Quotes About Warfare

In trench warfare five things are important: firewood, food, tobacco, candles, and the enemy. In winter on the Zaragoza front they were important in that order, with the enemy a bad last

A fat man eating quails while children are begging for bread is a disgusting sight, but you are less likely to see it when you are within the sound of the guns.

You always, I notice, feel the same when you are under heavy fire - not so much afraid of being hit as afraid because you don't know where you will be hit. You are wondering all the while just where the bullet will nip you, and it gives your whole body a most unpleasant sensitiveness.

I was said of these bombs (referring to FAI bombs) that they were 'impartial'; they killed then man they were thrown at and the man who threw them.

If [pacifists] imagine that one can somehow overcome the German army by lying on one's back, let them go on imagining it, but let them also wonder occasionally whether this is not an illusion due to security, too much money and a simple ignorance of the way in which things actually happen.

The tank, the submarine, the torpedo, the machine-gun, even the rifle and the hand grenade are still in use.

I am walking up and down the line of sentries, under the dark boughs of the poplars. In the flooded ditch outside the rats are paddling about, making as much noise as otters. As the yellow dawn comes up behind us, the Andalusian sentry, muffled in his cloak, begins singing. Across no-man's-land, a hundred or two hundred yards away, you can hear the Fascist sentry also singing.

In the past, the ruling groups of all countries, although they might recognize their common interest and therefore limit the destructiveness of war, did fight against one another, and the victor always plundered the vanquished. In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact.

The world sleeps peaceably in their beds while rough men practice violence on their behalf.

As a whole the world is more primitive today than it was fifty years ago. Certain backward areas have advanced, and various devices, always in some way connected with warfare and police espionage, have been developed, but experiment and invention have largely stopped, and the ravages of the atomic war of the Nineteen-fifties have never been fully repaired.

La guerra la lleva a cabo cada grupo gobernante contra sus propios gobernados, y el objetivo de la guerra no es hacer o impedir conquistas territoriales, sino conservar intacta la estructura de la sociedad.

posterior, afirma: «Un miliciano era un soldado que luchaba contra Franco, pero también un peón en la titánica lucha que se estaba librando entre dos teorías políticas».*

The shells the Fascists were firing at this period were wretchedly bad. Although they were 150 mm they only made a crater about six feet wide by four deep, and at least one in four failed to explode. There were the usual romantic tales of sabotage in the Fascist factories and unexploded shells in which, instead of the charge, there was found a scrap of paper saying 'Red Front', but I never saw one.

When are we going to attack? Why don't we attack?' were the questions you heard night and day from Spaniard and Englishman alike. When you think what fighting means it is queer that soldiers want to fight, and yet undoubtedly they do. In stationary warfare there are three things that all soldiers long for: a battle, more cigarettes, and a week's leave.

This is war! Isn't it bloody?

A revolutionary army can sometimes win by enthusiasm, but a conscript army has got to win with weapons

Having become permanent, the war ceased to be a war.

Inefficient nations were always conquered sooner or later

The truth was that the shells were hopelessly old; someone picked up a brass fuse-cap stamped with the date, and it was 1917. The Fascist guns were of the same make and calibre as our own, and the unexploded shells were often reconditioned and fired back. There was said to be one old shell with a nickname of its own which travelled daily to and fro, never exploding.

In front of him was an enemy who was trying to kill him: in front of him, also, was a human creature, in pain and perhaps with a broken bone. Already

As once, when the armies of the empire were shattered and the strong barbarians poured in upon the soft provincials, so now the fierce weeds pressed in to destroy the pampered nursling's of man.

How many times, through the long centuries of life on earth, has one group of men sneaked armed into the woods, hoping to surprise a second group not expecting them? And where has this gotten us?

We are fighting these terrorists with our military in Afghanistan and Iraq and beyond so we do not have to face them in the streets of our own cities.

Real men despise battle, but will never run from it.