#wwi

He saw the delicate blades of grass which the bodies of his comrades had fertilized; he saw the little shoots on the shell-shocked trees. He saw the smoke-puffs of shrapnel being blown about by light breezes. He saw birds making love in the wire that a short while before had been ringing with flying metal. He heard the pleasant sounds of larks up there, near the zenith of the trajectories. He smiled a little. There was something profoundly saddening about it. It all seemed so fragile and so absurd. ↗

— Humphrey Cobb

#wwi #love

I really should be studying now, but you're much more important to me than a .50 calibre machine gun. ↗

— Kara Martinelli

#humor #letters #longing #love #wwii-history

As we drew nearer I saw a cathedral like a crown on the head of a city. In its white walls every window glinted in the sun. Lincoln! Of such places is England made. -"No Moon Tonight ↗

— Don Charlwood

#inspirational #nationalism #wwii #inspirational

France is to me the heroine in the romance of all the nations of all time. This feeling was born in me years ago when I read how her noble sons had defended America in its cradle. Today I am proud that I am one of the millions who will come to save our heroine from the clutches of the villain from across the Rhine. ↗

— William Arthur Sirmon

#france #germany #historical-romance #history #inspirational

I knew why earlier generations once believed that the sun circled the earth. Because, in our limited imaginations, that is how we lived our lives. -Mrs. Tuesday's Departure ↗

— Suzanne Anderson

#religion #wwii #imagination

Wonderful?" wrote J.O. Young in his diary. "To stand cheering, crying, waving your hat and acting like a damn fool in general. No one who has spent all but 16 days of the this war as a Nip prisoner can really know what it means to see 'Old Sammy' buzzing around over camp. ↗

— Laura Hillenbrand

#freedom #wwii #freedom

(Thinking while being interrogated by the Germans) You big shots think you can decide on my life, but I have news for you: you can't touch a hair on my head without the will of God my Father, because He is on my side. ↗

— Diet Eman

#germany #god #holocaust #jesus-christ #prison

I..." He struggled to answer. "When everything was quiet, I went up to the corridor and the curtain in the livingroom was open just a crack... I could see outside. I watched, only for a few seconds." He had not seen the outside world for twenty-two months. There was no anger or reproach. It was Papa who spoke. How did it look?" Max lifted his head, with great sorrow and great astonishment. "There were stars," he said. "They burned by eyes. ↗

— Markus Zusak

#jew #stars #wwii #anger

It was such a heavenly dream: dreamed between the reality of war and the reality of hereditary madness. ↗

— Jessie Douglas Kerruish

#war #wwi #dreams

In the Somme valley, the back of language broke. It could no longer carry its former meanings. World War I changed the life of words and images in art, radically and forever. It brought our culture into the age of mass-produced, industrialized death. This, at first, was indescribable. ↗

— Robert Hughes

#industrialization #language #wwi #age