Graves B. Erskine Quotes

For the most part, everybody who fights in war fights to survive.

And when the war is done and youth stone dead I'd toddle safely home and die—in bed.

In war, everything changes. You are very selective of what you do because everything you do can be the last thing you do in your life.

I mean the only thing us dead soldiers got in common is that none of us was good enough or lucky enough to survive the fight. We're a host of failures.

Soldiers are citizens of death's grey land, drawing no dividend from time's tomorrows.

War is about dead people.

As a soldier, I survived World War I when most of my comrades did not.

They were so exhausted and seasick and all they could do was crawl up those beaches. And thousands of them lay dead in no time at all. It's unthinkable.

As one who participated in all the wars of the state of Israel, I saw the horror of wars. I saw the fear of wars. I saw my best friends being killed in battles. I was seriously injured twice.

No catalogue of horrors ever kept men from war. the war you always think that it's not you that dies. But you will die, brother, if you go to it long enough

I've never been to war, and I would never presume to fully understand the horrors that that kind of experience can impart.

Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead! There's none of these so lonely and poor of old, But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold.

Blood is the price of victory

By their victory, the 3rd, 4th and 5th Marine Divisions and other units of the Fifth Amphibious Corps have made an accounting to their country which only history will be able to value fully. Among the Americans who served on Iwo Island, uncommon valor was a common virtue.

Lee saw the fireball and head through the roar in his ears Hester saying, "That's the last of 'em Lee." He said, or thought, "Those poor men didn't have to come to this, nor did we." She said, "We held 'em off. We held out. We're a-helping Lyra." Then she was pressing her little proud broken self against his face, as close as she could get, and then they died.

When a soldier is hit by a cannonball, rags are as becoming as purple.

If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath,I'd live with scarlet Majors at the Base,And speed glum heroes up the line of death.

Now Catherine would die. That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. Or they killed you gratuitously like Aymo. Or gave you the syphilis like Rinaldi. But they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you.

In peace sons bury fathers, but war violates the order of nature, and fathers bury sons.

You're never more alive than in battle." "Never more dead after," I say.

Oh, go in anywhere Colonel, go in anywhere. You'll find lovely fighting all along the line.

It would be better if only the old men fought the wars. Every country is the country of youth. When its youth dies, it dies with them.

Suddenly, at about ten o'clock, a dull thud sounded somewhere far away from us, and simultaneously we saw a small white round cloud about half a mile ahead of us where the shrapnel had exploded. The battle had begun.

You fall out of your mother's womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.

When you're in the battlefield, survival is all there is. Death is the only great emotion.