Quotes About Trenches

The orders given to the troops were not the result of stupidity or ignorance but attempts to cope with the hard and oft-repeated fact that there was no way of communicating with those troops once they had left their trenches. Hence the daylight attack, hence the general shortage of smoke, hence the advance in extended line, hence the 'creeping', or 'drifting', barrage.

Defensive and offensive lineman control the game and true sports fans know that.

Nothing the Western Front can offer, however, matches the intensity of the five days of fighting inside Fort Vaux.

the white stain of chalk mixed with the clay topsoil zigzagging across the freshly-turned earth, the tell-tale marks of the German trenches from which ***** had been enfiladed. Fifty ploughings and fifty harvests had failed to erase those marks, so maybe they were etched into the land for all time, just like the spadework of the ancient peoples which the archaeologists studied with such fervour.

Republicans working in leadership and the trenches are largely old, white, male, out-of-touch, out of ideas, technology averse, and living in the past.

Too sane also, to anticipate the World War habit of digging in and clinging on to a depressed and depressing foothold under the enemy's "command." When

The most famous footballing episode was Captain Nevill's kicking a ball into No Man's Land on the first day of the Somme. A prize was offered to the first man to dribble the ball into the German trenches; Nevill himself scrambled out of the trench in pursuit of his goal and was cut down immediately. (Perhaps the Somme was not only an indictment of military strategy but also of the British propensity for the long-ball game.)

Battles are won by slaughter and maneuver. The greater the general, the more he contributes in maneuver, the less he demands in slaughter.

I have often wondered what it was like to be in the trenches during war, knowing that tomorrow morning you have got to go over the top and that you might die and what a surreal feeling, in addition to fear, that might be.

Motherhood is nitty and gritty and brutal and wonderful, but everything I read is about the wonderful parts. Sometimes, you're really in the trenches!

Unlike Heldt, he'd been spared the endless horror that followed: the gas, the artillery, the grenades, and, most of all, the vast wasteland of barbed wire and landmines between the rat-infested trenches, where Lewis guns spat out death at five hundred rounds a minute, and flyblown corpses bloomed like roses.

All around them were the bodies of dead Chinese soldiers. They lined the verges of the roads and floated in the canals, jammed together around the pillars of the bridges. In the trenches between the burial mounds hundreds of dead soldiers sat side by side with their heads against the torn earth, as if they had fallen asleep together in a deep dream of war.

I'm very much in the trenches, and I don't live in the lap of luxury. I come from a working-class military family. We watch the news and read the paper and vote, so there's always something to be upset about. I always have a certain amount of angst in my back pocket.

Dig trenches? With our men being killed off like flies? There isn't time to dig trenches. We'll have to buy them ready made.

Science and religion stand watch over different aspects of all our major flashpoints. May they do so in peace and reinforcement--and not like the men who served as a cannon fodder in World War I, dug into the trenches of a senseless and apparently interminable conflict, while lobbing bullets and canisters of poison gas at a supposed enemy, who, like any soldier, just wanted to get off the battlefield and on with a potentially productive and rewarding life.

You get married to have an ally against your family, and now I'm heading into the trenches alone.

On Memorial Day, I don't want to only remember the combatants. There were also those who came out of the trenches as writers and poets, who started preaching peace, men and women who have made this world a kinder place to live.

I'm thinking about doing a First World War film.

European nations began World War I with a glamorous vision of war, only to be psychologically shattered by the realities of the trenches. The experience changed the way people referred to the glamour of battle; they treated it no longer as a positive quality but as a dangerous illusion.

You get married to have an ally against your family, and now I'm heading into the trenches alone.

The problem had been evident from the moment the first Tommy tried to pull himself out of the trench by gripping a rotted sandbag and had fallen back to the bottom. The rain collapsed the sides of trenches, and men had to be heaved over the parapet bodily. Tanks sank, their treads unable to gain traction. As the men finally advanced, they were sucked into mud-filled craters, where many drowned.

I knew that when the great guiding spirit cleaves humanity into two antagonistic halves, I would be with the people. I know this, I see it printed in the night sky that I, eclectic dissembler of doctrine and psychoanalyst of dogma, howling like one possessed, will assault the barricades or the trenches , will take my bloodstained weapon, and consumed with fury, slaughter any enemy who falls into my hands.

Trench fighting is the bloodiest, wildest, most brutal of all ... Of all the war's exciting moments none is so powerful as the meeting of two storm troop leaders between narrow trench walls. There's no mercy there, no going back, the blood speaks from a shrill cry of recognition that tears itself from one's breast like a nightmare.

Bombentrichter und Gräben haben einen engen Horizont. Er reicht nicht weiter als einen Handgranatenwurf.