Douglas Reeman Quotes

Scum they might be; many would otherwise have been hanged or deported, but firm discipline and fair treatment would soon change that. The hard men who would never break, Adam would take on himself to train. They often proved to be the best sailors, especially those who had never known anything but poverty and oppression.

As the wind and quarter-sea had mounted the Indomitable, big though she was, had seemed to bound from trough to trough like the lion she followed, sail and spindrift pouring from the bulging canvas like tropical rain.

Released from the land Indomitable heeled over to the thrust of canvas and rudder, the sea almost brushing her lee gunports while she came about, sails thundering as fore and mainsails were hauled and beaten into submission.

Now he could see the difference. One hundred and eighty feet overall, and of some fourteen hundred tons, her broad beam betrayed that she had been built originally for the line of battle. Her sail plan had changed little, he thought. With a wind over the quarter she would run like a deer if properly handled.

He saw himself reflected in other people's faces, and the horror and the pity he saw there had never ceased to wound him.

Designed originally as a third-rate of sixty-four guns, she had been cut down to her present seize by the removal of most of her upper deck and corresponding armament. But her forty twenty-four pounders remained, with an additional four eighteen-pounders for bow and stern-chasers.

Damnation on doubt. It kills more good sailors than round shot!

Wars were not made by young men, he thought, yet they had to fight them.

Remember, Thomas a victory now will put heart into the ordinary people at home. They've had much to bear over the years.It's not only sailors who suffer in a war, you know.

I am telling you you must not care, sir. The three men died, but they helped to give us a small advance knowledge which we may use against the enemy. At the conference tomorrow they would all answer the same. A few lives to save the many is any captain's rule.

They don't have to fight wars! it mmight knock some sense into therir heads if they did!

The French man-of-war was small and agile, and from the deck of the fishing boat looked as big as a frigate. She was carrying so much sail it made Browne feel that their own boat was unmoving ...

We cannot always know the man who leads, just as I am no longer privileged to recognize the face of every sailor and marine who obeys.

You wait and you wait, you try to see things through the eyes of the enemy, and when it eventually happens it is all suddenly different. Many people at home believe their sailors fight for Kings and country, to protect their loved ones, and so they do. But when the guns begin to thunder, and the enemy is right there alongside rising above the smoke like the devil's fury, it is John who calls for Bill, one messmate seeking another, as the bonds of sailormen are stronger than symbols beyond their ship.

Routine and discipline. It held the ship together no less securely than copper and tar.