"So come along and die, it shall be great fun."

Rupert Brooke (dead of blood poisoning during the Gallipoli campaign 1915)

"It was not their fault that no one had told them that the real function of an army is to fight and that a soldier’s destiny-which few escape-is to suffer, and if need be , to die."

T.R. Fehrenback

This Kind of War

   "When those who engaged to serve during the war enlisted, they were promised a hundred acres of land, each, which was to be in their own or the adjoining states. When the country had drained the last drop of service it could screw out of the poor soldiers, they were turned adrift like old worn-out horses, and nothing said about land to pasture them upon. Congress did, indeed, appropriate lands under the denomination of "Soldier's lands" in Ohio state, or some state, or a future state, but no care was taken that the soldiers should get them. No agents were appointed to see that the poor fellows ever got possession of their lands; no one ever took the least care about it, except as a pack of speculators, who were driving about the country like so many evil spirits, endeavoring to pluck the last feather from the soldiers. The soldiers were ignorant of the ways and means to obtain their bounty lands, and there was no one appointed to inform them. The truth was, none cared for them; the country was served, and faithfully served, and that was all that was deemed necessary. It was, soldiers, look to yourselves; we want no more of you...

Joseph Plumb Martin (Soldier in the American Revolution)

"Every citizen should be a soldier. This was the case with the Greeks and Romans, and must be that of every state."

Thomas Jefferson ( another idea that Jefferson preached rather than practiced)

"A soldier is an anachronism of which we must get rid."

George Bernard Shaw

"Lucky are soldiers who strive in a just war; for them it is an easy entry into heaven."

Bhagavad Gita

" A cause breaks or exalts a soldier’s strength; unless that cause is just, shame will make him throw his weapons away."

Propertius (28 B.C. 16 B.C.)

"During the American War of Independence, American troops suffered a 2% battle casualty rate; meanwhile, 75% of those treated in hospitals did not survive. Disease, most of it unrelated to wounds , caused nine out of ten fatalities."

Edwrd Tenner

Why Things Bite Back

"Around her hair, she wore a yellow ribbon,

She wore it in the springtime and the merry month of May,

And if you asked her why the hell she wore it,

She wore it for her soldier who was far, far away,

Far away, far away

She wore it for her soldier who was far, far away."

(a favorite song among West Point cadets and throughout the army going back to before World War I)

"Ay, our life was an unresting march; like blustering wind,

homeless, we stormed across the war-broken earth."

Schiller

"It is a brutal truth about the world that the whole everlasting business of keeping the human race protected and clothed and fed could not go on for twenty-four hours without the vast legion of hard-bitten, technically efficient, not-over-sympathetic men, and without the harsh processes of discipline by which this legion is made. It is a brutal truth that unless a great many people practiced the Kipling 'ethos' there would be neither security nor leisure for any people to practice a finer 'ethos' ."

C.S.Lewis

"What shocked me on entering battle was the speed with which surrounding might seemed to thin out, and one found oneself no longer part of a mighty host, but confronting marked unpleasantness in a muddy field with only a few chums. That is where, according to the book, the confidence of the soldier in this weapons comes in-though I never found it so.

   Unexpectedly, in extremely nasty situations one came to depend heavily on the soldier, probably a busted sergeant, who had a fairly awful peacetime record for absence, reckless driving, drunkenness, fornication and insolence to seniors. In the last ditch, he was a rock; possibly because he wanted to prove you had done the right thing by sticking to him. I devoutly hope they have some of those in the desert."

W.F. Deedes, Daily Telegraph, 14.1.91,page 16

"Nothing ever bridged the gap between the man who went and the man who stayed behind. "

John LeCarres

The Looking Glass War

Our life was an unresting march; like blustering wind, home-

less, we stormed across the war-broken earth."

Schiller

"Nothing but hurting and harming and being in their turn hurt and harmed, this was their whole purpose and existence. From this nothing could divert them-not winter or summer, snow or ice, heat or cold, wind or rain, mountain or valley, swamp or desert, ditches, ramparts, water, fire. . ..or the very fear of eternal damnation itself. at this task they labored until at last, in battles, sieges, assaults, campaigns, or even in their winter quarters, which is the soldiers paradise, one by one they died, perished and rotted."

Melshausen

(During the 30 years war)

" "We see soldiers and they wave goodbye. . .and between those waving, lie others who will never get up on their feet again...when you look at these gigantic machines of war you feel like asking the human species, 'Tell me, have we gone absolutely berserk?' "

(a letter from a young Israeli Soldier to his wife during the

6 Day War)

Amos Elon

The Israelis

"We're here because we're here,

Because we're here, because we're here;

Oh, here we are, and here we are,

And here we are again. "

Soldiers Song 1916

"I'd read of our heroes, and wanted the same,

To play my own part in the patriot game. "

Irish Ballad

"Oh you've lost your youth .and come to manhood, all in a

few hours. . . . Oh, that' s painful. That is indeed. "

Howard Fast

April Morning

"They come like sacrifices in their trim,

And to the fire-eyed maid of smoky war

All Hot and bleeding will we offer them..."

Shakespeare

Henry IV, Part I

" 'We are but warriors for the working day.

Our gayness and our gilt are all besmirched

With rainy marching in the painful field."

Shakespeare

"Reckless he may be-fond of pleasure or of adventure-all kinds of bye-motives and mean impulses may have determined the choice of his profession, and may affect (to all appearance exclusively) his daily conduct in it; our estimate of him is based upon this ultimate fact-of which we are well assured-that put him in a fortress breach, with all the pleasures of the world behind him and only death and his duty in front of him, he will keep his face to the front; and he knows that his choice may be put to him at any moment-and has beforehand taken his part-virtually takes such part continually-does, in reality, die daily."

John Ruskin

"A curious boy asks an old soldier

Sitting in front of the grocery store,

"How did you lose your leg?"

And the soldier is struck with silence,

Or his mind flies away

because he cannot concentrate it on Gettysburg.

It comes back jocosely

And he says, "A bear bit it off."

Edgar Lee Masters

Silence Macmillan

"It was the sort of campaign that soldiers love-maximum of looting and destruction, minimum of discipline and fighting: splendid weather, few impediments, plenty of broiled turkey and fried chicken and roast pork, swarms of blacks eager to pillage their former masters, tagging joyfully along."

(description of Sherman's march to the sea)

by Samuel Eliot Morrison

"Straightway the word "fire!" is given: and they blow the souls out of one another; and in the place of sixty brisk useful craftsmen, the world has sixty dead carcasses, which it must bury, and anew shed tears for. Had these men any quarrel? Busy as the Devil is, not the smallest!.. ..Their Governors had fallen out: and, instead of shooting one another, had the cunning to make these poor blockheads shoot-alas, so it is in Deutschland, and hitherto in all other lands...."

Sartor Resartus

Carlyle

"I have been looking all my life to die. Today I see only the clouds

and the ground; I am all scarred up!"

(Indian War Song)

Crazy Horse

Maria Sandoz

"Brave rifles, veterans, you have been baptized in fire and blood and have come out steel. "

General Winfield Scott

"Time does not exist for the man who lives from one moment to the next or from one battle to the next. Future rewards become unreal, the moment' s pleasure is the only certainty, and to use an expression doubly applicable here, every pleasure is that much won from the enemy. Who can fail to see that this gamble between pleasure and death is necessarily corrupting."

Benjamin Constant

"Soldiers are citizens of death's gray land,

Drawing no dividends from time’s tomorrows. "

Siegfried Sassoon

Dreamers

"Most of them go into battle in a benevolent mood, confident that if they had the chance to talk to people and explain things to them, they would understand and stop killing each other. But the benevolence is soon knocked out of them by a stream of screaming invective invective and bursts from automatic rifles, fired at them in the darkness. And they, youngsters, seeing that they are being killed for no reason at all, get mad and the instinct for self-preservation and the thirst for revenge take over."

General Alexander Lebed

My life and My Country

" As a young man I had nursed, for a long time, a secret contempt for those who were content to live a whole lifetime under the benevolent patriarchy of the military system. They absolved themselves too easily, it seemed to me from the search for a philosophy and the necessity for an enlarged moral judgment. They were mercenaries dedicated to a brutal art which must in the end be stamped out if the human race was to survive at all. Like the policemen, they were passive instruments of policies, good or bad, which they had no voice in making. They created a caste for themselves with its own cosmogony and its own illusions of utility, sanctity, or heroism. They were dedicated to the national and not to the universal. They were like sorcerers, puttering in secret with a dangerous alchemy against the day when they might be required to launch death and destruction on an ignorant world. . .Alas, for my youthful cynicism! Today, in my secret dishonor,I envied the morality of their obedience and the absolution which was implicit even in the misguided command of a superior. Their dignity was more deeply founded than mine because it was rooted in a notion of service, and their lives were always in pawn to affirm it."

Morris L. West

The Ambassador

"If my soldiers were to begin to think, not One would remain in the ranks. "

Frederick the Great

"Had not innumerable soldiers shed their blood, there would have been no Hellenism, no Roman civilization, no Christianity, no Rights of Man, and no modern developments. "

Charles De Gaulle

******************************************************

Book: The Mammoth Book of Soldiers at War…Ed by Jon E. Lewis

Soldiers: A History of men in Battle…by John Keegan

Book: "The Spartans: The World of the Warrior-heroes of Ancient Greece, from utopia to Crisis and Collapse" by Paul Cartedge

Book: "The Gurkhas: The Inside Story of the World's Most Feared Soldiers" by John Parker

Book: "The Mammoth Book Of Elite Forces" Ed. by Jon E. Lewis

Book: "In the Company of Soldiers: A Chronicle of Combat" by Rick Atkinson

Book: "Testament: A Soldier's Story of the Civil War" by Benson Bobrick

Book: "Shoot To Kill: A Soldier's Journey Through Violence" by Michael Asher

Book: "Elite Forces: An Encyclopedia of the World's Most Formidable Secret Armies" by Richard M. Bennett