Alfred, Lord Tennyson Quotes
Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
Tennyson, Alfred. "The Charge of the Light Brigade." The Examiner, no. 2445, 9 Dec. 1854, p. 780.
Ataturk was a young major at the time commanding troops of a weak and corrupt Ottoman regime. However a combined English and French (the strongest military powers in Europe) invasion of the Gallipoli Peninsula threatened to capture the Turkish capital, Constantinople. Ataturk alone rallied the Turkish defenders and fought the invaders to a standoff in long drawn out battle with huge casualties on both sides. Ataturk became a national hero. Although Ataturk thereafter was very reluctant to use military force or endanger troops, the thing he always thought worth the supreme sacrifice (including his own) was the independence and sovereignty of the nation. See {584502} for his continuing belief in this type of sacrifice.
This line was used in the WPA Federal Theater Project. The play was closed down, because the State Department was distressed that the Federal Theater quoting heads of State might be insulting to the world leaders. Mussolini was another character in the play and he was depicted as the boorish thug that he turned out to be. It was that which offended the government officials who closed the show before it could open. FDR used a similar line 6 years later. See {32529} . Dolores Ibarruri in the Spanish Civil War is quoted with a similar phrase at about the same time. See {604321}
An example of this was the landing in the beaches of Normandy in WWII. Once on the beaches the allied troops had to win or die. Some of the most heroic fighting in American and English military history occurred on those beaches. Another was the Spanish Explorer Hernando Cortez who after landing in the New World, had his ships burned so that he and his soldiers had to conquer or they would die.
That is the way he was killed. The phrase, “We are bound to believe that, anyhow” indicates that Stuart really realized how futile the Southern war effort would be but loyalty and patriotism required him to suspend his rational belief structure.
Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson FRS was a British poet. He was the Poet Laureate during much of Queen Victoria's reign and remains one of the most popular British poets. In 1829, Tennyson was awarded the Chancellor's Gold Medal at Cambridge for one of his first pieces, "Timbuktu". He published his first solo collection of poems, Poems Chiefly Lyrical in 1830. "Claribel" and "Mariana", which remain some of Tennyson's most celebrated poems, were included in this volume. Although decried by some critics as overly sentimental, his verse soon proved popular and brought Tennyson to the attention of well-known writers of the day, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Tennyson's early poetry, with its medievalism and powerful visual imagery, was a major influence on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
