Why is it that a marriage of minds is so devastating in war? And why do I say it is equally necessary in the civilian world as well? In War, because until Alamein, the Germans ran rings round us; and it looked as if we were going to lose. In Russia, what General von Manstein did with his Corps on the Leningrad front was beyond belief. For much of the time he was 50 miles ahead of his Army; and as he laconically remarked, provided one kept swanning around, there was not much danger of being caught. A marriage of minds enormously increases the imagination of both minds involved; and if their opponents have not this advantage, in comparison they cannot cope. The Germans only came to grief in Russia when winter arrived, because Hitler had not the forethought to order winter clothing to be issued to his troops, and maybe he did not have any; he was persuaded the war in Russia would only last a few weeks And nobody on the German staff had read Caulaincourt on Napoleon’s retreat. It must have been the same lack of imagination that supposed during the early days of the Nazi movement that being a shipping clerk in Hamburg qualified a man to be their foreign affairs spokesman. In some ways Hitler was extraordinarily parochial. He only left Germany once before the War, for a short holiday in Italy. And it was a miracle for us, when he took personal command of the Wehrmacht in Russia. It destroyed at one stroke German versatility on a grand scale, and put an end to von Manstein’s idea of a strategic withdrawal into the Dnieper bend, with a view to destroying the Southern Soviet armies.
I found the same in the Law. It took me 15 years to master the skill of persuading men whom I considered dishonest to tell stupid obvious lies in the witness-box, of their own freewill, although some of my best successes were in the earlier cases. And I could never have mastered it, unless I had believed at first that there was a sense of communion between myself and another, regardless of whether this belief was fact or fantasy. It always surprised me that none of my colleagues tried to imitate me. Of course they could do many things better than I. But in this particular skill, I not only had no rivals, I had no competitors. About the only colleague with whom I discussed it, called it “diabolical”; but that was only because he could not do it himself.
So I know what I am talking about, within the narrow limits of my experience. And naturally having spent my life studying the human mind, I think that it provides an obvious opening for trying to understand something of the structure of Society, and with luck some inkling of how to build it up, when so many people seem intent on pulling it down. If you discover the destructive power of two minds in the realm of conflict, you may be able to learn its creative power in the world of harmony.