You take it from me, we are losing the war because we can salute too well.

Someone said to me once that a cigarette at the right moment is better than all the ideals in the world.

The idea of authority, which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and a more humane wisdom.

Strange how complicated we can make things just to avoid showing what we feel!

This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.

Come let me kiss you. Life was never so precious as today— when it meant so little.

It is just as much a matter of chance that I am still alive as that I might have been hit. In a bomb-proof dug-out I may be smashed to atoms and in the open may survive ten hour's bombardment unscratched. No soldier outlives a thousand chances. But every soldier believes in Chance and trusts his luck.