14 quotes
Only very young soldiers and head-cases object to boredom in war-time.
Quartered Safe Out Here (1992)
There are few sounds as menacing as a bayonet being fixed.
Quartered Safe Out Here (1992)
Certainly no general [Slim] ever did more with less; in every way, he was one of the great captains.
Quartered Safe Out Here (1992)
I must emphasise that at private soldier level you frequently have no idea where you are, or precisely how you got there, let alone why.
Quartered Safe Out Here (1992)
Putting a grenade into a bunker had the satisfaction of doing grievous bodily harm to an enemy for whom I felt real hatred, and still do.
Quartered Safe Out Here (1992)
Not that lance-jack [lance-corporal] is any great eminence; it is an appointment, not a rank, and is the worst dogs-body's job in the Army, as Hitler and I could tell you.
Quartered Safe Out Here (1992)
We all have kindly impulses, fostered by two thousand years of Christian teaching, gentle Jesus, and love thy neighbour, but we have the killer instinct, too, the murderous impulse of the hunter...
Quartered Safe Out Here (1992)
A Gurkha subaltern whom I met later told me that commanding a platoon of them was like leading a group of perfectly-disciplined ten-year-olds, and I believed him.
Quartered Safe Out Here (1992)
Another discovery was that the size and importance of an action is no yardstick of its personal unpleasantness. A big operation which commands headlines may be a dawdle for some of those involved, while the little forgotten patrol is a real horror.
Quartered Safe Out Here (1992)
No one underestimated Jap: he might be a subhuman creature who tortured and starved prisoners of war to death, raped women captives, and used civilians for bayonet practice, but there was no braver soldier in the whole history of war, and if he fought to a finish...
Quartered Safe Out Here (1992)
"Gravity, muzzle velocity, density, intensity, one for his nob, and bullshit baffles brains! There - into the breach, old Whatsit, and if all else fails we'll fix a bayonet on the bloody thing and charge! Fire at Will, he's hiding in the cellar, the cowardly sod!"
Quartered Safe Out Here (1992)
[Re the Piat anti-tank weapon] Like many British inventions, it looked improbable, unwieldy, and unsafe - and it worked.
Quartered Safe Out Here (1992)
No doubt newspaper reports and broadcasts had encouraged us, civilian and military, to regard him [the Japanese] as an evil, misshapen, buck-toothed barbarian who looked and behaved like something sub-Stone Age; the experiences of Allied prisoners of war demonstrated that the reports had not lied and reinforced the view that the only good Jap was a dead one.
Quartered Safe Out Here (1992)
...a reluctance to recognise that today's safety and comfort were bought fifty years ago by means which today's intelligentsia find unacceptable, and from which they wish to distance themselves.
Quartered Safe Out Here (1992)