In the account book of the Great War the page recording the Russian losses has been ripped out. The figures are unknown. Five millions, or eight? We ourselves know not. All we know is that, at times, fighting the Russians, we had to remove the piles of enemy bodies from before our trenches, so as to get a clear field of fire against new waves of assault.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the immense and often unrecorded human cost of war, particularly the loss of life in the context of World War I.
Paul Von Hindenburg's quote emphasizes the tragic irony of war, where the exact toll on human life is often obscured or unrecorded amidst the chaos of battle. The ripping out of the page recording Russian losses symbolizes both the disregard for human life and the overwhelming scale of suffering in war. It serves as a haunting reminder that behind military statistics and strategies, there exists an unimaginable loss of life that is often forgotten or ignored.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the impacts of war during a Memorial Day event.
What one Predator drone pilot described of his experience fighting in the Iraq war while never leaving Nevada: 'You're going to war for 12 hours, shooting weapons at targets, directing kills on enemy combatants. Then you get in the car and you drive home, and within 20 minutes you're sitting at the dinner table talking to your kids about their homework.'
A war doesn’t merely kill off a few thousand or a few hundred thousand young men. It kills off something in a people that can never be brought back. And if a people goes through enough wars, pretty soon all that’s left is the brute, the creature that we—you and I and others like us—have brought up from the slime.
War's dirty little secret is that some men love it.
Desert Storm created the pattern for the American way of war that eventually prevailed in Kosovo. America learned from Vietnam that unilateral use of force eventually forfeits international legitimacy and domestic support. Desert Storm demonstrated the political necessity of coalition warfare.
From now on we shall bomb Germany on an ever-increasing scale, month by month, year by year, until the Nazi regime has either been exterminated by us or - better still - torn to pieces by the German people themselves.
He once told Allie and I that if he'd had to shoot anybody, he wouldn't've known which direction to shoot in. He said the Army was practically as full of bastards as the Nazis were.
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