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 […]
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 […]
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.
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)
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. […]
I gave my life for freedom – this I know: For those who bade me fight had told me so.
The patriot volunteer, fighting for country and his rights, makes the most reliable soldier on earth.
