Western Front Quotes

“Had we returned home in 1916, out of the suffering and the strength of our experience we might have unleashed a storm. Now if we go back we will be weary, broken, burnt out, rootless, and without hope. We will not be able to find our way any more.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“Birds of the Western Front

Your mess-tin cover's lost. Kestrels hover
above the shelling. They don't turn a feather
when hunting-ground explodes in yellow earth,

flickering star-shells
and flares from the Revelation of St John.
You look away

from artillery lobbing roar and suck and snap
against one corner of a thicket
to the partridge of the war zone

making its nest in shattered clods.
History
floods into subsoil to be blown apart. You cling
to the hard dry stars of observation.

How you survive. They were all at it:
Orchids of the Crimea
nature notes from the trench

leaving everything unsaid - hell's cauldron
with souls pushed in, demons stoking flames beneath -
for the pink-flecked wings of a chaffinch

flashed like mediaeval glass.
You replace gangrene and gas mask
with a dream of alchemy: language of the birds

translating human earth
to abstract and divine. While machine-gun
tracery gutted that stricken wood

you watched the chaffinch flutter to and fro
through splintered branches, breaking buds
and never a green bough left.

Hundreds lay in there wounded.
If any, you say, spotted one bird
they may have wondered why a thing with wings

would stay in such a place.
She must have, sure, had chicks
she was too terrified to feed, too loyal to desert.

Like roots clutching at air
you stick to the lark singing fit to burst at dawn
sounding insincere

above the burning bush: plough-land
latticed like folds of brain
with shell-ravines where nothing stirs

but black rats, jittery sentries and the lice
sliding across your faces every night.
Where every elixir's gone wrong

you hold to what you know.
A little nature study. A solitary magpie
blue and white

spearing a strand of willow.
One for sorrow. One for Babylon,
Ninevah and Northern France,

for mice and desolation, the burgeoning
barn-owl population
and never a green bough left.”
― Ruth Padel

“One of the surprising realities about the Western Front was that intense action and peril were surrounded by long periods of having very little to do.”
― Paul T. Dean, Courage: Roy Blanchard's Journey in America's Forgotten War

“. Leaving the city behind, they entered the wasted countryside. Large shell holes, jagged stumps of full-grown trees, and gas residue clinging to puddles all pointed to the power of modern warfare. No living thing remained. The odor of rotting human corpses filled what was left of the woods: the dead wearing the uniforms of France, Germany, and the US.”
― Paul T. Dean, Courage: Roy Blanchard's Journey in America's Forgotten War

“The column swung into single file, with space between companies and platoons. Marching until 3:00 a.m., they stopped in a small forest, put their heavy packs on the ground, and unrolled their packs. The woods were thick. In the blackness, Roy could only see a few feet in front of him in the dark, and there wasn’t any acceptable cover. He had just put his pack down, when it started. A distant set of krumps went off somewhere in the distance and, moments later, the screaming shells descended, men yelled, and wood shrapnel flew from exploding trees. Roy hit the deck, grabbed his helmet, and held the fear back behind his clenched teeth. In the flash of the exploding shells, he saw his comrades and friends lying still, small, some crouched behind trees, some cursing, all helpless. Bigger shells came, shaking the landscape like a freight train speeding past a rickety station. Everything shook with diabolical red flashes and deafening roars. It went on and on, hour after hour.”
― Paul T. Dean, Courage: Roy Blanchard's Journey in America's Forgotten War

“While they continued to march toward the sounds of the guns, Roy noticed fear behind the eyes of some of his fellow soldiers. Death and destruction surrounded them. Corpses in the ditches, wounded on stretchers, shell holes were everywhere. They hadn’t even reached the front lines yet.”
― Paul T. Dean, Courage: Roy Blanchard's Journey in America's Forgotten War

“Mustard gas, which is the favorite frightfulness of the Hun, does not smell like mustard at all. Its pungency is something like the taste of mustard, but its smell is that of sour, fermented raspberry, with mold on top.”
― Clair Kenamore

“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