War — History’s Ultimate Failure

Summary

Podcast Summary: This is History: History’s Greatest Fails
Episode: War — History’s Ultimate Failure
Hosts: Dan Jones & Elizabeth Day
Date: May 12, 2026

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Overview

In this powerful season finale, Dan Jones and Elizabeth Day undertake a deep, thoughtful exploration of war as "history's ultimate failure." Drawing on both personal experience and historical expertise, they dissect how war is remembered, the role of memorials, and how cultures narrativize conflict and loss. Throughout, they thread together themes of collective grief, the creation of national identity, and the paradoxical presence of art and creativity born from catastrophe.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Elizabeth’s Personal Context: Growing Up in Conflict ([00:00])

• Elizabeth opens with candid reflections on her childhood in Belfast during the Troubles, sharing:
  • Everyday experiences of bomb scares, checkpoints, and militarized streets.
  • How this "normalization of conflict" shaped her lifelong interest in history and the stories we tell about conflict.
  • Quote: “There was a normality to it that I think masked how much that was to ingest as a child. But it's something that has made me forever more curious about history and also about conflict and how we tell the stories of conflict to each other, about each other.” (Elizabeth Day, [00:48])

Defining War as Failure ([02:14])

• The hosts assert the episode’s guiding premise: war is, itself, the ultimate failure of society, signaling the breakdown of norms.
  • Dan: “I think there's a way of framing war, which is to say that this is the ultimate failure in the sense that this is what happens when society breaks down.” ([02:27])
  • Elizabeth: “War is a failure. It is a breakdown of the norms that we would aspire to.” ([03:33])

The Hundred Years War: Case Study in Futility & Identity ([04:03])

• Dan offers a rich narrative of the Hundred Years War (1337–1453), focusing on:
  • The extensive devastation across Western Europe, the futile ambitions of the English monarchy, and the resulting failure.
  • The war’s paradoxical legacy: the solidification of distinct national identities in England and France.
  • Enduring myths (e.g., Agincourt) support the English nationalist narrative despite actual historical defeat.
    • Quote: “There couldn't be many greater examples of a totally futile conflict. And yet out of it ... come a few very important things which we still feel the effect of for better or worse today.” (Dan Jones, [06:37])
    • Quote: “There are all sorts of consequences of war which are, you know, either a positive net cultural, social gain or are ... contributory to human progress. And ... that’s a difficult idea to get our heads around.” (Dan Jones, [02:44])

Narrativizing Failure and Heroism ([07:15])

• Discussion on how societies transform military defeats into tales of heroism, patriotism, and national pride.
  • Elizabeth: “This is about how that failure was narrativized by the society that experienced it ... overlaying a story of patriotism and heroism.” ([07:15])
  • Dan notes that such constructed narratives form an “important element of English nationality” despite actual military outcomes.

War Memorials: From Ancient Epic to Modern Absence ([08:55]–[15:11])

• The evolution of memorializing war:
  • Medieval and classical examples: epic poems as oral “war memorials.” Homer’s Iliad is essentially "lists of names"—early war memorials ([09:41]).
  • The modern shift to commemorating absence and loss, especially post-World War I.
  • The Cenotaph (an empty tomb), standardized Commonwealth war graves, and the two-minute silence are cited as ways societies process collective trauma.
    • Elizabeth: “It's the commemoration of absence, of emptiness, of loss, of grief itself. ... so many bodies couldn't be identified. ... so unbelievably powerful.” ([15:11])
  • War memorials as emotional touchpoints and focuses for both personal and national grief.

Art, Modernism & Trauma ([11:22])

• War’s disruption led to formal inventiveness—modernism in literature and art as a response to the fragmentation of life.
  • Elizabeth: “It's the rise of modernism, it's the rise of fragmentary fiction like Virginia Woolf. It's the rise of a sort of formal inventiveness in visual arts. This kind of breaking up of canvases because there'd been a breaking up of the fabric of life itself.” ([11:22])
• War’s destruction can paradoxically inspire profound creativity and innovation.

Ruins & Absence as Memorial ([12:50]–[15:06])

• Dan tells the story of Chateau de Coucy, destroyed by Germans in WWI and left as a “monument to barbarity.”
• This motif—memorializing absence rather than victory—recurs throughout the episode.
• “Commemoration of emptiness” becomes linked to the physical, architectural marks left by war.

Contemporary Memorials & Living Architecture ([19:11]–[24:55])

• Personal stories: Both Dan and Elizabeth describe emotional moments at war memorials, linking historical grief to personal and recent experiences such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
  • Elizabeth relates the COVID Memorial Wall in London to the symbolism of the poppy after WWI ([20:33]).
• Cities like Berlin use architecture and public spaces to actively confront and integrate traumatic history.
  • Rachel Whiteread’s Vienna Holocaust Memorial (“negative space”) and Hamburg’s “Monument Against Fascism” are cited as artful yet raw commemorations.
  • Elizabeth: “There are all of these life stories that were left untold. And again, there's this notion of playing with absence and with scale.” ([22:04])

The Limits of Memorialization & Lessons Not Learned ([26:29])

• Dan critically reflects on how long the lessons of war remain embedded in society, questioning the effectiveness of both narrative and physical walls:
  • Walls “never work, walls always fall. And walls are a hopeless way of protecting, dividing, regulating a people. And yet it's something that people consistently return to.” ([27:04])
  • The transformation of historic sites (Dubrovnik, Belfast) from sites of suffering to pop culture tourist spots (Game of Thrones) raises questions about forgetting and commercializing tragedy.

War, Culture, and the Uncomfortable Gifts of Failure ([29:34])

• The hosts close by embracing the paradox: war is both catastrophic failure and the crucible that sometimes forges the greatest art or sharpest insights into human nature.
  • Elizabeth: “It speaks to your point about culture ... How, in extremists, we find the truth of ourselves and how often that makes the greatest art.” ([29:34])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “War is a failure. It is a breakdown of the norms that we would aspire to.” — Elizabeth Day ([03:33])
• “There couldn't be many greater examples of a totally futile conflict. And yet ... very important things which we still feel the effect of...” — Dan Jones ([06:37])
• “The commemoration of absence, of emptiness, of loss, of grief itself.” — Elizabeth Day ([15:11])
• “Walls never work, walls always fall. And yet people consistently return to them.” — Dan Jones ([27:04])
• “History and the history of failure is as much about what we've lost, how absences shape us, as it is about the presences.” — Elizabeth Day ([23:42])

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Segment | Timestamp | |-----------------------------------------------|---------------| | Elizabeth’s experience in Belfast | [00:00–01:54] | | Thesis: War as ultimate failure | [02:14–03:33] | | Hundred Years War analysis | [04:03–08:35] | | Narrativizing defeat/heroes/Agincourt | [07:15–08:35] | | Memorials: Homer, Iliad, ancient memorializing| [08:55–10:05] | | WWI trauma, shellshock, and memorials | [10:05–12:50] | | Chateau de Coucy: monument to barbarity | [12:50–15:06] | | Mourning, silence, the Cenotaph, absence | [15:11–16:57] | | Personal reflections at war memorials | [19:11–20:33] | | COVID and poppy symbolism, memorial wall | [20:33–22:04] | | Holocaust/modern memorial arts | [22:04–24:55] | | Berlin & Dubrovnik: history, memory, commerce | [24:55–29:34] | | War and creativity, conclusion | [29:34–30:01] |

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Tone & Language

• The conversation is empathetic, learned, and often deeply moving. Dan brings sharp historic analysis, while Elizabeth foregrounds emotion, memory, and art. Both balance the weight of tragedy with wit, personal stories, and a hope that lessons might, one day, endure.

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Conclusion

Dan and Elizabeth’s nuanced conversation underscores how the memory and memorialization of war is not merely about the past, but shapes living culture, identity, and even artistic expression. They urge us to mourn what is lost, interrogate how and why we remember, and to recognize failure as both the warning and, sometimes, the crucible of collective progress. The episode stands as a compelling argument for confronting history—its disasters as well as its gifts—with honesty and humility.

Transcript

[Elizabeth Day]

I did grow up in a war zone, effectively, yes. How was that at the time? Because as a child, you don't think to question the context of your life. But now, looking back on it and actually let me just massively pick up the name I'm about to drop with a loud clang when Jamie Dornan came on my. My other podcast, how to Fail. Yeah, he and I went to the same secondary school in Belfast, and it was an incredibly healing conversation because he had a miserable time at that school as well. And I was able to recategorize some of the experiences I'd had. I routinely would be evacuated from shopping centers because of bomb scares. You know, there were military checkpoints on the way to school. I used to walk past the most bombed hotel in Europe and one day walked past and there'd been a bomb the night before, and I saw the mangled wreckage of cars, and every August, men in balaclavas would march down the streets. And there was a normality to it that I think masked how much that was to ingest as a child. But it's something that has made me forever more curious about history and also about conflict and how we tell the stories of conflict to each other, about each other. Which is why I was so keen to talk about this subject today. Good sleep is everything. That's why Ollie's science bag support is made with a blend of melatonin and L theanine for both kiddos and grownups. So when your mind won't switch off, you've got something that can help your racing thoughts and restless nights won't stand a chance. Find Ollie Sleep solutions for the whole [e-mail] that's O L L Y dot com. Hello, this is History's Greatest Fails with me, Elizabeth Day, an author and po.

[Dan Jones]

And I'm Dan Jones, also an author and podcaster.

[Elizabeth Day]

We're old friends and fellow history graduates. And in this series, we talk about failures of historical proportions because we want

[Dan Jones]

to understand why failures make history.

[Elizabeth Day]

And today we're talking about a big one, Dan.

[Dan Jones]

The big one, Arguably, we are talking

[Elizabeth Day]

about the big one. We're talking about war and its memorialization and how the concept of failure threads itself through all of that.

[Dan Jones]

Yes, I think there's a way of framing war, which is to say that this is the ultimate failure in the sense that this is what happens when society breaks down. And yet out of warfare has come some of the most extraordinary art, some of the most important rearrangements of politics and. And communities. There are all sorts of consequences of war which are, you know, either a positive net or cultural, positive social or cultural net gain or are in some ways contributory to human progress. And that. That I think is a difficult idea to get our heads around. And we're also going to be speaking specifically to something you're very interested in, which is war memorials.

[Elizabeth Day]

I am very interested in war memorials. And there's something very moving about the history of war memorialization that for me goes to the root of the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. So we'll get onto that.

[Dan Jones]

But first. But first, I don't think we've had enough medieval history in this.

[Elizabeth Day]

Correct. And you've made the point, Dan, and I just want to reiterate it again, that war itself is the failure. So we're taking that sort of as red at the beginning, at the top of this episode, war is a failure. It is a breakdown of the norms that we would aspire to. Within that, how can we then discuss how we remember it and come to terms with it? And you're right, we haven't had enough medieval history. And you're going to kick us off with what, Dan?

[Dan Jones]

It's just been so long since I've had anyone who's just going to sit there and listen to me wang on about the Hundred Years War. And I'm so.

[Elizabeth Day]

Please don't wang on for a hundred years.

[Dan Jones]

I'll do 116 years if you like, because that's how long the Hundred Years War lasted. I want to talk about the 100 Years War because, I mean, listeners to my regular podcast on this feed will have heard a lot about the 100 Years War because we've been talking about the Plantagenet dynasty. And this is, this is the war that sort of sits at the middle of the story of, of medieval England. And it is, as I say, it runs for 116 years, from 1337 till 1453. And it's a really, really terrible series of interlinked wars, which starts off as the ambition of one King, Edward III in England to take the crown of another, or rather another realm, that being France, and ends up spiraling into a conflict that engulfs Western Europe. I mean, you have Scotland involved, you have the Spanish kingdoms, you have the Low Countries, you have France, you have Germany, you have this regional war that, that flares up over and over again for more than a century, causing untold damage to particularly mainland France, which tends to be the place where a lot of damage gets done during land wars in Western Europe, Misery and, and death of, and all the horrors of war in any age. But, but particular to the Middle Ages, where the Chevroche was a prime tactic of the English, which was just a ride through the countryside destroying everything and ends up, despite the fact that the English are the belligerents, with the English losing not only the primary goal, which is to take the crown of France, losing everything that they win in the war, losing everything they had before the war, losing control of their own crown and, and ending up with the wars of the Roses, which was a sort of, you know, a civil war which ended to take us back to the beginning of this miniseries with your hero Richard III getting it at Bosworth. So there, I mean, there couldn't be many greater examples of a totally futile conflict. And yet out of it, once, once we, we step centuries away from the, the immediate human misery of it, come a few very important things which we still feel the effect of for better or worse today. Now, one of those things is the emergence of England and France as the sort of unitary states that they would become thereafter. England, of course, becomes, you know, Great Britain, Northern Ireland and in various different forms, Empire and Commonwealth. But, but England as England, you know, centered on the main island of the archipelago, there's the British Isles. That's, that having those boundaries is really a product of the, the, the cycle of warfare. That's 100 years war. You have a similar situation in France in which the territorial landmass of France crystallizes through the Hundred Years War. And then on top of that you have this whole sort of corpus of myth and legend and history that's become really important to the, the identities of the two nations.

[Elizabeth Day]

Yes. So really this is about how that failure was narrativized by the society that experienced it and wanted to overlay a story of patriotism and heroism on it. Is that what you're saying?

[Dan Jones]

Yeah, I think that's definitely part of it. I think that there are the, the political consequences of England having totally exhausted itself on this war and realized that the, that whatever the dream that had existed of there being this sort of cross channel dual monarchy in, in which the English and the French were somehow bedfellows and could be considered part of, of a joint polity that with a few notable exceptions really dies the death in 1453 at the end of the Hundred Years War and the, the Channel becomes the divider. If you look at the course of 100 years war, Agincourt is a blip. It's an afternoon. But if anyone knows anything about the Merest thing about the hungry war, it would tend to be, oh, yeah, Battle of Agincourt. When the, when Henry V and his plucky sort of band of archers did the perfidious French. The French don't really talk about Agincourt at all or even remember what on earth we're talking about. But in taking pride from catastrophic defeat, there's been this spinning of an important element of English nationality.

[Elizabeth Day]

Is there a physical memorial anywhere to Agincourt?

[Dan Jones]

No. I mean, the battlefield itself has still been subject to sort of moving around.

[Elizabeth Day]

I mean, did they go in for war memorials in medieval times? I guess maybe not, because war was so current. War was just happening all of the time. You might as well memorialize peaceful life instead.

[Dan Jones]

Yeah, I mean, here we're looking back through the lens, aren't we, of the First World War. And I think that it is a reaction to centuries, thousands of years of a processing of war that has largely been done through heroic narrative. I mean, what is the birthplace of Western literature? Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey and these stories that are rooted in. In memorializing war. And if one. One thinks the Iliad is sort of this great exciting story, whether you have the Trojan Horse, which actually comes, you know, mostly from the Aeneid, from Virgil, you. You sit down and read the Iliad. I mean, whole portions of it are just lists and lists of names and ships, and it's. It's actually like, wow, this is quite boring. But then you realize that, I mean, when Homer was writing hundreds of years after the fact, there'd been this process of oral transmission of the stories of the Iliad, which had. You mean, reading against the text. You can see that this is war memorials. This is the lists of names. In the same way that those lists of names are put on, on World War I stat.

[Elizabeth Day]

The cenotaph brings us neatly onto World War I. And World War I was a catastrophic failure in so many respects, and it was a global conflict that revolutionized our notion of warfare. So up to this point, by and large, warfare, particularly in the 19th century, had been run according to sort of gentlemanly rules. There were certain things you could and couldn't do. There were hours of play, etc, it was generally. It was generals on horseback. And World War I introduced militarized destruction.

[Dan Jones]

Can I add a small footnote? You can, because just to amplify your point, I think even worse than that, the, the introduction of so many things that were. That was, you know, what was seen at scale on both the western eastern fronts and elsewhere in The First World War had been seen in the 1860s in the American Civil War. And in. From 1864, Spotsville, you have trenches. If you look at photographs from, from the, not the beginning of the American Civil War, but like, I mean, the transition is in the middle to 64 in Spotsville, you. You've got trenches that if you see an Alexander Gardner or Matthew Brady photo of them, you assume must be from the Somme.

[Elizabeth Day]

Yes. And I think what's so tragic about it is that the knowledge was not available to the ordinary man and woman, whereas now we live in an era of social media and globalized cult culture and instant communication. But of course, back then that knowledge wasn't there. It might have been had by the military elites, but there, there was this generation of young men who went off to war thinking it would be over by Christmas and were so horrified and traumatized by what they found when they got to the Western Front that when they returned, if they were, if they were able to return, if they survived, and that was by no means a given, they felt unable, so many of them, to reach for any language that existed that could express the nature of what they had witnessed. And so you get what was then termed shell shock, these veterans who literally couldn't express themselves. You also get the formal experimentation then of not only war memorialization, but art itself. It's the rise of modernism, it's the rise of fragmentary fiction like Virginia Woolf. It's the rise of a sort of formal inventiveness in visual arts. This kind of breaking up of canvases because there'd been a breaking up of the fabric of life itself. It feels like.

[Dan Jones]

Yeah, and something detonates under art, culture, music, the whole fabric of the understanding of reality. And then there's this search for how on earth in terms of. And I'll defer to you on this after one small, obviously medieval example. How do we memorialize, how do we remember? How do we tell this story? So no one goes and does this again. And I'm, as I keep banging on about writing this book about castles. One of the great chivalric castles in Europe was the Chateau de Coucy in Picardy, which had been built in the sort of, you know, it's 13th century castle. It was the. The biggest, tallest keep in Europe. It was magnificent. And it was, it was a, you know, a monument that had been restored by Eugene Ville Leduc as a monument to the greatness of the medieval chivalric world. And when the Germans were retreating in 1917 from the battle of the Somme back to the Siegfried line, Hindenburg line, call it what you will. Ludendorff gives this order to destroy everything in the salient. They're retreating from everything. And Ernst Jr. Writes about it, you know, as in his amazing Storm of Steel. Yeah. He describes the scenes that he was. He saw as they were retreating as far back as the Sea Creed line. Every village was reduced to rubble, every tree chopped down, every road undermined, every well poisoned, every basement blown up or booby trapped and so on and so on. And Ludendorff said, and we're blowing up the Chateau de Cussy. And this is amazing letter from the Commander of the 6th German 6th Army, I think Ruprecht of Bavaria, who writes him and says, do you have to blow up the Chateau de Coucy? I mean, what is the point? And Ludendorff does it anyway. 80,000 tons of dynamite and such a vast explosion of this, of this castle that almost nothing is left of it. And after the war, the French take this decision to leave it as a ruin, as, quote, a monument to barbarity. And so it's very early you start seeing this approach, which is, instead of putting up, you know, or as well as putting up monuments, I just remind

[Elizabeth Day]

you, you said this was a brief interjection.

[Dan Jones]

This is brief. This is brief. Monuments go.

[Elizabeth Day]

Well, I think what you were guessing to.

[Dan Jones]

Yeah, I was just like fluffing for you.

[Elizabeth Day]

And part of what we both find so affecting about post World War I memorialization is that it's the commemoration of absence, of emptiness, of loss, of grief itself. So you look at something like the Cenotaph, literally an empty tomb because the slaughter was so manifold and so many bodies couldn't be identified. You see the Commonwealth War graves and you see a similar thing, the sort of unified vision of those, those graves that were deliberately meant to look the same. You see the two minute silence, the great silence, which was introduced two years after the armistice in 1920. That idea of a crowd of people, each of whom probably is carrying their own unique grief, their own sense of loss, and they are able to infuse that silence, that emptiness with their own feelings, but also be part of a collective. It's so unbelievably powerful. And then you also see communities striving to build something that speaks to the importance of keeping this community going even though it's been ravaged. So you get a lot of bus stops and town halls sort of throughout the 1920s, being built by people who contributed funds and felt that this was a meaningful way to remember the loss of their loved ones. And I find it so unbelievably emotional. And I really. I do have to stop every time I see a war memorial in a village to have a moment of paying tribute to what that entire generation went through.

[Dan Jones]

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[Elizabeth Day]

Yeah.

[Dan Jones]

And like you, I find, I find war memorials extremely moving. I think I've told you this before, maybe I even told you around when it happened, but it was in Covid and one of those, you know, the lockdown to be going for A very long time. And it's. It was the first time in my lifetime that had been a national crisis of. Of that sort, where it was, you know, every community is losing people. I remember being out because all the pubs were shut and I was just, you know, stir crazy, going out into the town in. At night, waiting for a takeaway from some shop. We had to queue 2 meters between each other and sitting with a sort of can of Stella Artois next to the war memorial in. In Stains, in the town I live in, which is, you know, a very good example of a small town with. With a war memorial and just sort of becoming kind of choked up with either Stella or Emotion or the. Or the. The pair and just sort of sat on the ground by the war mem my eyes out. And something in the connection between those two events, of course, the First World War was image and the Second War were immeasurably more devastating, as it turned out, than Covid. But in that moment, there seemed to be a germ of this. That is terrible. There was a seed of the same sort of feeling.

[Elizabeth Day]

Yes. And actually, the thing that most reminds me of the symbolism of the poppy after the First World War is the COVID Wall. That was a grassroots memorial. It sort of sprouted up without forethought or organization. And that's near where I live. And I often, like, walk along the banks of the Thames and there's this wall that is directly opposite the Houses of Parliament on the other side of the river, right next to St. Thomas's Hospital, which obviously, like all NHS hospitals, saw a war of its own during COVID And there are all of these red hearts that people started painting on that wall in memory of the loved ones that they lost. And I find it constantly intriguing and moving how cities, villages, countries as a whole choose to weave or not the fabric of their loss or their conflicts through living architecture. And we're skipping ahead a bit now because we're going to talk about the Berlin Wall, but I also just want to talk about Holocaust memorialization, because we cannot have a discussion about memorialization without discussing this subject. How does one commemorate or memorialise something that is so barbaric that to make it in any way aesthetic feels like a betrayal of the suffering? And I think some artists have done phenomenal jobs at treading that very, very delicate but necessary balance. The British sculptor Rachel Whiteried made this astonishing Holocaust memorial in Vienna and she is famous for doing inverted concrete blocks that make a virtue of negative space. And if you look at that memorial from the outside, it is essentially a kind of concrete cube, but inside it's an inverted library. It's all of these books, they're so spines facing inwards. And of course, the sentiment there is. There are all of these life stories that were left untold. And again, there's this notion of playing with absence and with scale. There's another one which is much less well known, which is the Hamburg Monument Against Fascism, which was this long, several meter column and it was lined with soft lead. And people were encouraged to write in the lead and to leave messages. And gradually, year by year, that column disappeared into the ground. And so now if you go, there's nothing there. There's a little plaque on the surface of the pavement. And the messages started off being never again. How could we let this happen? But during the rise of neo fascism, there were some fascist messages and swastikas on it. And the decision was made, leave that graffiti on because it was a testament to. To the evil of human history too. And again, I find that so affecting. That history and the history of failure is as much about what we've lost, how absences shape us, as it is about the presences. Yeah, but. And that brings us back to the idea of living architecture. I think Berlin as a city, I mean, I love it for various reasons, but one of the reasons I find it compelling to walk around is because Berlin was confronted with a horrifying history and unlike some cities or nations, decided to confront that head on. And I think that they have done an extraordinary job of weaving in that narrative rather than shying away from it. So whether you're walking the streets of Berlin and you come across these plaques in the paving stones that pay tribute to the fact that a Jewish family once lived there, or as I did, I mistakenly checked myself into a sort of arty looking hotel to go and finish my last novel. And only when I got there did I realize it was actually a prison. It used to be a female prison for resistance fighters during the Second World War. I had booked the one room that had a bathtub and it turned out to have been the former prison chapel. And I have, I don't think ever slept so deeply or woken up with such sudden starts every morning. It had a very curious atmosphere. And that hotel is sort of symbolic of how Berlin just kind of approaches its history. The rooms actually had cell doors still. And going back to your chateau and the ruins, the Topography of Terror in Berlin tells the history on the former Gestapo headquarters of the rise to power of Nazism and the horrendous brutality that then ensued. But it does so almost using the form of fascist administration, as in, it just piles bureaucratic sign upon bureaucratic sign until you cannot escape, escape the scale or the terror of it. It's a sort of, it's a, it's an unforgettable experience. And the Berlin Wall is part of that. Yeah, the once quintessential symbol of division post World War. And then it's dismantling in 1989 and how people can infuse it a bit like the Cenotaph, with their own memories of what living in that city was like.

[Dan Jones]

Yes. But I wonder sometimes. And, and this is not to inject too down a note as we get towards the end of the, the show, like, you know, we have to think about the frame of, you know, if there, if there are lessons to be learned from, from the history of failure in warfare, it's how long do those lessons last? There are two things that occur to me. One is, is the, is walls. I mean, the history of building walls, from Hadrian's Wall to the Great Wall of China and its many different iterations to the Wall of Gaugan and. Or Iran, which, you know, blocked off the Caucasus to the Berlin Wall, is that walls never, never work, walls always fall. And walls are a hopeless way of protecting, dividing, regulating a people. And yet it's something that people consistently return to. I mean, I don't need to name, check the examples, but there is this sort of call for we build more walls when history shows us it's not. I'm not making a political statement. I'm making, if anything, an economic statement is a futile waste of resources. That's not how things work. So that's one of them. And the other is, is as you were describing Berlin so movingly then I was thinking of another European city, Dubrovnik. Twenty years ago I went to Dubrovnik. And then it was a decade on from the Yugoslavian civil war and being sort of, you know, not quite backpacking, but almost. We didn't book anywhere to stay, just got off the plane and at the airport, people, mostly women because there were so many war widows in, in Croatia at that time, were holding little placards, you know, €20 a night stay in a, in a B, B in the house. And we stayed with, with a lady just on, just outside the old town of Dubrovnik who didn't speak much English, spoke a little German, I spoke a little German and, and we managed. She told us a story one morning of what had happened to her husband. She said that it was the Yugoslavian war. Snipers were sitting in the hills. He wanted to go buy. Buy bread and milk. She said, don't go. You know, it's dangerous out there. He went anyway, and he never came back. He was shot dead. And if, you know, almost every. Not almost everyone, but many, many women in Dubrovnik had the same story. And as you looked around, if you walked, if you've ever been to Dubrovnik.

[Elizabeth Day]

Yes.

[Dan Jones]

Yeah. So as you know, as you walk along the. The walls, you could see very clearly the. The 90 of rooftops, which were new because they'd been shelled to pieces during the siege of Dubrovnik. And in many ways, I felt that that city at that point was a. Was like a powerful and poignant testimony to European war. So recently. And now if you go, it's Game of Thrones.

[Elizabeth Day]

Well, ditto the north of Ireland where I grew up. That's also Game of Thrones.

[Dan Jones]

Right. And. And it's like it's King's Landing and I wonder who'll win, the Lannisters or the Targaryens? Gosh, won't it be bloody exciting if we had another war? That's the sort of.

[Elizabeth Day]

It's kind of amazing in a way.

[Dan Jones]

In some ways, it is amazing.

[Elizabeth Day]

And it speaks to your point about culture.

[Dan Jones]

Yeah.

[Elizabeth Day]

And about how, in extremists, we find the truth of ourselves and how often that makes the greatest art.

[Dan Jones]

Yes. Good place to end.

[Elizabeth Day]

Oh, Dan, this has been such a. It's been an amazing experience doing this miniseries with you. I've really, genuinely and sincerely. There's not even a sarcastic joke at the end of this. I've really loved it. It's been so great hanging out with you, and I feel that we've had some really meaningful conversations. So thank you so much.

[Dan Jones]

Well, no, thank you. You are just so articulate and brainy and a joy to have in the studio. And I've enjoyed these conversations very much, and I hope our listeners have, too. Well, that brings us to the end of our first season of History's Greatest Fails, with me, Dan Jones, and me, Elizabeth Day. Thank you for listening along. And if you want more lessons about failure, do listen to Elizabeth's excellent podcast, how to Fail.

[Elizabeth Day]

Thank you so much for saying it's excellent, Dan. I mean, I think so. I interview a guest every week about three times. They think they failed in life and what they've learned along the way.

[Dan Jones]

But if you're one of my royal favourites on Patreon, the miniseries doesn't end here. On this week's accompanying bonus episode, producer Al and I are dissecting more military losses. Submitted by my keen eared royal favourites. Catch that ad free on patreon.com thisishistory

[Elizabeth Day]

and finally, if you've got a question about any of the failures we've discussed in this series, Dan's Royal favourites can DM him on Patreon or email us anytime on thisishistoryonymusic.com that's all for this season. Yes. And may we continue to learn the lessons from historical failure. Goodbye.

[Dan Jones]

Bye. I bought you a present.

[Elizabeth Day]

He's brought me a present.

[Dan Jones]

It's in a sunflowers Van Gogh themed. Because we were talking about Van Gogh. Don't cut your ear off.

[Elizabeth Day]

I won't. This is so kind of you.

[Dan Jones]

Well, it is kind of me because it's for your own good.

[Elizabeth Day]

Okay. There's a card on here that says, elizabeth, thanks for being a true history. And then there's a little picture of a crown.

[Dan Jones]

Yeah.

[Elizabeth Day]

And I'm going to assume that means queen.

[Dan Jones]

You remember I said I wasn't very good at drawing? Once I'd drawn it, I thought it looked like a depressing sort of early 20th century industrial factory, which is not what it is.

[Elizabeth Day]

It looks like a dead dog. Like an inverted dead dog.

[Dan Jones]

I don't see you as a dead dog or a factory.

[Elizabeth Day]

Can I open? Oh, my gosh. Stop.

[Dan Jones]

That is.

[Elizabeth Day]

That is okay. It's a gift, but it's also a troll. You've given me a Rubik's cube. You're so sweet.

[Dan Jones]

For listeners and viewers who don't know, we talked briefly about Rubik's Cubes and I was. Horrible phrase. Boasting that I could complete one. And since then, Elizabeth, via text has started referring to me as Rubik. So come back to me when you've mastered that fucker.

[Elizabeth Day]

The packaging, it has its own little stand. Sorry if you're listening to this podcast, because it's. But it's got. It comes in a package that means you can actually stand it up like it's on display.

[Dan Jones]

When I bought it, the. The man in the shop said, we do sell Rubik's Cubes, but they're smaller now than they used to be.

[Elizabeth Day]

Oh, well, isn't that just the way of the world?

[Dan Jones]

I said, isn't that just the way of the world?

[Elizabeth Day]

They're smaller.

[Dan Jones]

They're not smaller. If you ever mess it up, just give me a shout and I'll solve it for you.

[Elizabeth Day]

I'll let that one go. He's just giving me a gift guide. Spring just slid into your DMs.

[Dan Jones]

Grab that boho.

[Elizabeth Day]

Look for that rooftop dinner. Those sandals that can keep up with you.

[Dan Jones]

And hang some string lights to give

[Elizabeth Day]

your patio a glow up.

[Dan Jones]

Spring's calling.

[Elizabeth Day]

Ross, work your magic.