First World War Quotes

“This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“A society that devours its own young deserves no automatic or unquestioning allegiance.”
― Pat Barker, Regeneration

“No commander was ever privileged to lead a finer force; no commander ever derived greater inspiration from the performance of his troops.”
― John J. Pershing

“In each succeeding war there is a tendency to proclaim as something new the principles under which it is conducted. Not only those who have never studied or experienced the realities of war, but also professional soldiers frequently fall into the error. But the principles of warfare as I learned them at West Point remain unchanged.”
― John J. Pershing, My Experiences in the World War

“...all the men in the photograph wear puttees. All the men in the picture are bound, trying to keep themselves together. That is how considerate they are, for the love of God and country and women and the other men--for the love of all that is good and true--they keep themselves together because they have to. They are afraid but they are not cowards.”
― Elena Mauli Shapiro, 13, rue Thérèse

“... your father and I were in the trenches together, in the Great War. That was a war all right. Oh I know there have been other wars since, better-publicized ones, more expensive ones perhaps, but our war is the one I'll always remember. Our war is the one that means war to me.”
― Donald Barthelme, Snow White

“The truth is, no study is possible on the battlefield. One does there simply what one can in order to apply what one knows. Therefore, in order to do even a little, one has already to know a great deal, and to know it well.”
― Ferdinand Foch, The Principles of War

“A French officer . . . felt that there was a reverse correlation between xenophobia and proximity to the enemy:
Hatred of the enemy diminished as one passed from the interior to the front, where it tapered still more as one went from staffs to field headquarters, from headquarters to batteries, from batteries to the battalion command post, and finally from there to the infantryman in the trench and observation sap, where it reached its lowest ebb.
Or, as C.E. Mentague put it, rather more tersely: "War hath no fury like a noncombatant.”
― John Ellis, Eye-Deep In Hell: Trench Warfare In World War I

“The First World War was at once piteous, in the poet's sense, and 'a pity'. It was something worse than a tragedy, which is ultimately something we are taught by the theatre to regard as unavoidable. It was nothing less than the greatest error of modern history.”
― Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War: Explaining World War I

“Had Britain not declared war on Germany in 1914, Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, and India would not have followed the Mother Country in. Nor would Britain’s ally Japan. Nor would Italy, which London lured in with secret bribes of territory from the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. Nor would America have gone to war had Britain stayed out. Germany would have been victorious, perhaps in months. There would have been no Lenin, no Stalin, no Versailles, no Hitler, no Holocaust.”
― Patrick J. Buchanan, Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War" Publisher: Three Rivers Press; Reprint edition

“Unknown to the Cabinet and Parliament, a tiny cabal had made a decision fateful for Britain, the empire, and the world. Under the guidance of Edward Grey, the foreign secretary from 1905 to 1916, British and French officers plotted Britain’s entry into a Franco-German war from the first shot. And these secret war plans were being formulated by Liberals voted into power in public revulsion against the Boer War on a platform of “Peace, Retrenchment, and Reform.”
― Patrick J. Buchanan, Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World

“How absolutely out of place, how incongruous it seemed amongst these great hills, these eternal mountains, that man should have the effrontery to bring his petty strifes into their great silent spaces.”
― Edward Percy Stebbing, At the Serbian Front in Macedonia

“The [Second World] war may thus have acted as a forcing-bed, bringing to somewhat speedier development what was already securely rooted in the circumstances of our nation; and in this sense it may, perhaps, be said that: "The Scottish Renaissance was conceived in the First World War and sprang into lusty life in the Second World War.”
― Hugh MacDiarmid, The New Scotland: 17 Chapters on Scottish Reconstruction

“People wonder what's the matter with the world these days. They forget that all the best fellows, the men who'd have been in their prime now, who'd have been giving us a lead in everything, are dead [in the Great War]. If you could bring 'em all back... hundreds and hundreds of thousands of 'em, you'd soon see the difference they'd make in the place. But they're dead, and a lot of people, very different sort of people, are alive and kicking.”
― J.B. Priestley, Benighted

“So, tell me, have you ever paused for a moment to contemplate the amount of blood spilt, the volume of tears shed, and the degree of pain endured by soldiers and their families?”
― Qamar Rafiq

“The First World War shook the scaffolding of progress because it was deadly and unexpectedly long: it showed that technology could be two-faced. The war delivered one other insidious attack on the idea of progress by raising a moral question which the believers in progress had taken for granted: had the morality of Europeans improved during the long era of 'progress'?”
― Geoffrey Blainey, The Great Seesaw: A New View of the Western World, 1750-2000

“The cost of the Great War has never been adequately computed though its scale is clear enough; over 10 million men died as a result of direct military. As for disease, typhus probably killed another million in the Balkans alone. Nor do even such terrible figures indicate the unprecedented physical and psychic toll in maiming, blinding, the loss to families of fathers, husbands and sons, the spiritual havoc in the destruction of ideals, confidence and goodwill. Europeans looked at their huge cemeteries and the long list of those who were, as the British memorials recorded, 'missing', and were appalled at what they had done.”
― J. M. Roberts, The History of the World

“Anyone who thinks of the Germans as a naturally bellicose people should recall that Prussia-Germany was the only one of the continental powers in the run-up to 1914 whose elite seriously feared that if they had their war, their people might refuse to fight it.”
― James Hawes, The Shortest History of Germany

“If, on the eve of the war, a fortune teller had pointed to all the Australian men between the ages of 20 and 30, and had predicted that a number equal to 60 per cent of that age group would be killed or permanently disabled in the coming war, she would have been ridiculed but she would have been correct.”
― Geoffrey Blainey, The Story of Australia's People Volume 2: The Rise and Rise of a New Australia

“Io ero arrivato a una difesa di reticolati in cui mi sembrò si potesse passare. Attraverso i fili, infatti, v'era un passaggio stretto. Io l'infilai. Ma, fatto qualche passo, trovai lo sbarramento d'un cavallo di frisia. Era impossibile continuare. Mi voltai e vidi soldati della 10a che mi seguivano. Rimasi lì, inchiodato. Dalle trincee, nessuno sparava. In un ampia feritoia, di fronte, scorsi la testa d'un soldato. Egli mi guardava. Io non ne vidi che gli occhi. Vidi solo gli occhi. E mi sembrò ch'egli non avesse che occhi, talmente mi parvero grandi. Lentamente, io feci dei passi indietro, senza voltarmi, sempre sotto lo sguardo di quei grandi occhi,”
― Emilio Lussu, Un Anno sull'Altipiano

“Naši odani i plemeniti saveznici, Francuzi i Englezi, hitaju nam u pomoć, i već su i sami glasovi o njihovom dolasku udvostručili snagu i hrabrost naših vojnika pa ipak, oni možda neće stići na vreme da nam obezbede pobedu. Kao na Kosovu polju, sada se borimo u suštini sami.”
― Svetlana Milovanović, Heroine Velikog rata

“This place is dead,' he thought. The world he had come from was alive. Its incessant din, the movement, the vibration that never ceased from end to end of the war-swept territory, were earnest of a human activity so enormous that the mind spun with thinking of it. Over there one felt oneself part of something big. One was making the earth. Here there were men, no doubt, leading their hapless, misdirected, individual lives; but they were a people unaware, out of it. He felt almost angry that Lindsay should be dwelling among them. He knew from her letters that she was in Fetter-Rothnie, and, convalescent, had written her that he would come to Knapperley; but that her young fervour should be shut in this dead world annoyed him. She was too far from life. The reconstruction of the universe would not begin in this dark hole, inhabited by old wives and ploughmen.”
― Nan Shepherd, The Weatherhouse

“To return to Gibbon for a moment. The great epitaph for the fallen soldiers on the last page of Sunset Song is more than effective; in an early chapter it might have roused sneers. But Gibbon himself would not have written it there.”
― David Angus, Jabberwock: Edinburgh University Review, Volume 3, No. 2: Summer 1950

“And all around them, stretching as far as the market town of Arras, the dank tunnels, like graves, out of which thousands of young men had rushed into the brimstone air.”
― Jane Urquhart, The Stone Carvers

“But sometimes it feels as if we comfortable people are walking on a flowery meadow that is really a great quaking morass, and underneath there is black slime full of unimagined horrors. A photograph in the newspaper makes a crack and you see down. The War made a tremendous crack. It seemed then as if we were all to be drawn into the slime, as if cruelty had got its fangs into the heart of the world.”
― O. Douglas, Penny Plain

“In the complexity of its structure, its kaleidoscope of perspectives, its confrontation with the effects of the First World War, its attentiveness to experience at all life stages and it embrace of linguistic, formal and philosophical 'difficulty', The Weatherhouse is arguably the great Scottish modernist feminist novel of the period.”
― Glenda Norquay, The International Companion to the Scottish Novel

“Schnellfeuer": Die Menschen versuchen einander zuweilen etwas zuzurufen. Nach kurzem ist jeder Versuch verstummt. Bricht der Versuch neu auf, wird aus jedem Zuruf ein tierischer Schrei.
"Schnellfeuer": Die Wut der Menschen überträgt sich auf die Geschütze. Sechs metallene kalte Rohre geben mit Sachlichkeit sechsmal in sechzig Sekunden den Tod von sich.”
― Edlef Köppen, Heeresbericht

“Er dachte, heute Abend wird in Deutschland im Heeresbericht stehen, dass ein feindlicher Angriff mit großen Verlusten für den Feind abgewiesen ist und dass unsere Verluste gering sind. Gewiss, elf Mann spielen gar keine Rolle. Wir haben ein Millionenheer. Sehr begreiflich, dass man von geringen Verlusten spricht.
Aber er hatte den ersten von diesen elf Mann gesehen. Das war ein älterer Soldat mit einem Vollbart, auf der rechten Hand einen Trauring.
Das begriff Reisiger nicht.”
― Edlef Köppen

“The Armless Tics by Stewart Stafford

Never again, the blustering brass said,
Inked in blood, my generation dead,
Human meat carved with lunatic aplomb,
No cowering allowed from gun or bomb.

Lice, rats, and mud—war zeal’s reality.
Trench foot and poisoned-gas lethality,
Churned hellscape, where no man can be,
Scribbling letters home to preserve sanity.

The artillery’s heartbeat, now silent, aghast,
Shells raining on future, present, and past,
On a last keepsake bullet, I etched “11-11”,
Through influenza, faint prayers to Heaven.

© 2025, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Springtime flatters this part of the Somme countryside, undramatic with its flat fields and scattered villages. The largest object for miles, dominating the shallow depression of the Ancre, is the Thriepval Memorial. You approach the park down a long avenue, past lawns carefully tended and set in a girdle of trees. The massive triple arch of dark-red brick, each leg of the arch four piers deep, each pier with its four high panels of dun-coloured marble on which the names of the dead are engraves, is, for all its height, a squat, graceless thing.

There is not another soul in sight, and no sound. From the plinth you look down long rows of white crosses and plain headstones on the far side of the memorial; some say inconnu, others 'A Sodier of the Great War'. Beyond them, beyond this enclosure, the lush countryside meanders to its low horizon.

The dead are listed by regiment, then by rank and then alphabetically - nothing disordered here. This dismal monumentalism, a confirmation rather than a denial of the mindset which led to such slaughter in the first place, though the architect intended no irony. The monument was raised by the power of the state as a piece of political theatre extravagant enough to be seen from miles and years away, as it was by my father when he passed on the Bapaume Road in the summer of 1944.”
― Walter Perrie, Roads That Move: A Journey through Eastern Europe