He (Robert E. Lee) was a foe without hate, a friend without treachery, a soldier without cruelty, and a victim without murmuring. He was a public officer without vices, a private citizen without wrong, a neighbor without hypocrisy, and a man without guilt. He was Caesar without his ambition, Frederick without his tyranny, Napoleon without […]
Soldiers Quotes
I still remember the refrain of one of the most popular barrack ballads of that day (around the turn of the century) which proclaimed most proudly that “Old soldiers never die, they just fade away.” And like the old soldier of that ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away – an […]
All gave some. Some gave all. Some stood true for the red, white and blue. Some had to fall. Some gave all.
A good soldier, like a good horse, cannot be of a bad color.
As “Old soldiers never die,” I promise to keep on living as though I expected to live forever.
The lowest standards of ethics of which a right-thinking man can possibly conceive is taught to the common soldier whose trade is to shoot his fellow men. In youth he may have learned the command, ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ but the ruler takes the boy just as he enters manhood and teaches him that his […]
These, in the day when heaven was falling The hour when earth’s foundations fled, Followed their mercenary calling, And took their wages, and are dead. Their shoulders held the sky suspended; They stood, and earth’s foundations stay; What God abandoned, these defended, And saved the sum of things for pay.
They died hard – those savage men – not gently like a stricken dove folding its wings in peaceful passing, but like a wounded wolf at bay, with lips curled back in sneering menace, and always a nerveless hand reaching for that long sharp machete knife which long ago they had substituted for the bayonet. […]
Tell them of us and say, For their tomorrow, We gave our today. (Used on a monument erected at the British military cemetery at Kohima, Assam, India, in memory of those who died in World War II’s largest Asian land battle near there in 1944)
How many generous Britons meet their doom, New to the field, and heroes in the bloom! Th’ illustrious youghts, that left their native shore To march where Britons never march’d before (O fatal love of fame! O glorious heat Only destructive to the brave and great!)
