All we know is that life is sweet and that it does not last long. Why should people be envious of each other? Why do we hate each other? Why can't we… - William March

If the common soldiers of each army could just get together by a river bank and talk things over calmly, no war could possibly last as long as a week.

I saw much during my thirty years as a professional soldier, and I have watched the reactions of many men to pain, hunger and death, but all I have learned is that no two men react alike, and that no one man comes through the experience unchanged. I have never ceased to wonder at the thing we call human nature, with its times of beauty and its times of filthiness, or at the level of calm stupidity that lies in between the two. I have no theories and no remedies to offer.

In the sight of my beloved, I am like iron that the smith has heated at his furnace: iron whose surface gives heat. I am a bar that is rigid and will not bend.