“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
“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
“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
“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
“The skinny, sallow, shambling, frightened victims of our industrial system, suffering from the effect of wartime shortages, who were given into our hands, were unrecognisable after six months of good fresh air and physical training… Beyond statistical measurements was their change in character – to ruddy, handsome, clear eyed young men with square shoulders who stood up straight and were afraid of no one, not even the sergeant major. ‘The effect on me’, I wrote in a letter, ‘is to make me a violent socialist when I see how underdeveloped capitalism has kept them – and a Prussian militarist when I see what soldiering makes of them’.
Charles Carrington, British officer
“The first shock was an immense surprise…. Suddenly the enemy’s fire became precise and concentrated. Second by second the hail of bullets and the thunder of shells grew stronger. Those who survived lay flat on the ground, amid the screaming wounded and the humble corpses… Isolated heroes made fantastic leaps, but all to no purpose. In an instant it had become clear that all the courage in the world could not withstand this fire.”
Charles de Gaulle, French officer, on the Battle of the Frontiers
“These young fellows we have, only just trained, are too helpless, especially when their officers have been killed. Our light infantry battalion, almost all students from Marburg, have suffered terribly from enemy shell fire. In the next division, equally young souls, the intellectual flower of Germany, went singing into an attack on Langemarck [but it was] just as vain and just as costly.”
Rudolf Binding, German captain, October 1914
