"How easy it is, in retrospect, to see that that was so, how difficult at the time to except the fallibility of governments and general staffs. The fundamental truth underlying dissatisfaction with systems and with personalities in all countries was that the search for anything or anyone better was vain. The problem of command in the circumstances of the First World War was insoluble. Generals were like men without eyes, without ears and without voices, unable to watch the operations they set in progress, unable to hear reports of their development and unable to speak to those whom they had originally given orders once action was joined. The war had become bigger than those who fought it."
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Chapter 9, “The Breaking of Armies” (p. 347)
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John Keegan
Sir John Desmond Patrick Keegan OBE FRSL (15 May 1934 – 2 August 2012) was an English military historian and journalist.
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