the greatest assemblage of royalty and rank ever gathered in one place and, of its kind, the last. The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history's clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August

“Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August

“Honor wears different coats to different eyes.”
― Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August

“Human beings, like plans, prove fallible in the presence of those ingredients that are missing in maneuvers - danger, death, and live ammunition.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August

“The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history's clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August

“in the midst of war and crisis nothing is as clear or as certain as it appears in hindsight”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August

“Arguments can always be found to turn desire into policy.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August

“Of the two classes of Prussian officer, the bull-necked and the wasp-waisted, he belonged to the second. Monocled and effete in appearance, cold and distant in manner, he concentrated with such single-mindedness on his profession that when an aide, at the end of an all-night staff ride in East Prussia, pointed out to him the beauty of the river Pregel sparkling in the rising sun, the General gave a brief, hard look and replied, 'An unimportant obstacle.”
― Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August

“One constant among the elements of 1914—as of any era—was the disposition of everyone on all sides not to prepare for the harder alternative, not to act upon what they suspected to be true.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August

“When at last it was over, the war had many diverse results and one dominant one transcending all others: disillusion.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August

“Belgium, where there occurred one of the rare appearances of the hero in history, was lifted above herself by the uncomplicated conscience of her King and, faced with the choice to acquiesce or resist, took less than three hours to make her decision, knowing it might be mortal.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August

“No less a bold and pugnacious figure than Winston Churchill broke down and was unable to finish his remarks at the sendoff of the British Expeditionary Force into the maelstrom of World War I in Europe.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August

“Fateful moments tend to evoke grandeur of speech, especially in French.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August

“The Battle of the Marne was one of the decisive battles of the world not because it determined that Germany would ultimately lose or the Allies ultimately win the war but because it determined that the war would go on. There was no looking back, Joffre told the soldiers on the eve. Afterward there was no turning back. The nations were caught in a trap, a trap made during the first thirty days out of battles that failed to be decisive, a trap from which there was, and has been, no exit.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August

“The impetus of existing plans is always stronger than the impulse to change.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August

“The French right wing, opening the offensive into German-occupied Lorraine, took an old embattled path like so many in France and Belgium where, century after century, whatever the power that makes men fight brought legions tramping down the same roads, leveling the same villages.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August

“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.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August

“Although the defects of the Russian Army were notorious, although the Russian winter, not the Russian Army, had turned Napoleon back from Moscow, although it had been defeated on its own soil by the French and British in the Crimea, although the Turks in 1877 had outfought it at the siege of Plevna and only succumbed later to overwhelming numbers, although the Japanese had outfought it in Manchuria, a myth of its invincibility prevailed.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August

“Those deterrents—the brotherhood of socialists, the interlocking of finance, commerce, and other economic factors—which had been expected to make war impossible failed to function when the time came. Nationhood, like a wild gust of wind, arose and swept them aside. People”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August

“SOME DAMNED FOOLISH THING in the Balkans,” Bismarck had predicted, would ignite the next war. The assassination of the Austrian heir apparent, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, by Serbian nationalists on June 28, 1914, satisfied his condition.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August

“Character is fate, the Greeks believed. A hundred years of German philosophy went into the making of this decision in which the seed of self-destruction lay embedded, waiting for its hour. The voice was Schlieffen’s, but the hand was the hand of Fichte who saw the German people chosen by Providence to occupy the supreme place in the history of the universe, of Hegel who saw them leading the world to a glorious destiny of compulsory Kultur, of Nietzsche who told them that Supermen were above ordinary controls, of Treitschke who set the increase of power as the highest moral duty of the state, of the whole German people, who called their temporal ruler the “All-Highest.” What made the Schlieffen plan was not Clausewitz and the Battle of Cannae, but the body of accumulated egoism which suckled the German people and created a nation fed on “the desperate delusion of the will that deems itself absolute.” The”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August

“The impetus of existing plans is always stronger than the impulse to change. The Kaiser could not change Moltke’s plan nor could Kitchener alter Henry Wilson’s nor Lanrezac alter Joffre’s.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August

“They were twelve days in which world history wavered between two courses and the Germans came so close to victory that they reached out and touched it between the Aisne and the Marne.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August

“Believing themselves superior in soul, in strength, in energy, industry, and national virtue, Germans felt they deserved the dominion of Europe.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August

“There was an aura about 1914 that caused those who sensed it to shiver for mankind. Tears came even to the most bold and resolute.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August

“The occasions when an individual is able to harness a nation are memorable, and Grey’s speech proved to be one of those junctures by which people afterward date events.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August

“What is it about this book—essentially a military history of the first month of the First World War—which gives it its stamp and has created its enormous reputation? Four qualities stand out: a wealth of vivid detail which keeps the reader immersed in events, almost as an eyewitness; a prose style which is transparently clear, intelligent, controlled and witty; a cool detachment of moral judgment—Mrs. Tuchman is never preachy or reproachful; she draws on skepticism, not cynicism, leaving the reader not so much outraged by human villainy as amused and saddened by human folly. These first three qualities are present in all of Barbara Tuchman’s work, but in The Guns of August there is a fourth which makes the book, once taken up, almost impossible to set aside. Remarkably, she persuades the reader to suspend any foreknowledge of what is about to happen.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August

“General Gallieni, dining in civilian clothes at a small café in Paris on August 9, overheard an editor of Le Temps at the next table say to a companion, “I can tell you that General Gallieni has just entered Colmar with 30,000 men.” Leaning over to his friend, Gallieni said quietly, “That is how history is written.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August

“No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard and fast and specific decision.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August

“Clausewitz, a dead Prussian, and Norman Angell, a living if misunderstood professor, had combined to fasten the short-war concept upon the European mind. Quick, decisive victory was the German orthodoxy;”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August