Quotes on World War One

I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.

God for a month of power & a good shorthand writer.

It is remarkable that Lord Esher should be so much astray...We must conclude that an uncontrollable fondness for fiction forbade him to forsake it for fact. Such constancy is a defect in an historian.

I wanted us to go to the Tories when we were strong...not in misfortune to be made an honest woman of.

One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one.

All wars are follies, very expensive and very mischievous ones.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow.

How many have gone? How many more to go? The Admiralty is fast asleep and lethargy & inertia are the order of the day. However everybody seems delighted - so there is nothing to be said. No plans, no enterprise, no struggle to aid the general cause. Just sit still on the spacious throne and snooze.

We sit in calm, airy, silent rooms opening upon sunlit and embowered lawns, not a sound except of summer and of husbandry disturbs the peace; but seven million men, any ten thousand of whom could have annihilated the ancient armies, are in ceaseless battle from the Alps to the Ocean.

More than 80 per cent of the British casualties of the Great War were English. More than 80 per cent of the taxation is paid by the English taxpayers. We are entitled to mention these facts, and to draw authority and courage from them.

This war proceeds along its terrible path by the slaughter of infantry...I say to myself every day. What is going on while we sit here, while we go away to dinner or home to bed? Nearly, 1000 - Englishmen, Britishers, and the other is America...Everything else is swept away.

My only consolation for the failure of the Dardanelles was that God wished things to be prolonged in order to sicken mankind of war, and that therefore He had interfered with a project that would have brought the war to a speedier conclusion.

At the beginning of this War megalomania was the only form of sanity.

The old wars were decided by their episodes rather than by their tendencies. In this war, the tendencies are far more important than the episodes.