The First World War Quotes

“Within seven months, more than 600,000 Armenians were massacred. Of the 500,000 deported during that same period, more than 400,000 perished as a result of the brutalities and privations of the southward march into Syria and Mesopotamia. By September as many as a million Armenians were dead, the victims of what later became known as genocide, later still as ethnic cleansing. A further 200,000 were forcibly converted to Islam.”
― Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History

“Now it was the Germans who had to fall back to new defensive positions. Among the German soldiers who had fought throughout the retreat was Corporal Hitler. On August 4 he was awarded the Iron Cross, First Class, for ‘personal bravery and general merit’. This was an unusual decoration for a corporal. Hitler wore it for the rest of his life. The regimental adjutant who recommended him for it, Captain Hugo Guttman, was a Jew.”
― Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History

“Of the 850,000 Indian soldiers who left the subcontinent during the First World War, 49,000 were killed in action. India also made her contribution to the material aspects of the Allied struggle, including the manufacture of 555 million bullets and more than a million shells. Over 55,000 Indians served in the Indian Labour Corps, as butchers, bakers, carpenters, shoemakers, tailors and washermen. Many did menial work within range of the enemy guns. In Delhi, a monumental arch records the Indian losses, India’s contribution in blood to the Allied war effort.”
― Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History

“If the war was to be over by Christmas, as many believed, or at the latest by Easter 1915, tens of thousands of soldiers might be killed or wounded before the guns fell silent. Every army believed that it could crush its opponents within a few months.”
― Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History

“In the third week of April the stalemate on the Western Front was marked by a new and unpleasant phase: one that was intended by the Germans to end the stalemate and lead to victory. It was on April 22 that gas was used for the first time in the First World War. That evening, near Langemarck in the Ypres Salient, the Germans discharged, within five minutes, 168 tons of chlorine from 4,000 cylinders against two French divisions, one Algerian, the other Territorial, and against the adjacent Canadian Division, over a four-mile front.”
― Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History

“It was five months since Haig had told the British War Council: ‘The machine gun is a much over-rated weapon and two per battalion is more than sufficient.’ He was once again being proved terribly wrong.”
― Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History

“He never flinched, he never cringed, but he died as one would wish all Englishmen to die—quietly and undramatically,”
― Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History

“on November 6: in the rapidity and confusion of the advance, Douglas MacArthur, commanding an infantry brigade, was taken prisoner by his own side. Thinking he was a German officer, vigilant American sentries brought him in at pistol point. The mistake was quickly discovered, once MacArthur had taken off his unusual floppy hat and long scarf.”
― Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History

“Ludendorff and Hindenburg explained to the Kaiser that the problem was not only the German soldiers’ will and ability to fight, but also President Wilson’s deep reluctance to negotiate in any way with the Kaiser himself or his military chiefs. Grasping not only the nettle of military defeat, but also that of political democratisation, the Kaiser signed a proclamation establishing a Parliamentary regime. In the space of a single day, Germany’s militarism and autocracy were all but over.”
― Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History

“in towns and villages throughout the Ukraine, several thousand Jews were being murdered by anti-Bolshevik Whites, whose historic anti-Semitism, combining with a new hatred of the noted Jewish presence among the Bolshevik leadership, renewed the violent pogroms of a decade and a half earlier.”
― Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History

“On June 3, Britain, France and Italy announced their full support for Polish, Czech and Yugoslav statehood. On the following day, encouraged to do so by the British, Dr Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist leader, met the Emir Feisal, the leader of the Arab Revolt, near the port of Akaba, and worked out with him what seemed to be a satisfactory Arab support for a Jewish National Home in Palestine. A senior British general noted after the meeting that both T.E. Lawrence, who helped set the meeting up, and Weizmann, ‘see the lines of Arab & Zionist policy converging in the not distant future”
― Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History

“For the first time since 1815, Russia was denied control of the Polish capital. It was a signal triumph for the Central Powers. The Germans now set their long-term sights on Finland, Russia’s province since the Swedes had been driven out in 1808.”
― Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History

“the Germans were ‘picking out the revolutionists and Liberals from the many Russian prisoners of war, furnishing them with money and false passports and papers, and sending them back to Russia to stir up a revolution”
― Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History

“Indian Corps and the 4th Corps will push through the barrage of fire regardless of loss, using reserves if required.”
― Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History

“Have you forgotten yet? Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you’ll never forget. Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz— The nights you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets? Do you remember the rats; and the stench Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench— And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain? Do you ever stop and ask, ‘Is it all going to happen again?’ Do you remember that hour of din before the attack— And the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook you then As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men? Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back With dying eyes and lolling heads—those ashen-grey Masks of the lads who once were keen and kind and gay?”
― Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History

“Two German-held villages, Mametz and Montauban, were captured on July 1, as well as a German strongpoint, the Leipzig Redoubt. The human cost of the day’s attack was higher than on any other single day of battle in the First World War. Just over a thousand British officers and more than 20,000 men were killed, and 25,000 seriously wounded.”
― Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History

“In such times one realises to what a sad species of animal one belongs.”
― Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History

“All wars end up being reduced to statistics, strategies, debates about their origins and results. These debates about war are important, but not more important than the human story of those who fought in them.”
― Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History

“British and Indian troops were sent in, and an Indian Cavalry guard escorted them to work. That evening there was a further disturbance, and one of the labourers, Mohamed Ahmed, knocked a British officer unconscious with a stick and seized his rifle and bayonet, before being overpowered by three other Egyptians. Twelve days later he was tried for ‘a disturbance of a mutinous nature’, found guilty and shot.”
― Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History

“In No-Man’s Land near Loos an enormous flowering cherry tree had blossomed with stunning beauty that spring. After the blossoms had fallen a young British officer went out on night patrol and, climbing to the top of the tree, fixed a Union Jack to the trunk. As he was climbing down the tree, the Germans sent up a flare, and the officer was seen. A machine-gunner opened fire and he was hit. His body hung there: the attempts by two British patrols to get his body down on the following two nights were unsuccessful. Then the British artillery was asked to fire on the tree in the hope of bringing the body, and the tree, down. Gradually all the branches were blown off, and the body fell to the ground, but the tree stump remained.”
― Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History

“Such reconnaissance duties became a major feature of the war in the air. There were also new devices to be tested: on December 6 a metal arrow dropped from a French plane mortally wounded a German general on horseback.”
― Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History

“The Times correspondent who reported on the battle commented: ‘The estimation of Austrian losses is somewhat difficult as many of the fallen were not discovered until the penetrating odour of decomposed humanity disclosed the presence of bodies in wood or unharvested field.”
― Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History

“Maze also recalled how the sight of the Germans had an immediate effect on the villagers. ‘Women started to wail, and rushed for home, followed by the men, while the children, torn by curiosity, lagged behind turning to see.’ Then the Germans came nearer and firing broke out. ‘At once the atmosphere changed—in a few seconds all these civilians were fleeing along the roads while the invasion, creeping up like a tide, steadily gained ground. In their Sunday clothes, carrying in their hands their feathered hats which they had not stopped to put on, they wheeled perambulators, wheelbarrows, bicycles and anything on wheels, and fled with their babies and terrified men.”
― Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History

“That same week, on distant Lake Nyasa, in central Africa, a British naval officer, Commander E.L. Rhoades, sailed his gunboat, the Gwendolen, with its single 3-pounder gun, across the lake from the British port of Nkata Bay to the tiny German port of Sphinxhaven, thirty miles away. There he opened fire on, and captured, the German gunboat Wissman, whose commander, Captain Berndt, had not yet heard that war had broken out between Britain and Germany. ‘Naval Victory on Lake Nyasa,’ was the headline in The Times.”
― Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History

“At Joncherey, near the German-Swiss border, a French soldier, Corporal André Peugeot, was killed, the first French victim of a war that was to claim more than a million French lives.”
― Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History

“Albert Einstein wrote from Berlin to the French writer and pacifist, Romain Rolland: ‘When posterity recounts the achievements of Europe, shall we let men say that three centuries of painstaking cultural effort carried us no farther than from religious fanaticism to the insanity of nationalism? In both camps today even scholars behave as though eight months ago they suddenly lost their heads.’ ***”
― Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History

“28 German territorial losses”
― Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History