Goodbye to All That, by Robert Graves;  The Great War, by Peter Hart; Catastrophe: Europe goes to war 1914, by Max Hastings;  and The Peacemakers, by Margaret Macmillan

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Summary: Diverse, highly readable perspectives on the First World War

Like many of my generation, my introduction to the First World War was at school, studying the sublime poetry of Wilfred Owen. Owen’s writings along with others such as Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, did much to promote the “lions led by donkeys” view of that war. 

This is a perspective on the war that Peter Hart takes considerable exception to. A key theme of his fine narrative history of that war, similar to Hew Strachan, is that the allied generals have been unfairly maligned, made scapegoats by civilian leaders who bore more responsibility for the carnage.

The generals of the Western Front were, he argues, by and large, diligent soldiers, trying to learn the best way to fight an industrial war. This is something that their prior experiences, helping their colonial empires steal other people’s countries and butchering anyone who objected, had not properly prepared them for. 

Better than Strachan, Hart illustrates well the impact of the generals’ decisions on the front line troops of all armies. He quotes extensively from the letters and diaries of the combatants to give a truer sense of their experiences, including of the vicious fighting. This makes it hard to sympathise with Hart’s  broader argument that the generals were doing their best. 

The industrialised trench warfare of the First World War was not quite unprecedented: the Union’s final campaign against Richmond under Grant previewed the sort of warfare that would come to define the Western Front. Grant had realised that an attritional campaign would bleed the South to such an extent that even if he lost every battle the Union would win the war. 

With no extant tactics to breach the fortified lines in a way that would have meaningful strategic impact on the course of the war, the opposing sides settled into a similar war of attrition. This led to regular battles that hoped to inflict such a butcher’s bill on the other side as to make it difficult for them to continue.

Other pressures, not least that of coalition warfare, also demanded action, irrespective of how inadvisable. That is how the British came to attack fortified German positions on the Somme in 1916 – to provide some “relief” to the French under German attack at Verdun. On the first day of the Battle of the Somme the British Army suffered 57,470 casualties, including 19,240 deaths. That still does not seem to me a reasonable price for generals learning on-the-job or offering moral support to an ally. 

By way of contrast, during the Second World War Matthew Ridgeway, an American Airborne general risked his entire career by refusing to lead his troops on what he believed would be a suicidal assault on Rome. This would have entailed dropping his lightly armed forces in the midst of two German heavy divisions.

I suspect most of the allied troops on the frontline of the First World War, such as Owen, Sassoon and Graves, would have happily swapped their “diligent” generals for a few with a fraction of Ridgeway’s moral courage. 

Graves was almost killed in a later stage of the Somme battle. It is striking that in Goodbye to All That, his engaging account of his wartime experiences, he never describes killing anyone, though he hints that he did. The closest he comes is describing a sniping opportunity to kill a bathing German. Graves writes that he could not bring himself to press the trigger on the naked man, so he assigned the task to a subordinate instead.

Graves clearly carried the war with him for decades after. The guilt and trauma of it infuses his account of the Greek Myths, for example.

Given the horror of the war, it is understandable that we all should look for who to blame. This is among the tasks that Max Hastings undertakes in his typically gripping account of the outbreak of the war. Hastings is at pains to point out that Germany more than any other nation was the one that could have put a stop to the descent into cataclysm. Hence in Hastings’ view this is the country that should bear most of the blame. Hart has a similar perspective, noting that Germany believed that as war was inevitable the sooner it began the better it suited them. 

In this Hastings and Hart offer somewhat different perspectives to Christopher Clark’s exceptional book on the same subject, The Sleepwalkers. This lays considerably more of the blame on Serbia, Britain and France’s ally. Margaret Macmillan, whose book, The War that Ended Peace, also explored the dangerous, dizzying array of alliances and egos that shepherded Europe to war. Both these accounts suggest there is plenty more blame to go around all combatant nations. 

With The Peacemakers Macmillan explores the end of the war, specifically the Paris Peace conference that led to the Versailles Settlement. This established much of the contemporary political shape of Europe. Alongside the “Great Power” politics of the Conference, Macmillen’s book is also the story of how the peoples of, in particular, central and eastern Europe shook off the rule of the Great Powers whose blundering had dragged them into catastrophic war. 

But the Versailles settlement also sowed the seeds of future war in Europe, by assigning all the guilt for the war to Germany. This ignored the role of, in particular, Serbia in starting things. It also ignored the fact that the Germany that came to Paris was a different country to the one at the start of the war. Not fundamentally different, of course: as German history since 1919 has shown it a country that has never quite lost its relish for atrocity. But by 1919 it had been through a democratic revolution that was economically crippled by the demand for reparations from the victorious powers. This created the political conditions for the Nazis to emerge. 

In granting to Britain the Palestine mandate the Versailles Settlement also paved the way for a new settler-colonial entity there, and for the Zionist genocide of the indigenous people that, with shameless US, German and British support, continues to this day. 

The First World War remains an example of, as William Faulkner once wrote, the past not even being past. Its dark legacy is a bloody one in the present for millions of defenceless human beings.

So, perhaps Wilfred Owen remains still the most vital voice on the First World War, understanding from that one war the pity of all war, and encouraging a level of empathy for the victims of war that no discussions of causality, strategy or blame ever can.

Good Leaders in Turbulent Times: How to Navigate Wild Waters at Work, by Martin Farrell

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Summary: “Ever try. Ever fail. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

As a means to educate, stories are as old as humanity. And the best ones endure. That is why, for example, the wisdom of the parables of Jesus still resonates. 

Philip Gourevitch, in his book “A Cold” Case, explored the importance of stories in mentorships, as a way in which leaders share their experience with the next generation of “apprentices”. That is a tradition that Martin Farrell enters with his book, “Good Leaders in Turbulent Times: How to Navigate Wild Waters at Work”. 

As well as having led organisations himself, Farrell has a long background mentoring leaders: he was a particular help to me during one nightmarish phase of my career. So, he has deep understanding that even the best leaders often have to endure reversals and “the slings and arrows” of those who have never experienced the grinding responsibilities of choice-making that leadership entails. 

In other words, he has heard, if not all the stories, a great many of them. He recounts these here in the intertwined stories of a group of fictional not-for-profit CEOs at various stages of their careers each enduring their own professional crises. As resources for learning they are a reminder to other leaders going through their own trials that they are not alone. Others have passed this way and endured… or at least survived. Here are some of the ways they managed to cope.

Farrell understands that beneath the latest fads and fashions, which come and go and come back again, leadership is a human process and it takes a human toll. That is a truth that is often underappreciated by new leaders when they take up their roles. More unforgivably it is too often forgotten by board members who blunder in their organizational stewardship as a result, often in ways that they are never held accountable for. 

Because of this, Farrell’s book is a vital one and should be required reading for CEOs. It should also be required reading for board members, particularly those who have never been CEOs. It is book that the for-profit as well as the not-for-profit sectors can usefully learn from.

Good Leaders in Turbulent Times is an accessible, humane book, imaginatively designed and wonderfully illustrated by Steve Appleby. It is an important contribution to leadership literature.  

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain

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Summary: Huck and Jim try to flee their woes, stalked by the malevolent figure of Tom Sawyer.

Dith Pran, the Cambodian journalist made famous by the movie, The Killing Fields, wrote that the most terrifying of the Khmer Rouge were the child soldiers. They had no sense of either mortality or conscience and would kill with no compunction and little excuse.

In his writings on Vietnam, Tim O’Brien also describes this phenomenon amongst American troops, themselves little more than children. O’Brien describes the results when they are unleashed, as the dogs of war inevitably are, on a substantially defenceless civilian population whose pleas for mercy the Americans never understand.

The literary archetype for this monstrousness is perhaps Tom Sawyer. While not the main focus of this book, his presence when he appears inevitably causes mayhem, anguish and a threat to life for any with the misfortune to cross this dangerous clown’s path.

Huckleberry Finn is one of the great novels of America. In it Huck, a free-spirited kid who has grown up in the woods, and Jim, an escaped slave, both flee to the Mississippi River to seek the freedom to pursue their different ideals of happiness.

Along the way they have comic and comic-dreadful encounters with con men, blood feuds, and slave catchers who threaten to undermine their plans. But perhaps the most sinister threat comes from Tom Sawyer, Huck’s supposed friend.

In the book Tom seems to embody not the ideal of personal freedom cherished by Huck and Jim, but another American ideal still very much at large: that of the virtue of overweening self interest. Nothing matters to Tom but his own amusement and he has no concern if the modest hopes of people he regards as lesser, particularly Jim, are torn apart in the service of his gratification.

The spirit of Tom Sawyer still pervades American politics. There is a lineal link from Tom’s ludicrous plans of piracy to Trump’s grotesque fantasies of the benefits of genocide in Gaza. Those Americans who gave repeated standing ovations to Benjamin Netanyahu when that war criminal and genocidist addressed a joint session of Congress embody the spirit of Tom Sawyer. For them too, the lives of large swathes of humanity simply do not matter.

Huckleberry Finn is a charming and very funny reflection on the American Dream. But it knows there is an American nightmare too, and it stares deep into that void left by the absence of American conscience.

The Ghosts of Rome, by Joseph O’Connor

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Summary: more Paddington 2 than Jaws 2

Sequels are a tricky thing. Some, like Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments add something to an earlier classic. More ill-judged ones, like Pat Barker’s The Women of Troy, can dent the lustre of their more accomplished predecessor, seeming to aim to cash in on a successful formula rather than say anything compelling or new.

So it was with some trepidation that I picked up the Ghosts of Rome, Joseph O’Connor’s follow up to his superb novel of European Resistance to Nazism, My Father’s House.

Time has moved on a few months from the first novel, the German occupation has become more brutal, and the pressure on the Choir – the escape line for Allied prisoners of war and Jews established by Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty – more extreme.

The pattern that O’Connor uses for this book is similar to its prequel: It focuses on one operation, and one individual in the midst of the otherwise present and correct ensemble of the Choir, in this instance Contessa Giovanna Landini – Jo.

O’Connor admits that all of the novel, including the purported transcripts of BBC interviews, is his own invention. But many of the people involved including Jo and her Irish pals, Delia and her daughter Blon, were real. This accentuates the sense of awe regarding what these ordinary people endured and achieved in such extraordinary circumstances. And, even if we know they survived the war this does not diminish the tension.

The Ghosts of Rome is a gripping thriller. But like the best thrillers it is more than that. It explores and asserts the importance of morality and friendship in the face of monstrousness. These remain important ideals in a world in which the genocide of vulnerable people is again high on the agendas of many of the supposed liberal democracies of the West.

Standing Tall: living with motor neuron disease, by Samantha Whittaker

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Summary: a poetry of courage

“Silence – like a Quaker meeting.”

And like a Quaker meeting, Samantha Whittaker breaks this silence with her deeply considered words. Standing Tall is her first book, a collection of her poetry. As she explains in the introduction poetry is something that she returned to writing after her diagnosis with motor neurone disease. “At 56 I was struck with this terrible disease… Nobody can understand me now… I used to chat and laugh so much… Standing tall is where you’ll find me/ When I die.”

Because of its subject matter, this is a desperately sad book. But it is also an awe-inspiring one. I have only been in the presence of true courage a couple of times in my life. This book reminded me of those times. Because in this book Whittaker unflinchingly confronts her disease and her life with it: “Reason, slobber, alive, decline/ Words that sum up…”

Standing Tall is an extraordinary book by an extraordinary woman.

Prague winter

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Summary: Christmas in the Kafka’s city

New Town street
Church of SS Cyril and Methodius
Where Gabcik and Kubis died.
Sculpture of a girl
Girl getting away from it all
Art! ART!!!
Crib in Old Town Square
Astronomical clock, Old Town Square
Resistance to fascism is an ongoing struggle
Approaching Charles Bridge
Karlovy Lazne
Sun on the Vltava
Art on the riverfront

My most read blogs for 2024

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Summary: some things old, some things new, nothing borrowed, much of it blue.

In reverse order of popularity

10: In memory of my father, Gerry McQuade

9. Leadership in the grey zone – drawing on my book Ethical Leadership to reflect on the contemporary world.

8. My review of Lara Pawson’s extraordinary book of everything, Spent Light.

7. My review of Martin Doyle’s history of the Troubles in his home place, Dirty Linen.

6. My review of The Kidnapping: a hostage, a desperate manhunt and a bloody rescue that shocked Ireland, by Tommy Conlon and Ronan McGreevy

5. Still stirring considerable interest, 10 years after its initially blogging: The Doctor and the Saint: Arndahati Roy’s introduction to B R Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste

4. My review of Ellen McWilliam’s sublime Resting Places: on wounds, war and the Irish revolution

3. A long read, but surprisingly popular reflecting, I think, the enduring interest in the man: The human rights Legacy of Roger Casement

2. On western double standards and complicity in the genocide in Gaza: Old habits, new protests: on the politics of Israel’s allies

1. Letter to British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.

Leadership in the “grey-zone” 

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Summary: Remarks to the conference “Leadership in Dialogue: Exploring the Spaces between Ideas, Communities, Worldviews”, Birmingham, 8 to 10 December 2024[1]

There are diverse perspectives on leadership. Mine is leadership as a responsibility to choose – particularly in choices that affects the lives of others, in organisations or in wider society.

That has been most the defining feature of my experience of leadership, and something you never really appreciate until you are in that role. Key aspects of leadership involve decisions on resource allocation. Such choices are always fraught because there are always winners and losers, upset and distress, and lingering resentments. 

Of course it can always be worse – I spend a good number of years leading humanitarian operations in, among other places, Angola during the civil war there. This led to some choices that were even more filled with anguish than the difficult but routine budget allocations that all leaders have to deal with. I write in my book, Ethical Leadership, about having to prioritize the lives of one group of people over another and how you have to learn to live with that after. That thought experiment with the runaway tram can get very real in some leadership roles. 

So given that these are leadership realities, ethical leadership is self-evidently important: by ethical leadership I mean the attempt to make the most life affirming choice possible, irrespective of the difficulty of the situation. A life affirming choice is one that optimizes the protection of the environment on one hand and the protection of human rights on the other.

Now, when we are making choices it is important for leaders to remember that those choices are made in, what I call in my book “a cruciform of agency”.

That is, there are aspects of the choice – whether that choice relates to a love affair, or work, or war – that are in the social world: those are the rules and resources associated with the choice:  the laws, polices, practice, finances or people who will be affected.

Then there are the personal aspects of the choice: the ones relating to the choice maker’s aspirations and experiences, and most fundamentally to their moral values.

The dialogue between these personal and social aspects of choice can be conceived of interacting orthogonally, hence the idea of a cruciform of agency emerges.

Now there is a 2002 paper by Craig and Greenbaum on a mining operation in South Africa. In that paper they recount how when they raised concerns with the mine management about issues such as health and safety, or labour terms and conditions, or the environmental damage that the operation caused, the managers they interviewed would express sympathy, but assert there was nothing they could do. The company they worked for caused the problems. Their responsibility was simply to get on with the job. They seemed to believe that they had no moral responsibility for the damage caused by the company despite the fact that it was they themselves who constituted the company. 

This denial of personal responsibility of policy makers and business executives for the consequences of their choices is a central constraint on obtaining progress on many of the world’s contemporary problems including slavery, something that affects an estimated 50 million people in the world today. 

I have rarely met anyone who has been in favour of slavery in principle. However, many in reality are in favour of slavery in practice. And if you doubt that, to take just one example, look at the hostile environments for migrants that many political leaders, from left to right in rich countries, take such pride in. This, despite the well documented fact that such hostile environments lead to the trafficking into forced labour and sexual exploitation of hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people. 

If the personal aspects of leadership, particularly the moral responsibility of the leader for the consequences of their choices is abandoned then ethical leadership becomes impossible, and indeed much worse may emerge. But this is not uncommon.

You all know the history: The Nazi’s used the idea of “just following orders” to try to evade personal moral responsibility for their atrocities.

Henry Kissinger infamously used the notion of “realpolitik” to justify his murderous foreign policy that devastated the lives of millions in Bangladesh, Cambodia and Vietnam.

Today, Joe Biden, Olaf Scholz, Keir Starmer and David Lammy use the formulation “Israel has the right to defend itself” to justify their craven complicity in war crimes and genocide.

While the words used in each of these examples are different, their purpose is the same. They are explicit attempts to disguise moral bankruptcy and evade basic leadership responsibilities for the catastrophic human consequences of their choices. For this they deserve utter condemnation in “history and eternity” as Abraham Lincoln once put it.

The evasion of personal responsibility in a choice is the anathema of ethical leadership, and it brings with it a loss of authority: what follower worth their salt is ever going to respect a moral coward.

And there is always something more moral that leaders can do, even in the most extreme of circumstances. At the very least they can protest.

The current British prime minister likes to boast that his is not a party of protest. Which of course is true. Because protest is leadership. Protest is a way in which a society can open dialogue with itself and change the ways it thinks about itself. 

Protest is sometimes the only way more formal dialogue with power can be obtained. Protest is how women’s rights and gay rights, minority rights and, indeed, all human rights have been advanced in the world. Protest matters nationally and internationally as the struggles to end apartheid in South Africa and bring some measure of justice to the north of Ireland have shown. 

It also matters internationally because the failure of the West to protest Israel’s atrocities in Gaza, Lebanon and now Syria, compared to our volubility on Ukraine exposes an ugly, frankly racist, double standard at the centre of Western policy. 

Much of the progress towards human dignity, including limiting contemporary forms of slavery, has been through advancing international rule of law. This avenue for progress has now been struck a grievous blow, because the profound undermining of the principle of the universality of human rights that Western policy towards Gaza has asserted. This has undermined in a fundamental way the ideal of an impartial system of international rule of law. 

Many European leaders are expressing concern at the threat that Donald Trump poses to international order. But the damage done to that system of rule of international law by Biden, Starmer and Scholz is already catastrophic. 

At the heart of ethical leadership is the ideal once set out by the Irish patriot and anti-slavery campaigner Roger Casement who said, “We all on earth have a commission and a right to defend the weak against the strong and to protest brutality in every shape and form.” 

That is a commission which we must all take up. Because, more than any other time in my life, the challenge for all of us to lead ethically is at its most urgent. We are all leading in the grey zone now. Indeed, it is almost night.

[1] In his essay collection, The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi wrote of the “grey zone” a morally ambiguous space where the ideas of right and wrong are no longer absolute and “good” decisions are impossible.