Nothing of Importance Quotes

“the pride of all Picardy. Almost grotesque in their vivid humanity, they are the same people who walk outside the cathedral to-day. The master-artist, greater in his dreams than his fellow men, was yet blessed with that divine sense of humour that made him love them for their quaint smallnesses! So in Amiens I felt a double inspiration: there was man's offering of his noblest and most beautiful to his Creator, and there was also the reminder, in the saint among the Amiens populace, that God's answer was not a proud bend of the head as He deigned to accept the offering of poor little man, but a coming down among them, a claiming of equality with them, even though they refuse still to realize their divinity, and choose to live in a self-made suffering and to degrade themselves in a fog of war.”
― John Bernard Pye Adams, Nothing of Importance: Eight Months at the Front with a Welsh Battalion

“Most people, I imagine, have had the following experience. They have a great interest in some particular subject, yet they have somehow not got the key to it. They regret that they were never taught the elements of it at school; or it is some new science or interest that has arisen since their schooldays, such as flying or motoring. They are really ashamed of asking questions ; and all books on the subject are technical and presuppose just that elementary knowledge that the interested amateur does not possess. Then suddenly he comes on a book with those delicious phrases in the preface promising "to avoid all technical details," apologizing for "what may seem almost childishly elementary, '' and containing at the end an expert bibliography. These are the books written by very wise and very kind men, and because they are worth so much they usually cost least of all!”
― John Bernard Pye Adams, Nothing of Importance: Eight Months at the Front with a Welsh Battalion

“I, who have been through war and know it, say that it is evil. I knew it before the war; instinct, reason, religion told me that war was evil; now experience has told me also. It is a strange synthesis, this war: it is a synthesis of adventure, dullness, good spirits, and tragedy; but none of these things are new to human experience; nor is human nature altered by war.”
― John Bernard Pye Adams, Nothing of Importance: Eight Months at the Front with a Welsh Battalion

“What made war so cruel, was the force that compelled you to go on. After a factory explosion you cleared up things and then took every precaution to prevent its recurrence; but in war you did the opposite, you used all your energies to make more explosions. You killed and went on killing; you saw men die around you, and you deliberately went on with the thing that would cause more of your friends to die.”
― John Bernard Pye Adams, Nothing of Importance: Eight Months at the Front with a Welsh Battalion

“I begin to understand the spirit of the Homeric heroes; it was all words, words, words before. Now I see. Billet life—where is that in the Iliad? In the tents, of course. And the eating and drinking, the 'word that puts heart into men,' the cool stolid facing of death, all those gruesome details of wounds and weapons, all is being enacted here every day exactly as in the Homeric age. Human nature has not altered.”
― John Bernard Pye Adams, Nothing of Importance: Eight Months at the Front with a Welsh Battalion

“For field artillery enfilade fire is far more effective, as the trajectory is lower than that of heavy artillery. That is to say, a whizz-bang (the name given to an 18-lb. shell) more or less skims along the ground and comes at you; whereas howitzers fire up in the air, and the shell rushes down on top of you.”
― John Bernard Pye Adams, Nothing of Importance: Eight Months at the Front with a Welsh Battalion