Armed with a paint-box, one cannot be bored, one cannot be left at a loose end, one cannot 'have several days on one's hands.

Most people hate the taste of beer - to begin with. It is, however, a prejudice that many people have been able to overcome.

But who in war will not have his laugh amid the skulls?

You have to run risks. There are no certainties in war. There is a precipice on either side of you - a precipice of caution and a precipice of over-daring.

Woe betide the leaders now perched on their dizzy pinnacles of triumph if they cast away at the conference table what the soldiers had won on a hundred bloodsoaked battlefields.

I am sure that the mistakes of that time will not be repeated; we should probably make another set of mistakes.

I have not always been wrong. History will bear me out, particularly as I shall write that history myself.