#trenches

All we know is that, at times, fighting the Russians, we had to remove the piles of enemy bodies from before our trenches, so as to get a clear field of fire against new waves of assault. ↗

— Paul von Hindenburg

#assault #before #bodies #clear #enemy

However, the fact that the tanks had now been raised to such a pitch of technical perfection that they could cross our undamaged trenches and obstacles did not fail to have a marked effect on our troops. ↗

— Paul von Hindenburg

#could #cross #did #effect #fact

Human nerves quickly get accustomed to the most unusual conditions and circumstances and I noticed that quite a number of men actually fell asleep from sheer exhaustion in the trenches, in spite of the roaring of the cannon about us and the whizzing of shrapnel over our heads. ↗

— Fritz Kreisler

#accustomed #actually #asleep #cannon #circumstances

We started at once to dig our trenches, half of my platoon stepping forward abreast, the men being placed an arm's length apart. After laying their rifles down, barrels pointing to the enemy, a line was drawn behind the row of rifles and parallel to it. ↗

— Fritz Kreisler

#after #apart #arm #barrels #behind

I'm hardly digging trenches for a living. I'm getting to tap into my boyhood fantasies of being a larger-than-life character. ↗

— Joel Edgerton

#boyhood #character #digging #fantasies #getting

If the head man in a company is not working 12 hours a day, doing things, taking risks, but also standing with his people in the trenches at the most difficult of times, then the company loses something. ↗

— Rupert Murdoch

#company #day #difficult #doing #head

It’s like a man in the trenches again: he doesn’t know any more why he should go on living, because if he escapes now he’ll only be caught later, but he goes on just the same, and even though he has the soul of a cockroach and has admitted as much to himself, give him a gun or a knife or even just his bare nails, and he’ll go on slaughtering and slaughtering, he’d slaughter a million men rather than stop and ask himself why. ↗

— Henry Miller

#slaughter #soldiers #trenches #men