Sections (TOC) :
• 1
15 Words; 79 Characters
• 2
21 Words; 146 Characters
• 3
93 Words; 497 Characters
• 4
16 Words; 117 Characters
• 5
68 Words; 425 Characters
• 6
32 Words; 186 Characters
• 7
130 Words; 807 Characters
• 8
37 Words; 238 Characters
• 9
58 Words; 419 Characters
• 10
164 Words; 936 Characters
• 11
8 Words; 61 Characters
• 12
28 Words; 142 Characters
• 13
11 Words; 85 Characters
• 14
39 Words; 238 Characters
• 15
140 Words; 764 Characters
• 16
30 Words; 147 Characters
• 17
20 Words; 133 Characters
• 18
42 Words; 227 Characters
• 19
34 Words; 192 Characters
• 20
14 Words; 99 Characters
• 21
21 Words; 147 Characters
• 22
11 Words; 69 Characters
• 23
33 Words; 212 Characters
• 24
32 Words; 176 Characters
• 25
80 Words; 484 Characters
• 26
24 Words; 152 Characters
• 27
70 Words; 402 Characters
• 28
85 Words; 481 Characters
• 29
73 Words; 420 Characters
• 30
25 Words; 153 Characters
• 31
128 Words; 735 Characters
• 32
67 Words; 359 Characters
• 33
66 Words; 357 Characters
Sections (Content) :
• 1
It makes one miserable to think of that lovely Rhine as a seat of war.
• 2
[Unknown French National Guard, Paris Commune:] Civil war, with starvation, and bombardment, is that what tomorrow holds in store for us?
• 3
[Kurdish YPJ Fighter] I know that you will visit Kobanî one day and look for the house that witnessed my last days...it is on the east side of Kobanî. Part of it damaged, it has a green door which has many holes from sniper shots and you will see 3 windows, one on the east side, you will see my name written there in red ink.... Behind that window, mother, I waited counting my last moments watching the sunlight as it penetrated my room from the bullet holes in that window.
• 4
Are you not sad your children's fathers
Go endlessly off soldiering afar
In this plodding war?
• 5
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
• 6
The compulsions of war arise not from full employment but from distortion of war, from the need at all costs and without delay to make human beings do and suffer inhuman things.
• 7
now we come to the scum you take from the mouths of he dead,
now we sit beside the dying, and hold their hands, there is hardly time for good-bye
the staff sergeant from North Carolina is dying -- you hold his hand,
he knows the mansions of the dead are empty, he has an empty place
inside him, created one night when his parents came home drunk,
he uses half his skin to cover it,
as you try to protect a balloon from sharp objects....
Artillery shells explode. Napalm canisters roll end over end.
800 steel pellets fly through the vegetable walls.
The six-hour infant puts his fists instinctively to his eyes to keep out the light.
But the room explosed,
the children explode.
Blood leaps on the vegetable walls.
• 8
This is what it's like for a rich country to make war
this is what it's like to bomb huts (afterwards described as "structures")
this is what it's like to kill marginal farmers (afterwards described as "Communists")
• 9
diving, the green earth swiming, cheeks hanging back, red
pins blossoming ahead of us, 20-millimeter cannon fire,
leveling off, rice fields shooting by like telephone polse,
smoke rising, hut roofs loom up huge as landing fields,
slugs going in, half the huts on fire, small figures running,
palm trees burning, shooting past, up again;... blue sky
... cloud mountains
• 10
But if one of those children came near that we have set on fire,
came toward you like a gray barn, walking,
you would howl like a wind tunnel in a hurricane,
you would tear at your shirt with blue hands,
you would drive over your own child's wagon trying to back up,
the pupils of your eyes would go wild --
If a child came by burning, you would dance on a law,
trying to leap into the air, digging into your cheeks,
you would ram your head against the wall of your bedroom
like a bull penned too long in his moody pen --
If one of those children came toward me with both hands
in the air, fire rising along both elbows,
I would suddenly go back to my animal brain,
I would drop on all fours, screaming,
my vocal cords would turn blue, so would yours,
it would be two days before I Could play with my own children again.
• 11
...the frenzied mutual suicide, which is modern war.
• 12
Wonder whether I shall see the end, or leave my carcass to rot in the field of battle, cannot say that I much care which way it is...
• 13
Violent and quarrelsome men often come to a bloody end.
[Chapter 5.]
• 14
...young men are expected to die as individuals for the greater glory of their country as a whole. Moreover, they are encouraged to kill other individuals about whom nothing is known except that they belong to a different nation.
• 15
[Henry Eaton, Third Company Commissar] We dug our faces into the earth, our bodies prone. No thunder could be so deafening; the stench of high, sulfurous explosives choked in our mouths. Then crash, and a weight is forcing me into the soil. A faint moan -- I know then that the comrade lying next to me had been thrown on my back. A slight convulsion and the moaning stops. Shoving, I am free of his weight. The air is thick, a great sulfurous fog, almost impenetrable. I look at the body of my comrade. It was as if a giant biscuit cutter had been plunged into his back, his skull, his buttocks, and left gaping holes, clean and bloodless. The seven letters from his sweetheart in Detroit, which I had delivered to him the day before, are all around him.
• 16
On any night, if you listened for a while, you could hear the B-52's and 47's and 58's, but on this night there seemed to be more of them.
• 17
I still feel the same abhorrence of militarism, its dehumanization, its brutality and its power to turn men into automatons.
• 18
Nothing is so awful to me as the atrophy of human sensibilities since the World War and the horrors going on in Russia. No one cares a damn anymore, no matter how frightful the crimes committed in the name of an ideal.
• 19
The shells have begun falling in the Rue Boileau.... Tomorrow, no doubt, they will be falling here; and even if they do not kill me, they will destroy everything I still love in life.
• 20
...there are still enough nuclear weapons stockpiled to kill us all, several times over...
• 21
...a first visit to the sinister battlefields of Verdun engendered emotions that were never to leave me alone.
[Preface, Page xi.]
• 22
Blow upon blow, loss upon loss, Ah! The ordeal is redoubled.
• 23
...though the lives of twenty thousand men be often sacrificed to maintain a king in possession of his throne, or preserve the right of succession undisturbed, he entertains no indignation at the loss...
• 24
Think of the women, of the sweet children who listened for the footsteps of the dead -- who waited through the sad and desolate years for the dear ones who never came.
• 25
All wars are atrocious, occasions for atrocities; for all wars make men cruel. There is no army of which it can be said that in its campaign there never were atrocities -- even using the word in the narrower, popularly-understood sense. In the army of the most civilized nation, in any war, there will be found individuals whose unsuspected, innate brutality or sadism is unharnessed or, gentlemen who in desperate moments have no control over themselves and act like beasts.
• 26
[General Ducrot] "Would the cavalry try yet again?"
[Galliffet] "As often as you like, mon general, so long as there's one of us left."
• 27
Listen, are we helpless? Are we doomed to do it again and again and again? Have we no choice but to play the Phenix in an unending sequence of rise and fall? Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Carthage, Rome, the Empires of Charlemagne and the Turk. Ground to dust and plowed with salt. Spain, France, Britain, America -- burned into the oblivion of the centuries. And again and again and again.
• 28
The scientist has unavoidably usurped the place and the prestige of the soldier. A push-button war may or may not be in the offing. But if such a war does come, the measure of its horror will reside in the manifest helplessness and uselessness of ordinary men of all ages. Those that die will not be killed in conventional enemy attacks but will be annihilated by the latest products of scientific achievement. They will not die in the battlefield but like rats in a trap.
• 29
There are few wars in which they make not a considerable part of the armies of both sides: so it often falls out that they who are related, and were hired in the same country, and so have lived long and familiarly together, forgetting both their relations and former friendship, kill one another upon no other consideration than that of being hired to it for a little money, by princes of different interests...
• 30
The men who fought at Verdun, at Waterloo, at Flodden, at Senlac, at Thermopylae — every one of them had lice crawling over his testicles.
• 31
That the present 'cold war' will continue until the U.S.S.R., and several other countries, have atomic bombs as well. Then there will only be a short breathing-space before whiz! go the rockets, wallop! go the bombs, and the industrial centers of the world are wiped out, probably beyond repair. Even if any one state, or group of states, emerges from such a war as technical victor, it will probably be unable to build up the machine civilization anew. The world, therefore, will once again be inhabited by a few million, or a few hundred million human beings living by subsistence agriculture, and probably, after a couple of generations, retaining no more of the culture of the past than a knowledge of how to smelt metals.
• 32
No man knows war or its meaning who has not stumbled from tree to tree, desperate for cover, or dug his face deep in the earth, felt the ground pulse with the ear-breaking fall of death. No man knows war who never has crouched in his foxhole, hearing the bullets an inch from his head, or the zoom of planes like a Ferris wheel strafing the trenches.
• 33
It was rough and exhausting. Guys discovered they could walk in their sleep. One guy would stop and the rest would domino against him. The officers have to kick the men awake. We came out of the barranca at dawn and went into a rocky field and stopped and collapsed. I woke up minutes latter to find that I had been sleeping in a kneeling position.
Chronology :
April 09, 2020 : Horror -- Added.
November 27, 2020 : Horror -- Updated.
HTML file generated from :
http://RevoltSource.com/