Why do nations go to war? Why do young men fight and die over the causes that normally occupy the minds of aged statesmen? These are age-old questions, but I didn’t think about them in my youth. I served for two years in the Peace Corps (in Uzbekistan), but gave no thought at all to a military career. Now that I have youth, these questions recur often, in my mind and at my dinner table. This can happen when one lives in a house full of males (my husband and five sons), in an age when Great Power conflict seems to loom on the horizon. 

We talk about current events and what they mean in the context of history. This is uncomfortable because I don’t know exactly what they mean, which is the kind of reality that can be gracefully massaged in conversation with a talk radio host but not with your own kids. I’m frequently tempted to change the subject. (Dessert, anyone?) But I’ve come to understand that there are good reasons why military history is fascinating to boys. It raises crucial questions about virtue, self-sacrifice, civic duty, and manhood. I’d like to think that a nuanced exploration of the subject may make them less susceptible to empty, jingoistic rhetoric—while deepening their understanding of honor in ways that apply to more than war. At the same time, these conversations remind me that I am truly proud to be an American. In the Peace Corps, I remember sparring amicably with Uzbek friends about Soviet military history, and realizing how hard it would be to get perspective on the (harrowing) losses they suffered in the brutal conflict between Hitler and Stalin. On patriotic holidays, I’m grateful to be able to talk to my sons about George Washington, not Georgy Zhukov.

This point was vividly underscored when we recently read The Mask of Command, by the late John Keegan, as family read-aloud. Keegan is a British military historian whose earlier classic, The Face of Battle, explored the experience of the common soldier through the lens of three famous battles (Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme). The sequel considers the psychology and vocation of military commanders through profiles of four defining figures: Alexander the Great, the Duke of Wellington, Ulysses S. Grant, and Adolf Hitler. All of them are interesting, but I submit that the final two essays, on Grant and Hitler, teach certain lessons far better than a thousand warnings against “toxic masculinity” or “Christian nationalism.” 

A Place in History

Why does Keegan, a Brit, choose Grant for the hero of his book? The selection is not shocking, but neither is it an obvious choice. He was a victorious general and a US president, and his face appears on the $50 bill. But he’s not someone we regularly commemorate in story or song. Nobody I know has ever named a son “Ulysses,” and we tend to remember Grant’s defects as much as his strengths. People tend to know him as a high-functioning alcoholic who, from a military-historical perspective, won his war mainly by taking proper advantage of the Union’s enormous advantages. The Southern generals (especially Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee) are remembered for their military brilliance, while Grant is frequently cast as just the man who managed to be competent where feckless predecessors had failed. 

Keegan doesn’t agree with this assessment. Lee had a gift for Napoleonic strategizing, but in Keegan’s view, Grant was the one who truly grasped the nature of modern warfare. It’s not surprising that epic storytelling has focused more on the tragic romance of the South’s defeated Napoleons, but Grant’s “unheroic leadership” (Keegan’s term), prosaic and practical as it was, had its own peculiar excellence. He had an extraordinary ability to distill the strategically and morally essential features of a situation, and to focus unwaveringly on what needed to be done. And he didn’t much care whether anyone composed anthems about it.

Hitler’s selection as villain is utterly unsurprising; he is surely the most universally reviled human being on the planet today. That (dis)honor is merited. He started the world’s deadliest war, and orchestrated genocidal war crimes on an unprecedented scale. Hitler was a bad person. Given the obviousness of that starting point, though, the portrait Keegan paints of him is arresting and in some ways startling. The reader may actually be moved to a bit of sympathy for the alienated young striver who, in the First World War, managed at last to break into the social class where he had always felt he belonged, only to see his new friends promptly slaughtered at Flanders. Everyone knows what Hitler hated, but Keegan fills out the picture by telling us what he loved, which is ultimately more revealing. Both Hitler and Grant were patriots, and both thrived on meaningful activity and a sense of purpose. Grant found those things in the world. Hitler found them in his own megalomaniacal vision of what the world ought to be. 

That difference would not have been obvious, however, in Hitler’s early life, when he might have seemed more prepared than Grant to embrace commitment and self-sacrifice. It would in some ways be comforting to see the young Hitler as a budding sadomasochist or psychopath, on his way to becoming a Caligula or a Saddam Hussein. Even in his awful maturity, however, he doesn’t seem to have reveled in rape or torture. His motives are disturbingly comprehensible, and even familiar: at the start of the First World War, he threw himself into a cause with full patriotic fervor and conviction, believing (not unreasonably at the time) that Germany was the world’s elite military power, destined to stand astride Europe. As a Meldegänger (messenger), Hitler regularly placed himself in mortal peril to deliver crucial information that, among other things, prevented advancing German troops from being obliterated by friendly fire. His superiors were unstinting in their praise. The young Grant, by contrast, attended West Point but graduated in the lower-middle end of his class. He served with some distinction in the Mexican-American war, but a bad conscience over that war (which he saw as unjust), and severe homesickness (especially for his wife) sent him into a spiral of heavy drinking, and he ended up resigning his commission and returning to the Midwest. The outbreak of the Civil War found him scratching out a bare living as a store clerk to keep his children fed. It’s not entirely surprising that George McClellan refused to renew his commission at the start of the war.

There’s a curious symmetry to the two men’s biographies: the young Hitler fighting on the losing side of a war he supported passionately, while the young Grant fought on the winning side of a war he regarded as wrong. Both then moved into some years of obscurity, when no one would have guessed at their ultimate place in history. Grant, however, spent those years trying to live decently as a husband, father, and upstanding citizen. Hitler spent them developing his delusions of grandeur, mastering the art of propaganda, and considering how to channel his rage and resentment into a rematch of the war Germany had lost. He muscled his way into the annals of history. Grant allowed a world-historical role to find him. 

A Clarity of Purpose

Grant was neither charismatic nor charming. He detested pomp, speechmaking, and all forms of ostentation. He lived simply while on campaign, mostly preferring minimal furniture and simple fare. (But he did apparently have a taste for oysters. As a fellow oyster-lover, I enjoyed that eclectic detail.) Everything about Grant’s unassuming minimalism spoke to an individual who was self-directed, comfortable in his skin, and so aware of the extent of his abilities that there was no need to embellish. He also knew his own mind, and was able to hold that clarity even in the midst of tremendous tumult. America’s bloodiest conflict was, in his view, a detestable necessity, but unlike the previous war, it was in fact necessary and just.

So he won it. He did it because he could, and because he understood why it needed to be done. That ruthless efficiency and clarity of purpose permeated everything Grant did as a general, from his communications to his officers (always concise, clear, and delivering exactly the needed details) to his strategic decisions. He was a master of logistics. He had a spectacular memory for terrain and troop movements, and a shrewd ability to read both his own subordinates and enemy commanders. He seemed impervious to the psychological games that Robert E. Lee played so successfully with his predecessors. He understood, too, that he commanded a democratic army. Draconian efforts to deter desertion were impractical for Grant, so it was necessary to factor his soldiers’ moods and wishes into his strategic calculations. 

In the midst of such an ugly and emotional conflict, this extraordinary focus enabled him to win the trust and admiration of both his subordinates and his enemies. His compass was not clouded by the fog of war. Then, at Appomattox and beyond, Grant’s magnanimity made it clear that he had never been motivated by a hunger for domination or a thirst for revenge. Not for nothing did he name his favorite horse “Cincinnatus.”

Against that backdrop, the grotesque dimensions of Hitler’s demagoguery are particularly glaring. Though he was masterful at inspiring devotion in the distant masses, the people in his immediate orbit were constantly managing him, struggling to keep him on task and scrambling to adapt to his mercurial moods. He had fractious relationships with his generals. Quite often he would ignore their advice and then blame them when his orders went awry in predictable ways. Lower-ranking underlings were less likely to be fired, but their jobs were not enviable. Keegan tells of late nights at his headquarters in Rastenberg and Vinnitsa (far from the battlefields where his soldiers were killing and dying) where he forced his subordinates to sit awake at all hours, eating excessive quantities of cake and laboring to feign interest while he held forth with sophomoric opinions on everything under the sun. A number of young women were stationed at headquarters, ostensibly as secretaries but mainly because he enjoyed being flattered and fawned over. His war councils frequently degenerated into tangential rambles; although he was obsessed with victory, Hitler found it increasingly difficult as the war went on to focus on significant practical details. At the same time, he was unwilling to recognize his limits and delegate authority to men of greater ability. 

Grant, in short, inspired respect in friends, enemies, his soldiers, and the broader public. Hitler used cake and fear to manufacture the social acceptance he continued to crave. 

A Noble Fight

One hesitates to reduce two such complicated men to a simplistic aphorism, and yet one immediately springs to mind. A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. Grant lived that truth, won his war, became the 18th US president, and died at 68, surrounded by loving children and grandchildren. Hitler failed utterly to achieve any of his life’s objectives. He lost his war, incurred the hatred of the entire world, and died alone by his own hand. (Oddly, he had a vegetarian spaghetti lunch served immediately before going off to shoot himself in the head.)

That failure was not merely moral. Hitler failed by every metric that mattered to him personally. How do angry and alienated neo-Nazis manage to overlook this point? His strategic military choices were erratic at best. His personal life was pathetic. He presented himself as the savior of Germany, but ended up subjecting her to even worse humiliations than the ones that had scarred his own youth. To his beloved homeland, he delivered yet another lost generation. 

Near the end of his life, Keegan believes, he realized the awful extent of this failure. Over just a few months, he deteriorated to an astonishing degree, reaching the point where he could hardly walk across the yard without stopping to rest. In the daytime he was distracted and puffy-eyed; insomnia plagued his nights.

For Hitler’s supreme command had been—and may have appeared to him as he passed it in retrospect—no more than a charade of false heroics. It had been based, as he himself has trumpeted in his days of power, on the concept of lonely suffering, on his internalizing of his soldiers’ risks and hardships in the fastness of Rastenburg and Vinnitsa, on the equation of their physical ordeal with his psychological resistance, on the substitution of ”nerve” for courage, ultimately on the ritual of suicide as the equivalent of death in the face of the enemy.

No earthly punishment could be adequate for crimes as monstrous as Hitler’s, but it’s terrible nevertheless to imagine such a grim moment of truth. Who could possibly want to be Hitler? 

Grant, for his part, has the rare distinction of being a successful military leader who was inadequately appreciated by later countrymen. It seems unlikely he would have minded. He knew what he did, and he was the sort of man who always valued his wife’s good opinion more than any journalist’s or historian’s. For our sake, however, it is worth looking back and remembering, particularly because there is something distinctively American about Ulysses S. Grant. Even in midst of war, he distinguished himself as a republican leader, and a lover of ordered liberty. He drew his strength from his natural connections to family, friends, and the Midwestern soil, and from a nuanced appreciation of what was best in the American political tradition. Autocracy was completely foreign to his nature, and that made him a better man, and a better military leader.

For boys especially, the lessons are crucial. It’s not wrong to love one’s country, but that love needs to be tempered by other loves, and by a recognition of moral constraints on what can be done in pursuit of national greatness. It’s not “toxic” to aspire to manliness, but great men are guided by a prudent appraisal of what a given moment requires. All boys, perhaps, are on some level spoiling for a noble fight. But noble fights are earned, not demanded, and certainly not chosen on one’s own preferred terms. 

This is not a uniquely American truth, but Americans have been more successful than some at living it. If a British historian can see that, then surely we can too.