43
" ...of the 10 thopusand Indian soldiers and camp followers who went into captivity at Kut, as few as one third would live to see the war's end.
....Taken to Constantinople, he [Gen. Charles Townshend British Commander of forces surrendered at Kut] spent the remainder of the war in a pleasant villa on an island on the Bosporus, where he was given the use of a Turkish naval yachtand frequently attended diplomatic receptions at the Ottoman court. Joining him in Constantinople were his 3 prized Yorkshire terriers, pets that, despitethe mear-starvation co9nditionsin Kut, had weatheredthe ordeal quite nicely. (p. 178) "
― Scott Anderson , Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly, and the Making of the Modern Middle East
44
" Certainly, blame for all this [turmoil in the Middle East] doesn't rest solely with the terrible decisions that were made at the end of World War I, but it was then that one particularly toxic seed was planted. Ever since, Arab society has tended to define itself less by what it aspires to become than by what it is opposed to: colonialism, Zionism, Western imperialism in its many forms. This culture of opposition has been manipulated—indeed, feverishly nurtured—by generations of Arab dictators intent on channeling their people's anger away from their own misrule in favor of the external threat, whether it is "the great Satan" or the "illegitimate Zionist entity" or Western music playing on the streets of Cairo. "
― Scott Anderson , Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly, and the Making of the Modern Middle East
53
" point of comparison, over the previous century, during which it had expanded its empire to five continents, the British Empire had been involved in some forty different conflicts around the globe—colonial insurrections mostly, but including the Crimean and Boer wars—and had lost some forty thousand soldiers in the process. Over the next four years, it would lose over twenty times that number. In the disastrous Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, France had suffered an estimated 270,000 battlefield casualties; in the present war, it was to surpass that number in the first three weeks. In this conflict, Germany would see 13 percent of its military-age male population killed, Serbia 15 percent of its total population, while in just a two-year span, 1913 to 1915, the life expectancy of a French male would drop from fifty years to twenty-seven. So inured would the architects of the carnage become to such statistics that at the launch of his 1916 Somme offensive, British general Douglas Haig could look over the first day’s casualty rolls—with fifty-eight thousand Allied soldiers dead or wounded, it remains the bloodiest single day in the history of the English-speaking world—and judge that the numbers “cannot be considered severe.” The effect of all this on the collective European "
― Scott Anderson , Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly, and the Making of the Modern Middle East
56
" Burke had meticulously plotted and committed to memory every aspect of his cover story, quite conscious that “half-covers” like his, in which one’s real name was retained but attached to a false biography, were often far easier to slip up on than a “full-cover.” He had also been leery of drawing too close to the Rome film crowd, worried over potential questions about his ties to a production company no one had ever heard of, and which didn’t seem to actually produce anything. Fortunately, though, Burke discovered the Roman cinéastes were, much like their Hollywood counterparts, a profoundly self-absorbed lot. “I was mildly surprised at how incurious people were and how very easy it was, when it suited my purpose, to direct attention away from myself simply by asking the right question of other persons and being a good listener, or at least appearing to be. "
― Scott Anderson , The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War—A Tragedy in Three Acts