I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.
In Flanders fields the poppies blow Between the crosses, row on row, That mark our place, and in the sky, The larks, still bravely singing, fly Scarce heard among the guns below.
In Flanders fields the poppies blow.
We have war when at least one of the parties to a conflict wants something more than it wants peace.
One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one.
All wars are follies, very expensive and very mischievous ones.
The larks, still bravely singing, fly Scarce heard amid the guns below
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, Loved and were loved, and now we lie In Flanders fields.
God for a month of power & a good shorthand writer.
We sit in calm, airy, silent rooms opening upon sunlit and embowered lawns, not a sound except of summer and of husbandry disturbs the peace; but seven million men, any ten thousand of whom could have annihilated the ancient armies, are in ceaseless battle from the Alps to the Ocean.
More than 80 per cent of the British casualties of the Great War were English. More than 80 per cent of the taxation is paid by the English taxpayers. We are entitled to mention these facts, and to draw authority and courage from them.
I wanted us to go to the Tories when we were strong...not in misfortune to be made an honest woman of.
This war proceeds along its terrible path by the slaughter of infantry...I say to myself every day. What is going on while we sit here, while we go away to dinner or home to bed? Nearly, 1000 - Englishmen, Britishers, and the other is America...Everything else is swept away.
It was evident however that the lawyers would have to have their say....This also opened up a vista both lengthy and obscure.
...every offensive lost its force as it proceeded. It was like throwing a bucket of water over the floor. It first rushed forward, then soaked forward, and finally stopped altogether until another bucket could be brought.
The old wars were decided by their episodes rather than by their tendencies. In this war, the tendencies are far more important than the episodes.
It is remarkable that Lord Esher should be so much astray...We must conclude that an uncontrollable fondness for fiction forbade him to forsake it for fact. Such constancy is a defect in an historian.
At the beginning of this War megalomania was the only form of sanity.
There is more blood than paint upon these hands. All those thousands of men killed. We thought it would be a little job, and so it might have been if it had begun in the right way.
My only consolation for the failure of the Dardanelles was that God wished things to be prolonged in order to sicken mankind of war, and that therefore He had interfered with a project that would have brought the war to a speedier conclusion.
or simply:
