Quotes about war

“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.

The countryside looked as if hell had been there, but had gone away on vacation.

“We’d never—” Alexander began, but he didn’t finish the sentence. When you were in a war, who could say what you might be driven to do?

That was something else war was about: not caring.

Scott said, “If things had gone the way they were supposed to, we’d have been in Philadelphia a long time ago.”

“Yeah, and if pigs had wings, we’d all carry umbrellas,” Featherstone replied with a snort “When you’ve been through even a little more fighting, kid, you’re going to see that things just don’t go the way they’re supposed to.”

War would have been a much simpler, easier business with politics out of the mix.

Isaac might have been emboldened by the whiskey, for he asked Yossel Reisen, “What—is it like at the front?” Emboldened or not, he sounded hesitant.

Yossel looked into the depths of his glass as he had looked through Flora. At last, he answered, “Think of all the worst things you know in the world. Think of them all in one place. Think of them as ten times as bad as they really are. Then think of them ten times worse than that. What you are thinking about when you do that is one ten-thousandth of what the front is like.”

Nobody asked him any more questions.

He’d always been glad he wasn’t an infantryman: if you were a mudfoot, war, and the death and the maiming that went with war, were random and impersonal. What had he just been doing but dealing out random, impersonal death? He thought of himself as a knight in shining armor. What sorts of filthy things had knights done that never got into the pages of Malory and Ivanhoe? He didn’t know. He didn’t want to find out, not really.

He looked down at himself. His imaginary suit of armor seemed to have a patch or two of rust on it. No matter who you were or what you did, you couldn’t stay immaculate, not in this war.

When war reached out its hand, what did wealth and power matter? A fool with a gun could take them away. A fool with a gun had just taken them away.

“How come they get to call us names whenever they please and we don’t get to call them names whenever we please? That’s not fair.”

“Because they have more guns than we do, and they drove our soldiers out of this part of the country,” he told her. “If you have more guns in a war, you get to say what’s fair.”

War was rapidly doing what war did—making ugly everything it touched.

War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it. Its glory is all moonshine.