Matt Milne Quotes

I made a French film called 'Merry Christmas' which is a very European film. It's a World War I piece.

Anyone who experienced World War I close-hand was grossed out by it forever. It just was so awful.

The stories from World War I are worse than anything I have ever read.

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

European nations began World War I with a glamorous vision of war, only to be psychologically shattered by the realities of the trenches. The experience changed the way people referred to the glamour of battle; they treated it no longer as a positive quality but as a dangerous illusion.

What we know from World War I is that some of our troops had acute symptoms of exposure to chemicals, had bad health and died because of chemical exposure in World War I.

After World War I, while France and other Allies were building military defenses modeled on trench warfare, German commanders were shaping a nimble fighting force.

Gradually I became aware of details: a company of French soldiers was marching through the streets of the town. They broke formation, and went in single file along the communication trench leading to the front line. Another group followed them.

School-leavers unfortunately will come away thinking the First World War consisted simply of 'going over the top' on the Western Front to slaughter in no-man's-land, when the conflict extended so much further, to the collapse of four empires and numerous civil wars.

The Great War was a progressive revelation and disillusionment.

I'm thinking about doing a First World War film.

My father was in the First World War.

The battle for the mind of Ronald Reagan was like the trench warfare of World War I: never have so many fought so hard for such barren terrain.

The First World War was a horror of gas, industrialised slaughter, fear, and appalling human suffering.

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.

I had two family members involved in World War I: two great-uncles. One of them is on a memorial in France. And the other was a trench runner who survived the war. The average life span of a trench runner was 36 hours, but he survived the whole war.

It was quite a European war until 1917, when the Americans joined up. They don't have the same sense of the loss of innocence and the cataclysmic loss of life. A whole generation was wiped out.

'Into the Blizzard' follows the author as he traces the footsteps of the Newfoundland Regiment during the First World War: where they trained in Scotland, where they fought in Gallipoli and where they died at the Battle of the Somme in France.

I don't know what is to be done. This isn't war.

Are there not other alternatives than sending our armies to chew barbed wire in Flanders. No doubt several hundred thousand men will be spent to satisfy the military mind in the point.

I should not care to live half-frozen in a trench, up to my middle in water, for three or four months, because someone in authority said I ought to shoot Germans. But if I were a Frenchman I should do it, because I would have been accustomed to the idea by my compulsory military service.

The immediate reaction of the poets who fought in the war was cynicism... The war dramatized for them the contrast between the still-idealistic young, living and dying on the unalteringly horrible stage-set of the Western front, with the complacency of the old at home, the staff officers behind the lines. In England there was violent anti-German feeling; but for the poet-soldiers the men in the trenches on both sides seemed united in pacific feelings and hatred of those at home who had sent them out to kill each other.

The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time.

In March 1915, at the Battle of Neuve Chapelle, the British fired more shells in a single 35-minute bombardment than they had during the whole Boer War.

Our duty is to fight! Then we can adjust the problems that remain in the life of the colored man.