We soldiers knew next to nothing about what was going on in the centres of power. We received so many orders and counter-orders that there were times when we did not obey any of them at all, knowing that they were likely to be countermanded almost immediately.

No man is a man until he has been a soldier.

A German plans a month in advance what is bowel movements will be at Easter, and the British plan everything retrospect, so it always looks as though everything is good as intended. The French glad everything was to be going to be having a party, and the Spanish… Well, God knows.

He did not ask me to shoot him; perhaps at the very end he loved his vanishing life.

If you have been embroiled in a war in which you confidently expected to die, what were you supposed to do with so much life unexpectedly left over? There were so many ways of passing the peace, and you would never know what they would have been like, those roads not taken.