Pierre Terrail Quotes
Let me die facing the enemy ... A man who fights against his country deserves pity more than I.
He had been mortally wounded in battle and asked the Duc de Bourbon to prop him up against a tree facing the enemy. Then enemy army was French also but abandoned the cause of the French King to fight with the more powerful Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. He was only going to die, but the enemy would remain traitors for ever. This was typical of the code of the Knights of which he is sometimes referred to as the Last of the Knights.
Chevalier Bayard, 1473-1524, Pierre de Terrail, French Knight, Soldier, and Hero, Last Words, 1524
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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.
The first two lines of the song became the slogan a few years later of veterans of the Normandy invasion of WWII.
Quintus Horatius Flaccus
The American Army had just liberated Bellau Wood, but had lost almost 8,000 men.
Pierre Terrail, seigneur de Bayard (c. 1476 – 30 April 1524) was a French knight and military leader at the transition between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, generally known as the Chevalier de Bayard. Throughout the centuries since his death, he has been known as "the knight without fear and beyond reproach" (le chevalier sans peur et sans reproche). He himself preferred the name given him by his contemporaries for his gaiety and kindness, "le bon chevalier" ("the good knight").
