Colin Smith > Quotes

“God was not say, ‘I’m giving you these commands, and by keeping them you may become my people.’ He was saying, ‘I’m giving you these commands because you are my people.’ The law tells us how people who belong to God ought to live.”
― Colin Smith

“Robert Surcouf was the most famous of France’s eighteenth-century privateers who, based on Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, grew rich on English plunder before retiring to his native St Malo. Renowned for his chivalry towards prisoners, in France he is perhaps best remembered for the reply he gave a captive officer who admonished him for fighting for money rather than, as the British did, for honour. ‘Each of us fights,’ admitted Surcouf, ‘for what he lacks most.”
― Colin Smith, England's Last War Against France: Fighting Vichy 1940-1942

“In the early part of the Verdun battle he was reported to have cured an epidemic of self-inflicted wounds to hands or feet by posting orders that in future offenders would spend a night tied to stakes in no-man’s-land.”
― Colin Smith, England's Last War Against France: Fighting Vichy 1940-1942