“The story of the human race is war.” Winston Churchill’s doleful conclusion has not been disproven since he made it in 1929. The answer to this omnipresent blight on the human condition is a counterintuitive one; it is not to embrace pacifism and isolate oneself from the world and its troubles—the reach of the rocket and airplane has become too great and the planet too interconnected for that to work anymore—but rather to do the precise opposite. The answer instead is to engage further and more actively in order to try to understand the phenomenon of war, the better to counteract its siren voice. This is not as hard as it first sounds, for as Churchill wrote to a Mr. J. H. Anderson in December 1906, thanking him for sending him an account of Sir John Moore’s campaign in the Iberian Peninsula of 1808, “It is all one story in spite of every change in weapons; from the sheep under whose bellies Ulysses escaped from the cave of the Cyclops, to the oxen with which De Wet broke the blockhouse line in the Orange Free State.” Churchill referred to the ambush of British forces at Waterval Drift during the Boer War.
When one views the long story of the Ancient World up to and beyond the fall of the Roman Empire, it becomes clear that the commanders of the great Egyptian, Judean, Assyrian, Greek, Macedonian, Roman, and finally Hun empires provide not just examples of terrifying and inspiring leadership in themselves, but also the template for almost all the great commanders who came after them. It is impossible to consider the military and political career of Napoleon Bonaparte, for example, without appreciating how he consciously saw himself as a worthy modern successor to Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, and he proved as much in his exile on the South Atlantic island of St. Helena, when he wrote Caesar’s biography. It is likewise astounding how often battles like Cannae and Actium and leaders like Hannibal and Scipio crop up in the thought and conversation of the military leaders of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As a general, Dwight D. Eisenhower thought often about Cannae, and the battle is still taught at military academies today.
Winston Churchill saw himself acting on the same historical plane as his great ancestor John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough, and also of his other great hero, Napoleon. Besides them, his other templates for his leadership in 1940 were William Pitt the Younger in the Napoleonic Wars and David Lloyd George and Georges Clemenceau in the Great War. “Nelson’s life should be a lesson to the youth of England,” he wrote to his mother in December 1897. Margaret Thatcher likewise drew her own inspiration during the Falklands War from Churchill. Gen. George C. Marshall’s heroes were the giants of the American Civil War; as a young cadet
