Pat Barker Quotes

The Great War was a progressive revelation and disillusionment.

I vividly remember the stories my grandfather told me about the carnage of the First World War, which people tend to forget was one of the worst massacres in human history.

Germany has reduced savagery to a science, and this great war for the victorious peace of justice must go on until the German cancer is cut clean out of the world body.

We have in our heads a pretty well-defined narrative of the First World War, and there are certain events that are obviously key.

The first World War in so many ways shaped the 20th century and really remade our world for the worse.

[Describing World War I:] A short cleansing thunderstorm.

Everyone has come to recognize that the Great War [World War I] was utter social insanity, and was a crazy war, and we had no business in it at all.

There can be no peace until this German spirit of Militarism is crushed.

Speaking as somebody who is half English and half Hungarian, World War I still seems to me a familiar and seismic event, as if it had only just ended.

The Second World War simplified things like race, and people came down on very clear lines.

At the Imperial Conference on December 1, it was decided to make war against England and the United States.

As a result of the World War, this old Germany collapsed. It collapsed in its constitution, in its social order, in its economic structure. Its thinking and feeling changed.

The memory of the Second World War hangs over Europe, an inescapable and irresistible point of reference. Historical parallels are usually misleading and dangerous.

The more the history of the World War and what led up to it is studied, the more clearly those tragic years become revealed as a vast collapse of civilization.

If the blood of France and of Germany flows again, as it did twenty-five years ago, in a longer and even more murderous war, each of the two peoples will fight with confidence in its own victory, but the most certain victors will be the forces of destruction and barbarism.

Perhaps when the next great war comes we may see that sight unprecedented in all history, a jingo with a bullet-hole in him.

A European war is bound to come sooner or later in which the issue will be one of a struggle between Germandom and Slavdom.

I now seriously ask whether an English victory would not be more desirable for our future than a German victory.

The first 'world' war was in reality the last European war fought by globally significant European powers.

Both of my grandfathers fought in the Second World War, and my great-grandfather died at the Somme in the First World War. I never truly believed that the War just finished and everyone was happy-clappy, brought out the bunting, and felt everything was okay again. That's definitely not my impression of the fall-out of war.

The First World War may have been a uniquely horrific war, but it was also plainly a just war.

We are constantly trying to cope with what our fathers or our grandfathers did. I wrote the book 'Great War of Civilization,' and my father was a solider in the First World War which produced the current Middle East - not that he had much to do with that - but he fought in what he believed was the Great War for Civilization.

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.

World War I broke out largely because of an arms race, and World War II because of the lack of an arms race.

With the situation now, people might be intrigued to see how a country coped with war all those years ago.