Max Hastings Quotes
The dead lay stacked like folding chairs overlapping each other where they fell.
On that single day, 27,000 French Soldiers were killed in battle. The French Generals, with little understanding of the then modern weapons and their power, sent whole divisions on a bayonet charge and they were just mowed down by the latest German versions of machine guns. They assumed that if they failed to take a German position defended by machine guns, it was only because they had not sent enough men to make the charge. Each successive failure produced another charge with even more men.
Max Hastings, British Historian & Writer, Description of the WWI battle casualties in France, in August 22, 1914, Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War, 2014
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He was then a young Lieutenant.
He was warning the majority and blaming them for what was to happen. Ironically, at the end of the First World War, Germany was so harshly treated because the allies felt that the Germans had been aforewarned not only by others but by opposition Germans as well.
The Christian Crusaders had captured Jerusalem and slaughtered the Muslim civilian inhabitants. In the 21st century, some Islamic terrorists justified the beheading of captured Christian prisoners as revenge for this massive Christian beheading of Muslims almost 1,000 years earlier.
This quotation is unusual for several reasons. First, it is one of the few surviving descriptions of the Battle of Al Fuente an important battle keeping Muslim Grenada independent. Second, it was an elegant poem written by the winning commander who was a polymath with poetry and military prowess just two of his skills. Third, the commander was a Jew commanding a Muslim Army in Moorish Spain.
He and George Washington were both young officers in this battle.
Sir Max Hugh Macdonald Hastings FRSL FRHistS is a British journalist and military historian, who has worked as a foreign correspondent for the BBC, editor-in-chief of The Daily Telegraph, and editor of the Evening Standard. He is also the author of numerous books, chiefly on defence matters, which have won several major awards. Hastings currently writes a bimonthly column for Bloomberg Opinion.
