Quotes about war

Was that savage cynicism or sage common sense? When it came to gauging the chances of peace and war, how much difference was there?

Down underneath, there wasn’t much difference between people and animals. War brought that out all kinds of ways.

“Are you going to see if history can repeat itself? And are you setting me up to take the fall if it does? It can’t be your fault, after all.”

By you he didn’t mean Abell’s alone, but all the officers in Philadelphia who thought of war as theory and maps and not as cordite and burning barrels and mangled men. They were good at what they did. Because they were, they thought they knew everything there was to know about the business of organized slaughter. Morrell had a different, and lower, opinion.

Nothing like a wound infection to take the romance out of war.

“All things considered, we got away cheap.”

“Thank you, Mr. Cooley,” Sam said. We got away cheap. The dead and the maimed would not agree with the exec. Sam found that he was inclined to. War measured what you dished out against what you took.

“Besides, when you’re smoking you can’t smell the goddamn war so much.”

You can’t smell the goddamn war so much. Dowling wouldn’t have put it that way, which didn’t mean the kid was wrong. Even here in Washington, well back of the line, you noted whiffs of that smell. Dowling didn’t know what all went into it. Among the pieces, though, were unburied corpses, unwashed men, and uncovered latrine trenches. Cordite and smoke were two other constants. The smell had a sharper note in this war, for exhaust fumes had largely ousted the barnyard aroma of horses.

And there was one other stink that never went away. It blew out of the War Department. With luck, it blew out of the War Department on the other side, too. And it usually did, for most wars went on for a long, long time. No, there was no escaping the all-invasive, all-pervasive reek of stupidity.

Nothing was worse than a battlefield. Nothing could be. He was convinced of that. The devil hadn't known how to run hell before he took a long look at a Great War battlefield.

And a pair of albatrosses glided along behind the Remembrance. They really did look almost big enough to land. He wondered what they thought of the great ship. Or were they too birdbrained to think at all?

But this was their home. Men came here only to fight. That being so, who really were the birdbrains here?

He didn't feel like a knight in shining armor. He was filthy and fleabitten and probably lousy again. If they would have put him on a train and shipped him home, he wouldn't even have turned around to wave good-bye. He was here because the Army told him to be here and would shoot him if he bailed out, not because he thought God willed it. God was bound to have better things to do with His time.

During a war, nobody ever showed up on time, except possibly the enemy.

If you happened to end up in the wrong place at the wrong instant, you could be the best soldier in the world and it wouldn't matter one goddamn bit. Your next of kin would get a wire from the War Department, and that would be that.

He still couldn't believe she was dead. She’d been one of those fiercely vital people you thought of as going on forever. But life didn't work like that, and war had an obscene power all its own. What it wanted, it took, and an individual’s vitality mattered not at all to it.