Quotes About War

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.

In some curious way the battle at Verdun had become a paradigm for the entire war. Verdun now exerted its own dynamic and needed no reason to continue. By the middle of 1916 it was, or should have been, clear to all that there was no reason in it; reason had ceased to play any part in this struggle.

There was failure at every level: failure to see what was coming; failure to estimate how long the war would last; failure to set up a supreme command to fight the war strategically; and finally failure extended to the battlefields. Whatever their size, in terms of doctrine, the armies of 1914-1916 were nineteenth-century armies.

Now and again, the history of war throws up a battle that transcends reason. The soldiers fight because they cannot stop fighting, because too much has been committed to give up now. Too much blood has been shed, so much courage and will has been committed, that to admit defeat would be unthinkable.

Wage war against the weaker thoughts that have crept into the palace of your mind. They will see that they are unwanted and leave like unwelcome visitors.

While the Germans were unleashing a race war in the west of Poland, the Soviets imported class war to the east in the Red Army's baggage train.

I shall give a propagandist reason for starting the war, no matter whether it is plausible or not. The victor will not be asked afterwards whether he told the truth.

Maybe a knowledge of literature and history was of no immediate benefit to a soldier in the ranks during the second world war; without it, however, it would have been impossible for Churchill to exert the kind of leadership that distinguished him, and which aroused even in the most uneducated the sense that far more was at stake than he could easily define.

We should distinguish national loyalty from nationalism. National loyalty involves a love of home and a preparedness to defend it; nationalism is a belligerent ideology, which uses national symbols in order to conscript the people to war.

The wars of the twentieth century brought home the fundamental truth that people will fight for their country and unite in its defence, but will seldom fight for their class, even when the intellectuals are egging them on. At

Although the border between Canada and the United States is disputed, and has been disputed for a century or more, the chances that this dispute will lead to war are zero. The

You are a fool to speak of last great battles, Sam, for the last great battle is always the next one.

Toys here reveal the list of all the things the adult does not find unusual: war, bureaucracy, ugliness, Martians, etc. It is not so much, in fact, the imitation which is the sign of an abdication, as its literalness: French toys are like a Jivaro head, in which one recognises, shrunken to the size of an apple, the wrinkles and hair of an adult.

He thought America's character would be defined by how it treated its vanquished enemies, and he wanted to graduate from bitter wartime grievances to the forgiving posture of peace.

America, he argued, did not need to triumph decisively over the heavily taxed British: a war of attrition that eroded British credit would nicely do the trick. All the patriots had to do was plant doubts among Britain's creditors about the war's outcome.

Wars oftener proceed from angry and perverse passions than from cool calculations of interest.

Grant's fortuitous move to Illinois on the eve of the election had monumental consequences, conveniently situating him in the president's home state and overtly pro-Union northern Illinois. It also placed him in the district of Congressman Elihu B. Washburne, an emphatic Lincoln supporter. Had Grant remained in Missouri, riven by internal strife, he would never have enjoyed the same chance for rapid advancement in the coming war.

Hamilton has often been extolled as the exponent of a rational foreign policy based on cool calculations of national self-interest. But his April 14 letter expressed his unswerving conviction that nations, transported by strong emotion, often miscalculate their interests: "Wars oftener proceed from angry and perverse passions than from cool calculations of interest.

This was a powerful argument for Washington, who had gone to Philadelphia feeling that the war would be incomplete without a new Constitution; now, he knew, the Constitution would be incomplete without an effective new government.

Despite Grant's best efforts at Appomattox, the breach of the Civil War never healed but became deeply embedded in American political culture.

It was not an assembly of dogmatic extremists who sat in Windsor chairs for six weeks in the red-and-black brick structure known as Carpenters' Hall. Far from being bent on fighting for independence, these law-abiding delegates offered up a public prayer that war might be averted.

the fiery and destructive passions of war reign in the human breast with much more powerful sway than the mild and beneficent sentiments of peace.

short order, Grant had established his independence and taken full responsibility for the war's course. At the same time, he established a warm, cordial relationship with Lincoln, whose "affable and gracious manners" and humorous powers of mimicry pleased him.

His subordinates remembered him as tough but fair-minded. Years later, one of them retained Hamilton as a lawyer, even though he had become a vocal political enemy. When Hamilton questioned the wisdom of this, the ex-soldier replied, "I served in your company during the war and I know you will do me justice in spite of my rudeness.