59 Quotes About World-war-i

...My deepest personal reason for staying in Paris is that whatever I have as a character, good or bad, is based on the fact that since the age of four I have never run away from anything however painful or dangerous when I thought it was my duty to take a stand -- the American Ambassador to France upon being asked to evacuate Paris by the State Department on the eve of Nazi occupation of Paris in 1940

I wonder if they were aware of the power of complimentary alcohol during World War I.

World War I was the final straw. Youth turned on their elders for making a hash of the world. Older men’s values had produced a cataclysm, and young men had paid with their lives. “The older generation has certainly pretty well ruined this world before passing it on to us,” wrote a young man in the Atlantic Monthly of September 1920, expressing the prevailing sentiment. How could the younger generation, the idea went, possibly do any worse?

My centre is giving way, my right is in retreat, situation excellent. I attack.

Shame on military glory, shame on armies, shame on the soldier's profession, which changes men, some into stupid victims, others into base executioners. Yes shame, that's true – but it's too true, it's true in eternity, but not yet for us.

No. Because if you're not listening, it's impossible to hear. If you believe that somebody is so different from you that you can't possibly have anthing in common, you'll never be able to hear them no matter what they say. That was the way with the rats and horses. And that's how it is in war.

This new lot...they too would go down. They were 'troops' who were about to be 'thrown in,' 'men' in some general's larger plan, 're-enforcements ' and would soon be 'casualties'. They were also Spud, Snow, Skeeter, Blue, Tommo.

They made a mess of 1914. They came a cropper in 1940. And now they're working up for it again.

He remembered the feel of No Man's Land, the vast, unimaginable space. By day, seen through a periscope, this immensity shrank to a small, pock-marked stretch of ground, snarled with wire. You never got used to the discrepancy. Part of its power to compel the imagination lay precisely in that. It was the difference between seeing a mouth ulcer and probing it with your tongue.