Alan Moorehead > Quotes

“game hunting was flourishing; and, dining at Muthaiga Club, I was offered trout freshly caught in the mountains, together with some last bottles of a particularly fragrant Rhine wine. Not since that last bright summer in Paris in 1939, when the wealthy of the world came flocking to spend their money lest they should not visit Paris again, had I seen women so well groomed, wearing so many lush furs. Baboon pelts and leopard skins were particularly popular. Great log fires burned in the grates of the club chimney places, though the nights were scarcely sharp. The men wore dinner-jackets or dress uniform. The conversation tended to hunting. In the day one had golf at Brackenridge, or swimming or riding or fooling round the game reserves where giraffe still roam haphazardly. Normally one looked in at a roadhouse for an apéritif around eight in the evening, and after dinner perhaps went down to Torr’s to dance. They say the altitude at Nairobi makes people slightly crazy, but after the desert I found it all delightful, as though the world were enjoying one long holiday. As”
― Alan Moorehead, Desert War: The North African Campaign 1940-43

“No one could have guessed how deeply Mussolini had been misled by his intelligence services on two vital points. It seems he really believed the Greeks would not fight. That was his first error. He failed to learn the lessons of the Republicans in Spain, the Finns in Finland. Nor was Mussolini alone in failing to see that war was still made with men first and machines second, and that a people once fired with a passionate hatred and an emotional patriotism are the most dangerous enemy in the world though they lack every essential piece of equipment.”
― Alan Moorehead, Desert War: The North African Campaign 1940-43

“...in some ways depressions are more disastrous than wars, for wars are action and generate energy, while depressions are paralysis”
― Alan Moorehead, A Late Education

“There is something so mocking about this situation, something so wrong, that one feels that it is not explained by all the errors and mischances that had occurred: by the commander-in-chief pacing about his headquarters at Imbros when he might just as well have been asleep, by Stopford lying in bed at sea when he should have been wide awake on shore, by the landing of raw troops at night instead of experienced men at dawn, by the appointment of elderly, inefficient commanders, by the excessive secrecy that had kept so much in the dark, by the thirst and the heat and the uncharted reefs beneath the sea. In the face of so much mismanagement things were bound to go wrong, yet not so wrong as all this. Somewhere, one feels, there must be some missing factor which has not been brought to light--some element of luck neglected, some supernatural accident, some evil chain of coincidence that nobody could have anticipated.”
― Alan Moorehead, Gallipoli

“وقد لخص الأستاذ "توينبي" الموضوع بوضوح شديد، حين قال: «إن المفارقة الحرفية في الموقف كله، أن الفرنسيين كانوا في الواقع، قد هبطوا مصر من قبل بنية غزوها، وذلك في القرنين الثاني عشر والثالث عشر في زمن كانوا فيه أدنى مرتبة من الشرقيين من حيث الحضارة العامة، ومن حيث إجادتهم لفن القتال فالفارس الفرنسي في العصور الوسطى كان صورة ممسوخة -وأقل خبرة وبراعة- من الفارس المملوك ولذا حاقت به الهزيمة المرة عندما أقدم على مواجهة المماليك في ساحة القتال، ورجع عن عزمه على غزو مصر، واعتبر التفكير في ذلك غير مجدٍ وقد ظل المماليك مدة خمسة قرون ونصف قرن على حالهم (فيما عدا أنهم تخلوا عن قسيهم المجلوبة من آسيا الوسطى واستخدموا البنادق الإنجليزية الطويلة) وقد خيل إليهم -بطبيعة الحال- أن الفرنسيين لم يتغيروا إلا بمقدار ما تغيروا هم أنفسهم، ولذا فإنهم عندما سمعوا بأن نابليون اجترأ على النزول في الإسكندرية حسبوا أنهم سيذيقونه ما أذاقوه من قبل للقديس لويس وهكذا ركبوا خيولهم وهم خليو البال، وانطلقوا وفي نيتهم أن يطأوا الغزاة تحت سنابك خيولهم».
ص110”
― Alan Moorehead, The Blue Nile

“Indeed, there was very little time for any of the matters which Hamilton had to attend if he was to honour his undertaking that the attack would be launched by the middle of April. He did not reach Alexandria until the afternoon of March 26, and this meant he had barely three weeks in hand. The job that lay before the General was, in effect, nothing less than the setting up of the largest amphibious operation in the whole history of warfare”
― Alan Moorehead, Gallipoli

“In a dressing station one day a wounded Australian soldier with an unlighted cigarette in his mouth chatted with me for a while and then said "Have you got a match, dig?" I had no matches but I borrowed a lighter in a moment and lit it. The soldier did not draw on his cigarette, however, because in that instant of time he died.”
― Alan Moorehead, A Late Education

“Once in a generation," Hamilton wrote in his diary, "a mysterious wish for war passes through the people. Their instinct tells them that there is no other way of progress and of escape from habits that no longer fit them. Whole generations of statesmen will fumble over reforms for a lifetime which are put into full-blooded execution within a week of a declaration of war. There is no other way. Only by intense sufferings can the nations grow, just as a snake once a year must with anguish slough off the once beautiful coat which has now become a strait jacket.”
― Alan Moorehead, Gallipoli

“{Hamilton] did not reach Alexandria until the afternoon of March 26, and this meant he had barely three weeks in hand. The job that lay before the General was, in effect, nothing less than the setting up of the largest amphibious operation in the whole history of warfare... In fact the only operation that could be compared with this lay thirty years ahead on the beaches of Normandy in the second world war; and the planning of the Normandy landing was to take not three weeks but nearly two years.”
― Alan Moorehead, Gallipoli

“Everywhere around the forts shell craters had broken up the ground, and at the Dardanos, a little further downstream on the Asiatic shore, the hillsides were pitted and scarred like the surface of the moon. Coins and pieces of pottery which had lain in the earth since classical times had been flung up into the air.”
― Alan Moorehead, Gallipoli

“As July ran out both sides settled down to an erratic apprehensive calm, enduring the same blistering sun, the same plague of flies and infected dust, the same ant-like existence in the ground. The Allies waited for the Turks to issue forth from the hills; the Turks waited for the Allies to come up to meet them. It was all very old and very new, a twentieth-century revival of the interminable siege. The Turks had a trench and a machine-gun post among Schliemann’s excavations on the site of Troy. CHAPTER TWELVE THE”
― Alan Moorehead, Gallipoli

“The great onslaught upon the bush was only just beginning - the cutting down and ring-barking of the eucalyptus forests to make way for grazing land - and no one then could have envisaged a time when so much of this countryside would become tame and urbanized and even uglier than the American middle west. We thought the bush, like the British Empire, was there forever; it was so old and there was so much of it.”
― Alan Moorehead, A Late Education

“Yet it seems possible that one can make too much of the hardships of the soldiers at Gallipoli, or rather there is a danger of seeing these hardships out of their right context. With the mere cataloguing of the Army’s miseries a sense of dreariness is transmitted, and this is a false impression; at this stage life on the peninsula was anything but dreary. It was ghastly but it was not yet petty or monotonous. There can be no fair comparison with the relatively comfortable lives of the soldiers in the second world war, or even with the lives of these men themselves before they enlisted. Gallipoli swallowed them up and made conditions of its own. With marvellous rapidity the men removed themselves to another plane of existence, the past receded, the future barely existed, and they lived as never before upon the moment, released from the normal weight of human ambitions and regrets. ‘It was in some ways,’ Herbert says, ‘a curiously happy time.’ It is a strange remark, but one feels one understands it very well. The men had no cinemas, no music, no radios, no ‘entertainment’ of any kind, and they never met women or children as the soldiers did behind the lines in France. Yet the very absence of these pleasures created another scale of values. They had a sharp and enormous appetite for the smallest things. Bathing in the sea became an inexpressible joy. To get away from the flies, to wash the dust from one’s eyes and mouth, to feel cool again: this was a heightening of sensation which, for the moment, went beyond their dreams of home. The brewing of tea in the evening, the sharing out of a parcel, a cake or a bar of chocolate, the long talks in the starlight talking of what they would do ‘when it was all over’—all these things took on an almost mystical emphasis of a kind that became familiar enough in the western desert of Egypt in the second world war, or indeed on any distant front in any war. There were no pin-up girls; no erotic magazines reached them—they were lucky if they even saw a newspaper from home that was under a month old—and there were no nurses or Ensa troupes. Perhaps because of this the sexual instinct seems to have been held in abeyance for the time, or rather it was absorbed in the minutiae of their intensely friendly life, the generous feelings created by the danger all around them. There was very little vice; ordinary crimes became lost in the innocence of the crime of war itself. Certainly there was no possibility of drunkenness,22 and gambling was not much more than an anaemic pastime in a world where money was the least of things. They craved not soft beds and hot baths but mosquito nets and salt water soap.”
― Alan Moorehead, Gallipoli

“Here [in Nahariya] in the sunshine a little group of Jews flung out by Germany were rebuilding their lives under the lee of war. They had worked hard. They had turned this barren coast into a lovely place full of good food and good living. There was only the Alamein Line now between them and Hitler, but they did not seem to be afraid. They knew there was no longer any place they could flee to. This, whatever happened, was their journey's end. Their children were growing up here into a new life, a better life than they could have ever have had in Germany. At night, looking through their lighted doorways, you could see the families sitting together. Someone would be playing music in the garden.
Perhaps it was for this that in the last analysis we were fighting the war. A cottage, a piece of farmland, the right to work in one's home securely and enjoy it.”
― Alan Moorehead, African Trilogy