Quotes November 19, 2021

“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
 
 
 
 
“The First World War was a horror of gas, industrialized slaughter fear and appalling human suffering.”
Nick Harkaway, 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
This interview was part of the report titled “Candid Comment on The American Soldier of 1917-1918 and Kindred Topics by The Germans,” which contained postwar attitudes of Germans toward Americans.
 
 
 
 
“We had been brought up to believe that Britain was the best country in the world and we wanted to defend her. The history taught us at school showed that we were better than other people (didn’t we always win the last war?) and now all the news was that Germany was the aggressor and we wanted to show the Germans what we could do.”
Private George Morgan, British soldier
 
 
 
 
“To die from a bullet seems nothing; parts of our being remain intact. But to be dismembered, torn to pieces, reduced to pulp, this is a fear that the flesh cannot support – and which is fundamentally the great suffering of the bombardment.”
Paul Dubrulle, French sergeant
 
 
 
 
“From the darkness on all sides came the groans and wails of wounded men; faint, long, sobbing moans of agony and despairing shrieks. It was too horribly obvious to me that dozens of men with serious wounds must have crawled for safety into shell holes. And now the water was rising above them, and powerless to move, they were slowly drowning.”
Edwin Vaughan, British lieutenant, 1917
 
 
 
 
“All through the long night those big guns flashed and growled just like the lightning and the thunder when it storms in the mountains at home. And, oh my, we had to pass the wounded. And some of them were on stretchers going back to the dressing stations. And some of them were lying around, moaning and twitching. And the dead were all along the road. And it was wet and cold. And it all made me think of the Bible and the story of the Antichrist and Armageddon.”
Alvin C. York, US soldier, on fighting in Argonne in 1918