Quotes About Great War

As for Verdun, while the estimates vary, the most widely accepted figure is 377,231 French and 337,000 German - a total of more than 700,000 men.

There were two views on how to conduct a frontal assault and they reveal the basic tactical argument of the Great War. Should the attacker go for 'bite and hold', seizing a small portion of the enemy line and hanging on to it, then bringing up the guns and the infantry before taking another bite, or should he concentrate on going for a full scale 'breakthrough'?

By the turn of the century, all-out attacks by hosts of valiant French infantry, rather on the style employed by the Imperial Guard at Waterloo, were the received wisdom in French military circles, and would remain so until the losses of the Great War killed off its adherents and a million or so brave young men.

A total of 895,000 French soldiers died in battle during the Great War, but a further 420,000 died of wounds in the casualty clearing stations, from gangrene or septicaemia or some other sickness, much of it preventable.

During the Great War tens of thousands of German civilians died of malnutrition and starvation because of the British naval blockade; the accepted estimate is that between half a million and one million people died of hunger in Germany between 1914 and 1918

The example afforded before the Great War by Germany - which, if only it had exercised forbearance for another five or ten years, would by now be unrivaled in Europe - suggests that the task facing us now is to build up our strength calmly and with circumspection.

The private soldiers of France were not well treated during the Great War; compared with their lot, the soldiers of the other armies on the Western Front were blessed with good food, reliable mail, adequate pay, frequent reliefs and regular leave.

They called it the Great War, but that implied worthiness and grandeur, not violence and helplessness and the utter waste and devastation our country, our city, our people endured.

After the Great War broke out in Europe there began the rise in the prices of commodities that was to be expected. It was as easy to foresee that as to foresee war inflation.

In 1918, when I was 6 or 7 years old, radio was just coming into use in the Great War.

It takes some effort to grasp just how small the American government and its military were before the Great War. Fewer than twenty officers served on the Army General Staff in Washington. The planning staff was only half that size. And yet the War Department, together with the Post Office, accounted for well over half of the federal payroll.)

I have prophesied for years that I was born for a Great War; that if I did not witness the coming of the Second American Civil War, I would begin it myself.

To put the last point another way, writers such as Graves, Sassoon, and Owen saw the Great War as the disease, but Tolkien saw it as merely the symptom.

The German military were equally unenthusiastic, because they were oblivious to the damage caused by their insecure ciphers during the Great War. For example, they had been led to believe that the Zimmermann telegram had been stolen by American spies in Mexico, and so they blamed that failure on Mexican security. They still did not realize that the telegram had in fact been intercepted and deciphered by the British, and that the Zimmermann debacle was actually a failure of German cryptography.

That was the Battle of Mons. As the opening British engagement of what was to become the Great War, it became endowed in retrospect with every quality of greatness and was given a place in the British pantheon equal to the battles of Hastings and Agincourt. Legends like that of the Angels of Mons settled upon it. All its men were valorous and all its dead heroes.

Perhaps when the next Great War comes we may see that sight unprecedented in all history, a jingo with a bullet-hole in him.

They passed a succession of granite monuments to the conquering magicians of the late Victorian age and the fallen heroes of the Great War, then a few monolithic sculptures representing Ideal Virtues (Patriotism, Respect for Authority, the Dutiful Wife).

Henry O. Sturges, born in England, March 2nd, 1563. Landed at Roanoke, July 27th, 1587. Friend to the American Revolution, present at the Battles of Trenton and Yorktown, staunch supporter of the North in its hour of need, adviser to presidents, a decorated soldier who distinguished himself in the trenches of the Great War, and member of the Union Brotherhood—a collective of vampires dedicated to preserving the freedom of man and his dominion over the earth.

Out of the ashes of the Great War came the freewheeling cultural renaissance that was the Jazz Age, but the decade-long party of flapper dresses and bootlegging came to a crashing halt with the Crash of '29 - triggering the Great Depression and the New Deal that would help America get back on its feet, just in time for another, greater war.

Born of the Great War, this "trench broom" meant to help American doughboys sweep their way across Europe. But the conflict ended too soon for the Thompson to take part, and many of the fifteen thousand guns in circulation by 1929 ended up in private hands. Because the weapon was so new, few laws governed its sale. Legally purchasing a tommy gun in Chicago, in those days, was easier than acquiring a handgun.

They used to call it the 'Great War'. But I'll be damned if I could tell you what was so 'great' about it. They also called it 'the war to end all wars'...'cause they figured it was so big and awful that the world'd just have to come to its senses and make damn sure we never fought another one ever again. That woulda been a helluva nice story. But the truth's got an ugly way of killin' nice stories.

They used to call it the 'Great War'. But I'll be damned if I could tell you what was so 'great' about it. They also called it 'the war to end all wars'…'cause they figured it was so big and awful that the world'd just have to come to its senses and make damn sure we never fought another one ever again. That woulda been a helluva nice story. But the truth's got an ugly way of killin' nice stories.

all the Danish leaders, had carved into our shield wall with his great war ax, I had faced him, beaten him, and sent him to join the einherjar, that army of the dead who feast and swive in Odin's corpse hall. What

He continued, sombrely, to evoke the more recent memory of the Great War: 'the four names which have really engraved themselves on the popular memory are Mons, Ypres, Gallipoli and Passchendaele, every time a disaster. The names of the great battles that finally broke the German armies are simply unknown to the general public.