SCHOLAR ISLAND

"The first blessing is peace, as is agreed upon by all men who have even a small share of reason. ..The best general, therefore, is that one who is able to bring about peace from war."

Belisarius

 

   "When Alexander finally walked out of his tent, he was fully armed, wearing a Sicilian tunic tightly around his waist, covered by a double-woven linen corselet from the Granicus spoils. His polished steel helmet, bright as silver, had been forged by Theophilus, a famous craftsman of the time. Around his neck, he wore a steel collar inlaid with precious stones. His sword, extraordinarily light and well-tempered, had been presented to him by the king of Citium in Cyprus. But above these things, the cloak hanging from his shoulders distinguished itself through the artistry of the maker, Helikon, and because it was given to him by the capital city of Rhodes, of the same name."

Theodore Vrettos

Alexandria: City of the Western Mind

"My riches are spear and sword and the beautiful shield. ..

But those who do not dare to bear spear and sword and the

beautiful shield that protects the body fall all down unto

their knees with awe and address me as Lord and Great King."

(Ancient Cretan poem by "Hybrias"

quoted from Eduard Meyer

Die Sklaverei im Altertum 1898

"Prepare you, Generals.

The enemy comes on in gallant show;

Their bloody sign of battle is hung out,

And something is to be done immediately. "

Shakespeare

Julius Caesar

"There’s no sight more inspiring or heartwarming than troops marching out to battle when you ain’t going with them."

Brigadier Sir Harry Paget Flashman, V.C., K.C.I.E. etc etc.

"Well, well, General, bury these poor men, and let us say no more

about it. "

General Robert E. Lee: To General Hill after the battle of Oct 14,1863

"Many generals appear to civilians like deceptively simple men. Most of them possess, from a civilian point of view, an unworldly character.....Debate, when protracted, makes (the professional officer) impatient."

J.P. Marquand

"We are here to be killed."

(attributed to General Blackjack Pershing

upon placing the American forces at the

disposal of the Allied High Command-l9l8)

"Sophisticates in the last quarter of the twentieth century are disdainful of military intellect, but great captains have always been men of genius. Goethe thought that Napoleon's mind was the greatest that the world had ever produced: Lord Acton agreed. That century rated warriors higher than this one does. Walt Whitman wrote: "Knowest thou not there is but one theme for ever-enduring bards? And that is the theme of War, the fortune of battles, the making of perfect soldiers."

William Manchester

American Caesar

"I spent my life as a professional military man, and am not apologizing for having done so. We had to have professional military men. Still have to but, quite contrary to trivial opinion, all professional military men do not walk blind and brutal. I have known some who demonstrated as much pity as they did courage, and they showed a lot of that. When you're dealing constantly firsthand with the quivering elements of life and death-when you are trying to figure out the best answer to save certain lives as well as to take others, and in the same operation-you do not necessarily become calloused. Neither does a surgeon. "

General Curtis E. Lemay

Mission with Lemay

Mackinlay Kantor-Doubleday

"I begin to regard the death and mangling of a couple of thousand men as a small affair, a kind of morning dash-and it may well be that we become so hardened. "

General William Tecumseh Sherman

(letter to his wife July 1864)

"There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory,

but, boys , it is all hell."

(attributed to General Sherman)

"I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a method of settling international disputes."

General Douglas MacArthur

Infantry Journal Mar 1927

"Within the walls of the old Vauban fortress of Montreuil, where G.H.Q. were established, Kiggel (General Kiggel-Chief of Staff under General Haig-World War I) meditated like a Buddhist bhikku;revolved the prayer wheel of his doctrines, and out of them concocted Napoleonic battles on paper, which on the ground turned out to be slaughter-house dramas. He was essentially a cloistered soldier; he never went near a battle, and-if reports are correct-only once visited a battlefield, and then long after the battle had been fought. Spiritually he was the twin brother of Flecker's Mandarin general in the 'Golden Journey to Samarkan, "

"Who never left his Palace gates before,

But hath grown blind, reading great

books on war. "

J.F.C. Fuller (introduction to

                                       In Flanders Field

Leon Wolf

Time Inc.

"When you get to be a general, you haven't any friends . '

General MacArthur

"….But I’ll tell you: I’ve learned something. It’s exactly in time of war when the dumbest asses rise to the top. Don’t ask me why."

Willard Smith (officer in WWII)

Aphrodite: Desperate Mission

By Jack Olsen

"Many good generals exist in Europe, but they see too many things at once: I see but one thing, and that is the masses; I seek to destroy them, sure that the minor matters will fall of themselves. "

Napoleon

"We have good Corporals and Sergeants and some good lieutenants and captains, and those are far more important than good generals. "

General Sherman

"It's awful, he said. 'Its terrible, that’s what it is. I can see it in a vision. It comes to haunt me at night. I am standing knee deep in the water and all around as far as the eye can see and dead men, floating like a school of dynamited fish. And they're all floating face up with their eyes wide open and their skins a ghastly white. And they're all looking at me as they float by and saying. "Patton, its your fault. You did this to me. You killed me. "I can't stand it, I tell you. By God, I won't go. I won't go. "

(attributed to General George Patton by his

son-in-law Fred Ayer Jr. in his biography

Before the Colors Fail

"I cut off their heads; I burned them with fire; a pile of living men and of heads over against the city gate I set up; men I impaled on stakes; the city I destroyed. ..I turned it into mound and ruin heaps; the young men and maidens. . . I burned. "

King Ashurnasirpal II

(ancient Assyrian King)

"Christmas dawned clear and cold. Lovely weather for killing Germans, although the thought seemed somewhat at variance with the spirit of the day. "

(excerpt from the diary of

George Patton)

"Finally, one finds among war leaders, among those who exercise absolute command, a phenomenon that we may call "The Abraham complex. " All absolute command invites its holder to a mystic internal life. In moments when his responsibilities weigh upon him, he will inevitably rely upon inspiration, in the mystic sense of the word. Further, absolute command also leads to patriarchal psychological attitudes to the extent to which the father is the all-powerful chief and pontiff of the 'gens' . Now, the culminating moments of patriarchal power are those in which he orders the sacrifice of the son, and here we find the psychoanalytical ambivalence, for the father slays either the unworthy or the perfect son as a choice offering, an incomparable victim offered to the gods. Abraham' s sacrifice is the supreme consecration of a task or a policy. Thus Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great followed the example of Jeptha and Agamemnon. War indirectly performs this sacrament. The leader sends and devotes the best of his sons to war. As for the combatants, the more they love and admire their leader, the more they expect him to order them to unheard-of-sacrifices. The Abraham complex appears also to have another significance; namely , as a manifestation of the conflict between the generations. The generation of fathers, comfortable and well provided for, who find themselves under pressure from bustling and ambitious youth too numerous for the available employment possibilities, tends, consciously or otherwise, to see a remedy for this dangerous situation in war. "

Gaston Bouthoul

War

"So as through a glass darkly

The age-long strife I see

Where I fought in many guises,

Many names but always me.

And I see not in my blindness

What the objects were I wrought

But as God rules o'er our bickerings

It was through His will I fought.

So forever in the future,

Shall I battle as of yore

Dying to be born a fighter,

But to die again once more.

(Poem by General Patton)

"Cold and indifferent. . .in the beginning of battles, when the moment of difficulty comes intelligence flashes from the eyes of this wonderful man; and he rises superior to all that can be imagined.

(description of the Duke of Wellington by Col. Frazer)

 

General Lee was much amused by an enlisted cook (negro) explaining

his absence of wounds: 'Cause I stays back wid de Ginerals!"

Samuel Eliot Morrison

The Oxford History of the American People

"Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees."

(dying words of Stonewall Jackson)

"Robert E. Lee was the finest general of a Napoleonic age that was passing: Sherman was the first general of an age that was coming, and whose end we have not yet seen."

Samuel Eliot Morrison

"Everything is in the execution. I am like a woman in labour. Few people realize the strength of mind required to conduct, with a full realization of its consequences, one of these great battles on which depends the fate of an army, a nation, the possession of a throne. Consequently one rarely finds Generals who are keen to give battle."

Napoleon

"I consider myself the boldest of Generals"

Napoleon

"The very sight of him (Tiberius) drew tears of joy from the soldiers. They were all eagerness, with a sort of unexampled rapture in their salutation and a passion for touching his hand: they could not re- strain themselves from immediately adding "Is it really you, General? Have we got you back in safety?" and then, "I was with you in Armenia, General," "I was in Raetia," I had a reward from you in Vindelicia,"  in Pannonia," I in Germania a scene not to be expressed in words, and perhaps scarcely of winning belief."

Vellelius Paterculus (l9BC-3OAD)

"At one time General Hill, when the confederates were in full retreat, seized the standard of the Fourth North Carolina, a regiment which he had formerly commanded , and shouted to the retreating soldiers: "If you will not follow, I will perish alone."

John Laird Wilson

The Pictorial History of the Great Civil War

What good are peasants without a leader? Where ends the war without a brain and heart to conduct it?"

Bram Stoker

Dracula

"in peace there's nothing so becomes a man

as modest stillness and humility:

But when the blast of war blows in our ears ,

Then imitate the action of the tiger;

Stiffen the sinews, Summon up the blood,

Disguise fair nature with hard-favoure'd rage;

Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;

Let it pry through the portage of the head

Like the brass cannon; let the brow o'erwhelm it.

As fearfully as doth a galled rock

O'erhang and jutty his confounded base,

Swill'd with the wild and wasteful ocean.

Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide,

Hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit

To his full height. "

Henry V

Act III sc. I

Shakespeare

"Battle is the most magnificent competition in which a human being can indulge. It brings out all that is best; it removes all that is base. All men are afraid in battle. The coward is the one who lets his fear overcome his sense of duty. Duty is the essence of manhood. Americans pride themselves on being he-men, and they 'are' he-men. "

General George S. Patton

"When he conquered a province he did no harm to the people or their property, but merely established some of his own men in the country among them, while he led the remainder to the conquest of other provinces. And when those whom he had conquered became aware how well and safely he protected them against all others, and how they suffered no ill at his hands, and saw what a noble prince he was, then they joined him heart and soul and became his devoted followers. And when he had thus gathered such a multitude that they seemed to cover the earth, he began to think of conquering a great part of the earth."

Marco Polo on Genghis Khan

"It is ordered that all men should believe in one God, Creator of Heaven and earth, the sole giver of goods and poverty. of life and death as pleases Him, whose power over all things is absolute."

lst law of the Yassa of Genghis Khan

"War is the most exciting thing in life. In fighting to death you feel terribly relaxed when you manage to come through."

General Moshe Dayan

"The general of a non-violent army has got to have a greater presence of mind than that of a violent army, and God would bless him with the necessary resourcefulness to meet new situations as they arise".

Gandhi

"War is my profession. I know its hellish nature. No man shouldbe made to endure its horrors except to accomplish a goal which is equivalent in value to life itself. It is an American military tradition that each single American life is precious and must not under any circumstances be squandered. Stalemate and appeasement are contrary to our traditions and are not goals men will willingly fight or die for. "

General Lewis Walt USMC (Ret)

"Man in his childhood has been compelled to use the weapon of violence, the brutal destruction of war, in order to effect the great changes necessary for his own development. Nor can we be blind to the fact that the successful prosecution of war demands the highest intellectual powers, the greatest effort of will and the most perfect co-coordinating genius of which man is capable. The greatest commanders, for these very reasons, have always therefore been men who were much more than soldiers, men whose terrible genius possessed something legendary and godlike. Among these few world geniuses, alongside Alexander and Napoleon, Chingis Khan takes his place, one of the greatest of those who were at once destroyers and world builders."

Ralph Fox

Genghis Khan

Book: "Alexander The Great: Son of the Gods" by A. Fildes & J. Fletcher

Book: "Alexander: Destiny and Myth" by Claude Mosse

Book: "Alexander" by Theodore Ayrault Dodge

Book: "King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Rules Israel" by Jonathan Kirsch

Book: "Cleopatra of Egypt: From History to Myth, Ed. by S. Walker & P. Higgs

Book: "The Blue Wolf: The Epic Tale of the Life of Genghis Khan and the Empire of the Steppes" by Frederic Dion

Book: "Once an Eagle" by Anton Myrer

Book: "Terrible Terry Allen: Combat General of World War II-The Life of an American Soldier" by Gerald Astor

Book: "Eisenhower" by Geoffrey Perret

Book: "General Patton: A Soldier's Life" by Stanley P. Hirshon

Book: "Rommel: Battles and Campaigns" by Kenneth Macksey