29 Quotes About World-war-one

While they continued to march toward the sounds of the guns, Roy noticed fear behind the eyes of some of his fellow soldiers. Death and destruction surrounded them. Corpses in the ditches, wounded on stretchers, shell holes were everywhere. They hadn’t even reached the front lines yet.

In his mind he was a spirit, feeling the radiant heat of the chalk of the trenches; cooling himself in the flicker-rippling Ancre. O, to be able to see it all again, a ghost world of gun-flashes at night. O to see it all, to grasp all of it, without violence, without pain; to share the marching and the singing of the living that were part of the great dream of life and death.

We set to work to bury people. We pushed them into the sides of the trench but bits of them kept getting uncovered and sticking out, like people in a badly made bed. Hands were the worst; they would escape from the sand, pointing, begging - even waving! There was one which we all shook when we passed, saying, 'Good morning', in a posh voice. Everybody did it. The bottom of the trench was springy like a mattress because of all the bodies underneath.

One day the great European War will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans (1888).

When Roy’s 32nd Division arrived in France, the Great War had been grinding on for over three years. Though called the “War to End All Wars,” it was the “War that Went on Forever” to those in it. The lines were static, the casualties horrendous, and hope for any breakthrough was fleeting.

The casualty lists went on appearing for a long time after the Armistice - last spasms of Europe's severed arteries.

When a bullet broke the store-house of the self, inside the skull, how could those myriads of photographs survive, or the personality that they made up? Why should they survive, what use were they to life?

A German attack on Russia’s ally France would, in reality, be defensive—but the English talked as if Germany was trying to dominate Europe.

If poetry could truly tell it backwards, then it would.