24 quotes
Once blood is shed in a national quarrel reason and right are swept aside by the rage of angry men.
War Memoirs (1942)
There is no greater mistake than to try to leap an abyss in two jumps.
War Memoirs (1938)
There can be no question that one outstanding reason for the high level of loyalty and patriotic effort which the people of this country maintained was the attitude and conduct of King George V.
War Memoirs (1938)
Politicians are liable to be attacked from every flank—simultaneously. They are suspicious, subtle, crafty and designing, and at the same time they are gullible, simple and foolish.
War Memoirs (1938)
If the whole truth, as it was known at the time to the military staffs, had been exposed before the members of the War Committee, the Flanders offensive would have been turned down.
War Memoirs (1938)
I am now approaching the narrowest and the most threatening gorge in the mad voyage, with one particularly jagged rock right in the middle of the stream and to all appearances barring the way.
War Memoirs (1938)
If Britannia ruled the waves, she did it with a shaky trident in the days before the submarine was overcome.
War Memoirs (1938)
There is no wrath like the cold fury of the professional spirit proved wrong by outsiders, and no folly comparable to its reactions under such conditions.
War Memoirs (1938)
[N]o one can doubt that Lenin was one of the greatest leaders of men ever thrown up in any epoch.
War Memoirs (1938)
The fact remains, that but for the distraction of Passchendaele, Turkey might have been forced to make peace, and the Black Sea might have been opened to Russia and Roumania.
War Memoirs (1938)
There are nightmares in which one welters amid a web of fettering strands and obstacles, and watches, wide-eyed, some doom approaching against which the strangled throat cannot force a sound of protest or appeal.
War Memoirs (1938)
Against enemy machine-gun posts and wire entanglements the most gallant and best-led men could only throw away their precious lives in successive waves of heroic martyrdom. Their costly sacrifice could avail nothing for the winning of victory.
War Memoirs (1938)
It is not too much to say that when the Great War broke out our Generals had the most important lessons of their art to learn. Before they began they had much to unlearn. Their brains were cluttered with useless lumber, packed in every niche and corner.
War Memoirs (1938)
The men drawn from that class who attained pre-eminence, like Palmerston, Randolph Churchill, Salisbury and Balfour, threw themselves into the arduous conflicts of politics and fought their way to the top, giving and taking on the way the blows that hammer character.
War Memoirs (1938)
I never concealed from myself or my colleagues that I thought Sir Douglas Haig was intellectually and temperamentally unequal to the command of an Army of millions fighting battles on fields which were invisible to any Commander.
War Memoirs (1938)
I have not received a single letter from any one who took any part in the actual fighting at Passchendaele which contradicts any of my statements, or suggests that the picture which I have endeavoured to paint is an exaggerated one.
War Memoirs (1938)
I realised that if the submarine menace were not checked (and there seemed at that moment no expectancy that anything could prevent it from increasing in gravity) the War as far as we were concerned might end in starvation for this country.
War Memoirs (1938)
If success was achieved on the Italian Front, I believed that victory in the War was assured. A separate peace with Austria would then be practicable, and having eliminated Austria from the War, Germany would be at our mercy.
War Memoirs (1938)
1914 was a catastrophe for Liberalism. That was unfortunate, but the issues at stake were too big for treatment in terms of party interests. The challenge to international right and freedom was so tremendous that Liberalism—above all Liberalism—could not shirk it.
War Memoirs (1938)
I felt that the fatal error which had been committed in the present war had been continually to attack where the enemy was strongest. Surely, it was a mistake to deliberately aim our spear against the thickest part of the enemy's armour.
War Memoirs (1938)