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People in histories also are not human beings. The moment you try to make them human in writing your history a demon enters and makes you make a great quantity of little mistakes. For instance, you are writing about a man with one eye, and you are determined to make him human; you find out all you can about that eye, whether the other one was of glass, or was just left screwed up in the old-fashioned style. You get right about the date of the time when he lost his eye, the effect which his one eye had on other people, and all the rest of it. You make the man live again before you, and the moment you begin writing about him you will make his left eye his right eye. It is the knowledge of this, and the fear of the powerful Demon who works it, that makes historians shun the human being and stuff their books full of ghosts paler than any that wander by Acheron.

This is especially true of historians of war. The people they write about occupy "strategic" points (a phrase which is blankly meaningless to the writer as to the reader), they "grasp" the situation at a glance, they "master detail," they are (when the author is against them), "in spite of all their faults, not devoid of physical courage," or (if the author is in favour of them) "acting with that quiet decision which is characteristic of them" (and of bad actors in problem plays, too, by the way), but they never live.