Hello and welcome back. This is WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. We’ve just walked out of Versailles—the great paper ending that doesn’t end anything—and now we take the next step exactly where you want it: into two men who had every reason, as human beings, to understand what modern war really is… and who still carried the old dreams forward anyway.

This is not an episode about “great men” in the flattering sense. It’s an episode about a frightening continuity: the way an industrial slaughter can make people more addicted to myth, not less. The way trauma can harden into ideology. The way the mud can teach you to hate, or teach you to endure, but almost never teaches you peace.

You said it perfectly: both were in the mud. Both should know better. And yet the old world continues through them—the hunger for empire, the instinc ...