Word: prussian
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...times like this, I get the impression that the etiquette of a gentleman's club has an absolute supremacy in the minds of scholars, just as the ideal of hierarchic obedience held an absolute supremacy in the Prussian officer corps. This leads to trouble. If we tell the truth about Kissinger, then there is a limit to how polite we can be, and the limit is low. In your letter you conveyed a false conception of the man and of the problem that he presents. Your attitude to him as a person means to me that you are being false...
...SETTING: THE HALL OF MIRRORS, VERSAILLES, JANUARY 1871: In the palace of the Bourbons, the rulers of Germany's 25 independent and quarrelsome states gather to savor the fruits of their victory over France's armies. The Franco-Prussian War has given the Germans something that eluded them for centuries?unity. As the architect of that unity, Count Otto von Bismarck looks on, gripping the long spike of his Prussian helmet, while Prussia's King Wilhelm proclaims the establishment of the German Empire. Historian Thomas Carlyle hails the German victory in a letter to the Times of London: "That noble...
...rules of toy battles that he and his friends fought out near his country home. Many of today's rule books draw heavily on Wells' work, devised, as he put it, to attract "boys of every age and girls of the better sort." With deadly seriousness, Prussian officers originally developed the idea in the mid-19th century to hone their tactical skills for actual warfare. Today, of course, professional war-gamers play out their grim battles in locked rooms in Washington and Moscow...
...Knowlton is the first to admit that there has always been something unique in the attitudes of Americans in arms. It was noticed, he says, by the Prussian Baron Friedrich von Steuben, a military adviser to Washington's army: "When he was at Valley Forge, Von Steuben observed that you cannot just tell an American soldier what to do, you always have to tell...
...move, however, to erase the old enmity between French and Germans. Though De Gaulle was raised on his father's stories of his wounds and France's disgrace in the Franco-Prussian War, le Général had a profound respect for the abilities of the Germans. On a visit to the Soviet Union in 1945, De Gaulle stopped off to see the battlefield at Stalingrad. For a long time, he stood mute before the incredible destruction. Molotov waited for his comment. Finally it came. "Un grand peuple," De Gaulle said somberly. "Un grand peuple...