Anna

“Emerson abandoned irony for blunt and passionate speech.
'This war has been a monumental blunder from the start! Britain is not solely responsible, but by God, gentlemen, she must share the blame, and she will pay a heavy price: the best of her young men, future scholars and scientists and statesmen, and ordinary, decent men who might have led ordinary, decent lives. And how will it end, when you tire of your game of soldiers? A few boundaries redrawn, a few transitory political advantages, in exchange for an entire continent laid waste and a million graves! What I do may be of minor importance in the total accumulation of knowledge, but at least I don't have blood on my hands.”
― Elizabeth Peters, Lord of the Silent

“The leave zipped right by. We were so terrifically glad to be back to our own little section of the trench, with all its happy memories, that we wouldn’t have traded places with anybody.

The lazy bastard who’d filled in while we were away hadn’t managed to nibble away so much as an inch of garden soil in the direction of Berlin.

We found out that Brugnon hadn’t come back from leave. He’d hanged himself in the stairwell of his building, on rue des Gâtines. He left a note to say he couldn’t take it any more and asked us to count him out. We accepted it… Who were we to judge?”
― Jacques Tardi, Goddamn This War!

“They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them.”
― Laurence Binyon

“That as he climbs out of the trench
with the rest of the lads
he feels lifted up as if by angels.”
― Caroline Davies, Voices from Stone and Bronze