The Great War: Breakthroughs

“Has anyone ever told you, sir, that you may be too damn smart for your own good?”

“A whole raft of people, Colonel Landis,” Morrell answered cheerfully. “Once or twice, they’ve even been right.”

“I never knew any Sonorans before you. You’re a good fellow. You ever get tired of trying to scratch out a living down where you’re at, you bring your family on up to Alabama. Plenty of good farm country there. You’d live high on the hog.”

“Thanks, amigo, but no thanks.” Rodriguez’s smile was sweet and sad. “I want to go home. I want to talk español, to see my friends and family. And in Sonora, I am a man. In Alabama, I am a damn greaser.” He tapped a brown hand with a brown finger to remind Pinkard of what he meant.

In the trenches, Jeff had long since stopped worrying about their being of different colors. Hip was right, though; it would matter in Alabama.

“Do I tell you how to arrange your life, Carlton?” he demanded.

“Only when you open your mouth,” Ben answered. “Sir.”

“I’ve been thinking,” George Enos said….

Beside him, Carl Sturtevant was panting more than a little. “Probably won’t do you any lasting harm,” he said.

A man who couldn’t see truth when it tried to shoot him wouldn’t live long, and didn’t deserve to.

She looked so angelic, any real angel who saw her would have been extremely suspicious.

What people believe and what they’ll do because they believe it is a big part of what’s real, especially in politics.

“You’re still learning the difference between being an agitator and being a politician. Listen to me, Flora.” He sounded very earnest. “Compromise is not a dirty word.”

“Maybe it should be,” she answered.

“Pretty damn soon, the Rebs’ll pack it in here, too, I expect,” Carlton said.

“Every blasphemy that passes your lips means a hotter dose of hellfire in the world to come,” McSweeney answered.”

I’ve seen enough hellfire right here on earth,” Carlton said. “The kind of the preachers go on about don’t worry me as much as it used to.”

You have a fine stump speech there, Congresswoman, and I think you are sincere in it, but it doesn’t altogether match the way the world works.

“The War Department has all sorts of opinions,” he said, sneering as he had when Dowling announced the Roosevelt was there. “A few of them bear a discernible relation to the real world—but only a few, mind you.”

When you lose, Sis, the last war’s never over and done with.

A fisherman who wasn’t a born pessimist hadn’t been going to sea long enough.

The War Department had never forgiven Jake for being right.

Some of those men were black, the new units going forward along with the white troops who have been in the field for years. The Negro soldiers charged straight at the U.S. trenches; they weren’t skilled in the fire-and-move tactics the veterans had learned by painful experience. And they went down in gruesome numbers. When they screamed, Bartlett couldn’t tell their voices from those of white men.

He sees the country going forward. He doesn’t see the suffering he’s creating to make it go in the direction he wants.

“Major Potter isn’t a pal—not exactly, anyhow.” As far as he could see, the only thing he and the bespectacled major had in common was an unbounded contempt for the bluebloods who, because of who their grandfathers had been, got a higher rank and a bigger arena in which to display their blunders than they deserved.

Fashion made a harsh mistress.

I’ll tell you, though, this whole business of war would be a hell of a lot more fun if you didn’t get shot.

Scipio would sooner have gone on without the revolution than the other way around.

Potter studied him. “I never have figured out how smart you are, Featherston, but you’ve made it plain you’re shrewd enough and to spare. If you hadn’t made the fatal mistake of being right at the wrong time, we might have the same rank by now.”

The bullet doesn’t care who shot it, only where it’s going.

“I must conclude that my views on the subject are also the views of the large majority of the American people.”

That was probably true. Because of it, Flora did not have a good opinion of the political wisdom of the large majority of the American people. Nationalism kept too many from voting their class interests.

It was like dying and going to hell, except a little hotter and a little stickier. July in Tennessee was not the ideal weather in which to fight in a barrel.

Moss sighed and nodded. Might-have-beens was a stupid game, when you got right down to it. Look back on things, and you couldn’t help but see they’d come out the way they had to come out.

Lieutenant Crowder reported that submersible as probably destroyed, and if you don’t think Lieutenant Crowder knows everything in the world, well, shit, just ask him.

Don’t do anything to make things worse was the eleventh commandment of the ghetto, at least as important as the original ten.

The only people who love a war are those who have never fought in one.

Down near the Florida border, Georgia could give South Carolina lessons in heat and humidity.

“Maybe we’ll get some use out of battleships in the next war after all.” He didn’t doubt there would be a next war; there would always be a next war.

She was only eight years old, and still confused the way things should have been with the way they were.