42
" Soon you shall be landing In the battleground, ensure you have the right weapons to fight the enemy; ensure you know your enemy and what he is capable of; take them unprepared to gain the victory and stand with your head held high; show it to the world the cause you have been fighting for, deception is the key, challenge your enemy when it is least expected; break them mentally before breaking them physically. You are a soldier; your enemy is a soldier and you are facing the best, both sides have a lot of similarities only variation lies in the cause.
Cause is driver for the battle; cause is binding comrades together and even if the victory is gained the cause stays undefeated. You stand defeated for your strategy, tactics and leaders but never for the cause, it’s still alive, it shall always be alive with the men who have sacrificed their lives, with the men who are still alive. They stand defeated with the physical strength but not for the cause they have believed in and you can never take it away from them. Fight for a cause and you shall stay invincible.
A war story is always biased towards one side and it’s hard to narrate a true war story. We choose and make our heroes from what we have read, heard and believed in. If we know the cause both sides are standing for, it will become difficult to take sides. Always respect your enemy, respect for the fact they are standing neck to neck with you, respect them for the courage they have shown to defend the other side, their land, respect them for whatever you have earned the respect for from your men, from your country and from your people.
Powerful strategies, tactics, weapons, leaders are allies to the war, they support but never claims victory all my themselves Greatest wars won always had the greater cause. Rebel without a cause is never a rebel just an aimless person whose fate lies in the defeat. "
― Pushpa Rana ,
45
" Yes, I am crying although I am a man. But has not a man eyes! Has not a man hands, limbs,
senses, thoughts, passions? Is he not fed with the wine food, hurt by the same weapons, warmed and cooled by the same summer and winter as a woman? If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? And if you poison us, do we not die? Why shouldn't a man complain, a soldier weep? Because it is unmanly? Why is it unmanly? "
― August Strindberg , The Father
48
" Visit the Navy-Yard, and behold a marine, such a man as an American government can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts, -a mere shadow and reminiscence of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already, as one may say, buried under arms with funeral accompaniments, though it may be, -" Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note,As his corse to the rampart were hurried;Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot,O'er the grave where our hero we buried. "
52
" Whoever fails in the consideration generally due to the interests and feelings of others, not being compelled by some more imperative duty, or justified by allowable self-preference, is a subject of moral disapprobation for that failure, but not for the cause of it, nor for the errors, merely personal to himself, which may have remotely led to it. In like manner, when a person disables himself, by conduct purely self-regarding, from the performance of some definite duty incumbent on him to the public, he is guilty of a social offence. No person ought to be punished simply for being drunk; but a soldier or a policeman should be punished for being drunk on duty. "
― John Stuart Mill , On Liberty
53
" The word everyone forgets is 'serve'...Yes. Serve. This is the service, and we soldiers are servants. Sure, when people think of a soldier, they think of soldiers taking. They think of us taking territory, taking the enemy, taking the city or a country, taking treasure, or blood. This grand, abstract idea of 'taking,' as if we were pirates, swaggering and brandishing our weapons, bullying and intimidating people. But a solider, a true soldier, I think, does not take. A soldier gives. "
― Robert Jackson Bennett , City of Blades (The Divine Cities, #2)
59
" One had heard and read a great deal about death, and even seen a little of it, and knew by heart the thousand commonplaces of religion and poetry which seemed to deaden one's senses and veil the horror. Society being immortal, could put on immortality at will. Adams being mortal, felt only the mortality. Death took features altogether new to him, in these rich and sensuous surroundings. Nature enjoyed it, played with it, the horror added to her charm, she liked the torture, and smothered her victim with caresses. Never had one seen her so winning. The hot Italian summer brooded outside, over the market-place and the picturesque peasants, and, in the singular color of the Tuscan atmosphere, the hills and vineyards of the Apennines seemed bursting with mid-summer blood. The sick-room itself glowed with the Italian joy of life; friends filled it; no harsh northern lights pierced the soft shadows; even the dying women shared the sense of the Italian summer, the soft, velvet air, the humor, the courage, the sensual fulness of Nature and man. She faced death, as women mostly do, bravely and even gaily, racked slowly to unconsciousness, but yielding only to violence, as a soldier sabred in battle. For many thousands of years, on these hills and plains, Nature had gone on sabring men and women with the same air of sensual pleasure. "
― Henry Adams , La educación de Henry Adams
60
" I have lived nearly fifty years, and I have seen life as it is. Pain, misery, hunger ... cruelty beyond belief. I have heard the singing from taverns and the moans from bundles of filth on the streets. I have been a soldier and seen my comrades fall in battle ... or die more slowly under the lash in Africa. I have held them in my arms at the final moment. These were men who saw life as it is, yet they died despairing. No glory, no gallant last words ... only their eyes filled with confusion, whimpering the question, " Why?" I do not think they asked why they were dying, but why they had lived. When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams — this may be madness. To seek treasure where there is only trash. Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be! "