battlefield challenges Quotes

Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult. The difficulties accumulate and end by producing a kind of friction that is inconceivable unless one has experienced war. ... Countless minor incidents - the kind you can never really foresee - combine to lower the general level of performance, so that one always falls short of the intended goal.

'Tis the soldier's life to have their balmy slumbers waked with strife.

I always like to make explicit the fact that before I went off not too long ago to fight in the trenches, I was a mathematician by profession. I don't like people to get the idea that I have to do this for a living. I mean, it isn't as though I had to do this, you know, I could be making, oh, three thousand dollars a year just teaching.

At the same time the Turks did not cease to attack and slaughter the crowd of foot-soldiers who were unable to follow the army. We pitied the fate of our suffering people, perishing by famine and by the arrows of the enemy; and by the advice of our princes and barons, we led the army back from that desert land to the sea, in order that it might regain its strength. We preferred to preserve the army for greater achievements rather than to win so bloody a victory over archers.

Nothing is easy in war. Mistakes are always paid for in casualties and troops are quick to sense any blunder made by their commanders.

War makes extremely heavy demands on the soldier's strength and nerves. For this reason, make heavy demands on your men in peacetime exercises.

Action in war is like movement in a resistant element. Just as the simplest and most natural of movements, walking, cannot easily be performed in water, so in war, it is difficult for normal efforts to achieve even moderate results.

DCGS is hard to learn. It takes a long time. You have to use it all the time, which means it's not a simple technology that people are used to and can buy off the shelf today. And frankly, it doesn't do what it's touted to do. That's why you see units out on the battlefield asking for very similar things.

When people say a knight's job is all glory, I laugh and laugh and laugh. Often I can stop laughing before they edge away and talk about soothing drinks.