Quotes October 06, 2023

“Two armies that fight each other is like one large army that commits suicide.”
Henri Barbusse, 1916
 
 
 
 
“We’re telling lies; we know we’re telling lies; we don’t tell the public the truth, that we’re losing more officers than the Germans, and that it’s impossible to get through on the Western Front.”
Lord Rothermere, 1917
 
 
 
 
“The cries of the wounded had much diminished now, and as we staggered down the road, the reason was only too apparent, for the water was right over the tops of the shell-holes.”
Captain Edwin Vaughan, 1917
Vaughan was a British Army officer in World War I, and his diary became a famous book.
 
 
 
 
“I wish those people who talk about going on with this war whatever it costs could see the soldiers suffering from mustard gas poisoning. Great mustard-coloured blisters, blind eyes, all sticky and stuck together, always fighting for breath, with voices a mere whisper, saying that their throats are closing and they know they will choke.”
Nurse Vera Brittain, 1933
Brittain was an English Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse, writer, feminist and pacifist, and the quote can be found in her 1933 memoir, Testament of Youth.
 
 
 
 
“However the world pretends to divide itself, there are only two divisions in the world today – human beings and Germans.”
Rudyard Kipling, 1915
Kipling was an English journalist who published this statement in the British War Propaganda Section of the Morning Post, a London-based daily newspaper, on June 22.
 
 
 
 
“The First World War was a horror of gas, industrialized slaughter fear and appalling human suffering.”
Nick Harkaway, 2012
The British novelist and commentator wrote an article titled “On Poppy Burning” in the Huffington Post in 2012.
 
 
 
 
“[I] like the American soldier individually but do not like the nation as a whole. America entered the war for what money she could get out of it.”
Frau Frieda Fischer of Lohndorf, Germany, 1919