Quotes & Sayings About Wwi

I am now working on the second WWI story and find the challenge marvelous. — Anne Perry

Men were snoring, twitching and whimpering, struggling with nightmares less terrible than reality. — Gabriel Chevallier

And when Franz Ferdinand pays, everybody pays! — Thomas Pynchon

Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general. — Barbara W. Tuchman

During high school I worked in a retirement home. I spent many wonderful hours hearing from service men and their widows about WWI. — Charles Todd

WWI is a romantic war, in all senses of the word. An entire generation of men and women left the comforts of Edwardian life to travel bravely, and sometimes even jauntily, to almost certain death. At the very least, any story or novel about WWI is about innocence shattered in the face of experience. — Anita Shreve

The war (WWI) cost your Uncle Sam $52 billion. $39 billion was expended in the actual war period. This expenditure yielded $16 billion in profits. — Smedley Butler

And I saw the eyes of the gazelle again in France [during WWI], and it struck me that perhaps a heartsick God had looked down and taken up a soul, leaving only the shell of a man." [of those who developed PTSD and/or "war neuroses"] ... [In becoming a psychiatrist] I was really trying to create the conditions whereby a soul might be persuaded to join a man's body once a again, thus making him whole. — Jacqueline Winspear

I keep such music in my brain
No din this side of death can quell;
Glory exulting over pain,
And beauty, garlanded in hell. — Siegfried Sassoon

Certainly, blame for all this [turmoil in the Middle East] doesn't rest solely with the terrible decisions that were made at the end of World War I, but it was then that one particularly toxic seed was planted. Ever since, Arab society has tended to define itself less by what it aspires to become than by what it is opposed to: colonialism, Zionism, Western imperialism in its many forms. This culture of opposition has been manipulated - indeed, feverishly nurtured - by generations of Arab dictators intent on channeling their people's anger away from their own misrule in favor of the external threat, whether it is "the great Satan" or the "illegitimate Zionist entity" or Western music playing on the streets of Cairo. — Scott Anderson

He saw the delicate blades of grass which the bodies of his comrades had fertilized; he saw the little shoots on the shell-shocked trees. He saw the smoke-puffs of shrapnel being blown about by light breezes. He saw birds making love in the wire that a short while before had been ringing with flying metal. He heard the pleasant sounds of larks up there, near the zenith of the trajectories. He smiled a little. There was something profoundly saddening about it. It all seemed so fragile and so absurd. — Humphrey Cobb

So it comes about that the war [World War I] seems, to us, to have been fought less over territory than the way it would be remembered, that the war's true subject is remembrance. Indeed the whole war - which was being remembered even as it was fought, whose fallen were being remembered before they fell - seems not so much to be tinted by retrospect as to have been fought retrospectively. — Geoff Dyer

This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them. Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War. Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity. — Wilfred Owen

Retreat, hell we just got here! — Lloyd Williams

But how intolerable bright the morning is where we who are alive and remain, walk lifted up, carried forward by an effective word. — David Jones

For they were unseasoned, nor inured, not knowing this to be much less than the beginning of sorrow. — David Jones

As suddenly the whole world would slip back into a mollifying, untormented dark; their aching bodies knew its calm. — David Jones

It brings a lump into the throat to see how they go over, and run and fall. A man would like to spank them, they are so stupid, and to take them by the arm and lead them away from here where they have no business to be. They wear grey coats and trousers and boots, but for most of them the uniform is far too big, it hangs on their limbs, their shoulders are too narrow, their bodies too slight; no uniform was ever made to these childish measurements. — Erich Maria Remarque

Throughout the war, it was always my endeavour to view my opponent without animus, and to form an opinion of him as a man on the basis of the courage he showed. I would always try and seek him out in combat and kill him, and I expected nothing else from him. But never did I entertain mean thoughts of him. When prisoners fell into my hands, later on, I felt responsible for their safety, and would always do everything in my power for them.
p. 58 — Ernst Junger

These moments of nocturnal prowling leave an indelible impression. Eyes and ears are tensed to the maximum, the rustling approach of strange feet in the tall grass in an unutterably menacing thing. Your breath comes in shallow bursts; you have to force yourself to stifle any panting or wheezing. There is a little mechanical click as the safety-catch of your pistol is taken off; the sound cuts straight through your nerves. Your teeth are grinding on the fuse-pin of the hand-grenade. The encounter will be short and murderous. You tremble with two contradictory impulses: the heightened awareness of the huntsmen, and the terror of the quarry. You are a world to yourself, saturated with the appalling aura of the savage landscape.
p. 71 — Ernst Junger

The implicit optimism of the [field service post card] is worth noting - the way it offers no provision for transmitting news like "I have lost my left leg" or "I have been admitted into hospital wounded and do not expect to recover." Because it provided no way of saying "I am going up the line again," its users had to improvise. Wilfred Owen had an understanding with his mother that when he used a double line to cross out "I am being sent down to the base," he meant he was at the front again. Close to brilliant is the way the post card allows one to admit to no state of health between being "quite" well, on the one hand, and, on the other, being so sick that one is in hospital. — Paul Fussell

And this I know: all these things that now, while we are still in the war, sink down in us like a stone, after the war shall waken again, and then shall begin the disentanglement of life and death. — Erich Maria Remarque

Pershing won [WWI] without even looking into an airplane, let alone gong up in one. If they had been of such importance he'd have tried at least a ride ... We'll stick to the army on the ground and the battleships at sea. — John W. Weeks

Suffering is the common lot of man. — Theresa Breslin

This is a picture of him from 1919, just after the war, looking like he slept in that uniform all the way from France. He still had that face, but he wasn't the same. I know there's men who came back changed: the Paterson boy up in Brownville hung himself that summer. Nobody talked about it much, and I suppose that was for the best. But Jack wasn't like that; it hadn't been a terrible thing for him, I don't think. Or if it had been, then it was one of those terrible things you get through and it sets you free. — David F. Porteous

It's certainly no coincidence that big bands became the entertainment of the army in WWI and WWII, and that jazz drumming style is very military influenced. The snare drum comes from the military and becomes the core kind of sound of jazz drums. — Damien Chazelle

But it's fair to say that the war's [WWI] dialectic forced those who were more or less alive to go to their death, and gave those who were more or less dead the right to live. And if the war managed only to separate the living from the dead, then the new regime, arriving in its wake, would sooner or later pit them against each other as enemies. — Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

They had also brought in a piece of human scrap so monstrous that everyone recoiled at the sight, that it shocked men who were no longer shockable. I shut my eyes; I had already seen far too much and I wanted to be able to forget eventually. This thing, this being, screamed in a corner like a maniac. The revulsion that turned our stomachs told us that it would be an act of generosity, a fraternal act, to finish him off. — Gabriel Chevallier

The landscape had been so maimed by this new kind of warfare it was as if human architects of great genius had sat down to plan hell, since no two of them could agree on the design of heaven. — Christopher Buehlman

...and how is a man to know the habits of their God, whether He smites suddenly or withholds, if you mishandle the things set apart, the objects of His people He is jealous of. — David Jones

Victorious troops are those who kill more, and here we were the victims. This put the finishing touch to our demoralisation. The soldiers had lost conviction long ago. Now they lost confidence. — Gabriel Chevallier

He had volunteered early, rather than waiting to be conscripted, for he felt a duty and an obligation to serve, and believed that ... being willing to fight for his country and the liberty it represented, would make some small difference ... His idealism was one of the casualties of the carnage [of Verdun]. — Iain Pears

A man dreams of a miracle and wakes up to loaves of bread. — Erich Maria Remarque

It had been a war of kingly poisons, in the air, in the memory, in the blood. — Sebastian Barry

I stand there and wonder whether, when I am twenty, I shall have experienced the bewildering emotions of love. — Erich Maria Remarque

Balint pondered the programme outlined by Slawata: centralization, rule by an Imperial Council, the ancient kingdom of Hungary reduced to an Austrian province, and national boundaries to be re-arranged statistically according to the ethnic origin of the inhabitants! Why all this? To what purpose? Slawata had given him the answer: Imperial expansion in the Balkans so that feudal kingdoms for the Habsburgs reached the Sea of Marmora; and it was all to be achieved with the blood of Hungarian soldiers and paid for by Hungarian tax-money! So it was merely to help Vienna spread Austrian hegemony over the nations of the Balkans that Tisza was to be helped to build up the Hungarian national armed forces. — Miklos Banffy

I wish those people who write so glibly about this being a holy War, and the orators who talk so much about going on no matter how long the War lasts and what it may mean, could see a case
to say nothing of 10 cases
of mustard gas in its early stages
could see the poor things burnt and blistered all over with great mustard-coloured suppurating blisters, with blind eyes
sometimes temporally, sometimes permanently
all sticky and stuck together, and always fighting for breath, with voices a mere whisper, saying that their throats are closing and they know they will choke. — Vera Brittain

It is important to remember when making jokes about women, that they are not a minority. They weren't captured on another continent and brought here in leg-irons (funny shoes, yes, but not leg-irons) and Hitler didn't blame them for Germany's loss in WWI. Therefore, you can make any kind of fun of them you want. — P. J. O'Rourke

Irony is the attendant of hope and the fuel of hope is innocence. — Paul Fussell

In short, the war got off to a pretty good start, with the help of chaos. — Gabriel Chevallier

I guess Madden had seen everything with out group, and everybody else had seen everything. (After coming to practice field riding a horse and wearing a German WWI helmet painted silver and black) — Ted Hendricks

I did this film with Russell Crowe called 'The Water Diviner,' which took place just after WWI. It was fascinating because the weapons between WWI and WII were very different. I had to learn how to ride horses in a battle setting. It was important that we rode a certain way. — Jai Courtney

Senate Doc. # 259. The 65th congress( ... The coal companies made between 100% and 7,856% on their capital stock during the war (to end all wars, WWI) ... The leather people sold your Uncle Sam hundreds of thousands of saddles for the calvary. But there wasn't any calvary overseas! — Smedley Butler

They bright whiten all this sepulchre with powdered chloride of lime. It's a perfectly sanitary war. — David Jones

There is much argument here about what is respectable and what is not, and what a good gel should or should not do regarding hemlines. I have to report that the general opinion of a soldier looking forward to leave after many months at the Front is that a hemline should go up as far as possible, and that the more unrespectable the girl the better. The proviso being, of course, that one's own wife/sweetheart should not occupy this category. — Theresa Breslin

It is a confession of the weakness of our own faith in the righteousness of our cause when we attempt to suppress by law those who do not agree with us.
Alfred E. Smith, governor of New York after WWI — Alfred E. Smith

World War I was the most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery that has ever taken place on earth. Any writer who said otherwise lied, So the writers either wrote propaganda, shut up, or fought. — Ernest Hemingway,

I had been astonished to find myself in the middle of the war yet not be able to find it, unable to accept that in fact the war consisted precisely of this stasis. — Gabriel Chevallier

If, as I have reason to believe, I have disintegrated the nucleus of the atom, this is of greater significance than the war.
[Apology to the international anti-submarine committee for being absent from several meetings during World War I.] — Ernest Rutherford

I know. I was there. I saw the great void in your soul, and you saw mine. — Sebastian Faulks

My great uncle fought in WWI. His stories fascinated me. — Charles Todd

The rocket was beautiful. In conception it had been shaped by an artist to break a chain that had bound the human race ever since we first gained consciousness of earth's gravity and all it's analogs in suffering, failure and pain. It was at once a prayer sent heavenward and the answer to that prayer: Bear me away from this awful place. — Michael Chabon

When the war (WWI) finally ended it was necessary for both sides to maintain, indeed even to inflate, the myth of sacrifice so that the whole affair would not be seen for what it was: a meaningless waste of millions of lives. Logically, if the flower of youth had been cut down in Flanders, the survivors were not the flower: the dead were superior to the traumatized living. In this way, the virtual destruction of a generation further increased the distance between the old and the young, between the official and the unofficial. — Robert Hughes

...I found that much of the romance had left the trenches. The old days, from the beginning to July, 1915, were all so delightfully precarious and primitive. Amateurish trenches and rough and ready life, which to my mind gave this war what it sadly needs - a touch of romance. — Bruce Bairnsfather

Cigarettes are called coffin nails for a reason, Billy Boy," I remembered telling him. "Be careful with those things. You're risking your life. — Cat Winters

Hauriou, became a crown witness for us when he confirmed this connection in 1916, in the midst of WWI: The revolution of 1789 had no other goal than absolute access to the writing of legal statutes and the systematic destruction of customary institutions. It resulted in a state of permanent revolution because the mobility of the writing of laws did not provide for the stability of certain customary institutions, because the forces of change were stronger than the forces of stability. Social and political life in France was completely emptied of institutions and was only able to provisionally maintain itself by sudden jolts spurred by the heightened morality. — Carl Schmitt

How simple everything could seem if one looked only at the figures, those cold statistics that took no account of people's feelings and traditions. How much would be destroyed if men were to be treated as robots! What of the myriad of individual characteristics, passions, aspirations, triumphs and disappointments that together made one people different from another? How could anyone ignore all the different threads of experience that, over the centuries, had formed and deepened the differences that distinguished each nation? — Miklos Banffy

At the sight of the Neckar slopes wreathed with flowering cherry trees, I had a strong sense of having come home. What a beautiful country it was, and eminently worth our blood and our lives. Never before had I felt its charm so clearly. I had good and serious thoughts, and for the first time I sensed that this war was more than just a great adventure.
p. 33 — Ernst Junger

Cripes, just listen to that desperation mixed with a wild joie de vivre. That doesn't come out of nothing. They'll be able to hear that a massive eruption once rocked the world and scattered pain and passion in it's wake. — Cat Winters

Mute in that golden silence hung with green,
Come down from heaven and bring me in your eyes
Remembrance of all beauty that has been,
And stillness from the pools of Paradise.
— Siegfried Sassoon

This is War. Things like this also happen in peace time, but not so obviously. — Ellen N. La Motte

What is interesting is that the term Aryan was adopted by the Nazis and Adolf Hitler in the early 20th century to describe a people group they deemed as purely Germanic (must be of one people group) and more "evolved" than the rest of European peoples and the rest of the world. And yet, the true Aryans were one of the most famous groups of people who were of mixed descent. Hitler and the Nazis were playing off of Charles Darwin's model of higher and lower races. This idea, claimed by this humanistic religion, has been a cause of terrible atrocities in WWI, WWII, and mass exterminations of people by leaders like Stalin (Soviet Union) and Mao (China), among others. — Bodie Hodge

I love to discuss WWI American Trench Watches. If you have a question about one of my books, a Waltham Trench Watch or an Elgin Trench Watch drop me a line through my web page at LRF Antique Watches. I'll do my best to get back with you quickly! — Stan Czubernat

They died in splendour, these who claimed no spark
Of glory save the light in a friend's eye. — Edmund Blunden

When he could stand it no longer, he fired a revolver up through the roof of his mouth, but he made a mess of it. — Ellen N. La Motte

The Second World War created the need for a new generation of female heroes. Where could these women look for role models? The women of the previous war had by this time been largely forgotten. Although efforts had been made during the 1920s to memorialize the war's heroes, both men and women, with monuments, books, and films, most Europeans, impatient to forget the war, also forgot its heroes.

But now the memory of their courage was needed and eagerly recalled... — Kathryn J. Atwood

History conditioned you for epic-scale calamity. Once, when she was studying the death tolls of battles in World War I, she'd caught herself thinking, Only eight thousand men died here. Well, that's not many. Because next to, say, the million who died at the Somme, it wasn't. The stupendous numbers deadened you to the merely tragic, and history didn't average in the tame days for balance. On this day, no one in the world was murdered. A lion gave birth. Ladybugs launched on aphids. A girl in love daydreamed all morning, neglecting her chores, and wasn't even scolded. — Laini Taylor

We have yielded no more than a few hundred yards of it as a prize to the enemy. But on every yard there lies a dead man. — Erich Maria Remarque

It is as if Quincey has replaced the sun in my universe and it is around him that I spin. — Kate Cary

Belgium, where there occurred one of the rare appearances of the hero in history, was lifted above herself by the uncomplicated conscience of her King and, faced with the choice to acquiesce or resist, took less than three hours to make her decision, knowing it might be mortal. — Barbara W. Tuchman

It was such a heavenly dream: dreamed between the reality of war and the reality of hereditary madness. — Jessie Douglas Kerruish

I never heard communism seriously propounded or argued; perhaps I was too deeply preoccupied with my own dissipations; and, as it turned out in the end it was a way of thought that I was denied or spared by a geographical fluke. From the end of these travels till the War, I lived, with a year's interruption, in Eastern Europe, among friends whom I must call old-fashioned liberals. They hated Nazi Germany; but it was impossible to look eastwards for inspiration and hope, as their western equivalents
peering from afar, and with the nightmare of only one kind of totalitarianism to vex them
felt able to do. For Russia began only a few fields away, the other side of a river; and there, as all her neighbours knew, great wrong was being done and terrible danger lay. All their fears came true. Living among them made me share those fears and they made stony ground for certain kinds of grain. — Patrick Leigh Fermor

In the space of a single year, a crumbling rural village had sprouted an army town, like a great parasitical growth. The former peacetime aspect of the place was barely discernible. The village pond was where the dragoons watered their horses, infantry exercised in the orchards, soldiers lay in the meadows sunning themselves. All the peacetime institutions collapsed, only what was needed for war remained. Hedges and fences were broken or simply torn down for easier access, and everywhere there were large signs giving directions to military traffic. While roofs caved in, and furniture was gradually used up as firewood, telephone lines and electricity cables were installed. Cellars were extended outwards and downwards to make bomb shelters for the residents; the removed earth was dumped in the gardens. The village no longer knew any demarcations or distinctions between thine and mine.
pp. 36-37 — Ernst Junger

I will draw a sight draft on my grandfather, I said. A what? A sight draft. He has to pay or I go to jail. Mr. Cunningham at the bank does it. I live by sight drafts. Can a grandfather jail a patriotic grandson who is dying that Italy may live? Live the American Garibaldi, said Rinaldi. Viva the sight drafts, I said. We must be quiet, said the major. Already we have been asked many times to be quiet ... — Ernest Hemingway,

We had come from lecture halls, school desks and factory workbenches, and over the brief weeks of training, we had bonded together into one large and enthusiastic group. Grown up in an age of security, we shared a yearning for danger, for the experience of the extraordinary. We were enraptured by war. — Ernst Junger

And be very careful at the front, Paul."
Ah, Mother, Mother! Why do I not take you in my arms and die with you. What poor wretches we are! — Erich Maria Remarque

In a curious failure of comprehension, I looked alertly about me for possible targets for all this artillery fire, not, apparently, realizing that it was actually ourselves that the enemy gunners were trying for all they were worth to hit. — Ernst Junger

During the conflict that was placed before them, they not only gained the gratitude of many in their own generation but they proved, for the first time on a global scale, the enormous value of a woman's contribution, paving the way for future generations of women to do the same. — Kathryn J. Atwood

In the Somme valley, the back of language broke. It could no longer carry its former meanings. World War I changed the life of words and images in art, radically and forever. It brought our culture into the age of mass-produced, industrialized death. This, at first, was indescribable. — Robert Hughes

We know only that in some strange and melancholy way we have become a waste land. All the same, we are not often sad. — Erich Maria Remarque

I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting (WWI) to those who want the war to go on forever. Feeble, inarticulate will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth and may it burn their lousy souls. — Paul Nash

France is to me the heroine in the romance of all the nations of all time. This feeling was born in me years ago when I read how her noble sons had defended America in its cradle. Today I am proud that I am one of the millions who will come to save our heroine from the clutches of the villain from across the Rhine. — William Arthur Sirmon