Quotes About Battle

La vida es conflicto. Ésa es su naturaleza. El escritor debe decidir dónde y cómo orquestar su lucha.

You played it with great seriousness. And it is not such an uncommon game. Do you know Ibsen's poem -- To live it to do battle with trolls in the vaults of the heart and brain. To write: that is to sit in judgement over one's self.

Heroj modernog doba, to je ?ovek koji iz unutrašnje borbe izlazi kao pobednik.

You remember the little poem by Ibsen that I quoted to you during one of our early meetings? MYSELF: Only vaguely. Something about self-judgement. DR. VON HALLER: No, no; self-judgement comes later. Now pay attention, please: To live is to battle with trolls in the vaults of heart and brain. To write: that is to sit in judgement over one's self.

The soldier looked back at the King as the King looked at him; for a moment he wondered if he should bow, but the King's look seemed to wish to forestall him. The soldier saw a face for whom he would be willing to carry colors into battle once more, and the memory of his colonel seemed to fail and fade nearly to oblivion.

the British infantry assault on the German positions north of the Somme began at 0730 hrs on 1 July 1916. A force of some 120,000 British soldiers of Fourth and Third Armies assaulted the German line between Maricourt and Gommecourt. Their attack was pressed home with great resolution - and at considerable cost. By the end of that day, 19,240 men had been killed outright and the total casualty figure, including the missing and those taken prisoner-of-war, amounted to 57,470 men.

The battle at Verdun can best be imagined as some monstrous ball game, in which two teams of giants push a boulder to and fro across impossible terrain. For months the Germans had pushed the French south, towards Verdun; now the French were pushing the Germans back to the north, towards their start-line positions of 21 February. The entry fee in this contest for a worthless piece of terrain was a great number of lives.

In all but killing terms, the battle ended in the last days of September and the main reason it ended was mud.

the aim of the Somme battle was no longer an attempt at a breakthrough to Bapaume but an attempt to write down the strength of the German field army and kill German soldiers - in other words, attrition.

sometime in October 1916, Haig abandoned the notion of a breakthrough on the Somme and joined his peers in France and Germany in committing his soldiers to a battle of attrition.

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.

The Somme began as an offensive; it ended as a battle of attrition.

At Neuve Chapelle in March 1915, the British lost almost 13,000 men in three days; at Loos in September, 59,000 men in six weeks, but most of them fell in the first two days; neither attack gained more than a few hundred yards of useless, shell-pitted, corpse-strewn ground.

It is an axiom of warfare that a good officer never reinforces failure. To do so simply throws away more lives and a good general will avoid doing that. A commander's task, even in moments of defeat, is to find some way forward, some way out of the current catastrophe and when General Haig assembled his reports and looked at his maps on 2-3 July, he saw that all was not yet lost in this battle on the Somme.

As Sir Douglas Haig's despatch makes clear, the series of engagements collectively known to history as the Battle of the Somme did not begin as a battle of attrition. The Somme battle was designed from the first as an offensive but major battles and offensives do not happen overnight.

The 72nd Division, which had opened the battle with 12,000 men, had lost nearly 10,000 men in three days; this is as many as all the Allied armies, navies and air forces lost on D-Day 1944 - and the French losses came from a single division.

What Joffre wanted on the Somme was not a tactical battle. As he saw it, the attempt at a breakthrough had failed and now, as so often before, the task of breaking the enemy line would get even harder. Therefore, since it was probably impossible to break through the enemy line, the next best thing was to attack all along the line, and engage the enemy in a battle that would force him to remove divisions from the Verdun front

on the day the Somme battle opened, the French share of the offensive had shrunk to 14 divisions compared to 16 British divisions; this fact disposes of one of the lesser British myths, that the French only played a minor part in the Somme offensive. On the first day of the Somme, the French divisions on the right also did far better than most of the British divisions.

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.

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.

as Alistair Horne points out, this was not simply a battle between two armies but the ancient conflict of Teuton and Gaul, two ethnic groups letting one thousand years of envy and hatred out in one long pent-up explosion of violence

2 Filosofía diaria para llegar a ser legendario No permitas que se extinga tu fuego, chispa a chispa, cada una de ellas irremplazable, en los pantanos sin esperanza de lo aproximado, lo casi, lo nunca jamás. No permitas que perezca el héroe que llevas en tu alma, en solitaria frustración por la vida que merezcas pero que nunca pudiste alcanzar. Revisa la naturaleza de tu batalla. El mundo que deseas puede ser ganado, existe, es real y posible; es tuyo. AYN RAND

Los únicos demonios en este mundo son los que corren por nuestros propios corazones. Es allí donde se tiene que librar la batalla».

While he joined eagerly in the contemporary intellectual battles, philosophy was, for Spinoza, not a weapon but a way of life, a sacred order whose servants were transported to a supreme and certain blessedness.