Infantry Quotes

“How long you been in the infantry, sir? Anything under ten miles counts as 'almost there'.”

“Commanders and historians are the people who discuss wars; I was in the infantry, and most of the time I did not know where I was or what I was doing except that I was obeying orders and trying not to be killed in any of the variety of horrible ways open to me.”

“No one knew much about the Twenty-Eighth Infantry. It was not a glamour outfit. They knew about the Big Red One and the Screaming Eagles, about the Eighty-Second Airborne and Hell On Wheels, but not about Twenty-Eighth Infantry. The name was met with a certain silence, as if he was in a room full of Harvard graduates and told them his degree was by correspondence.”

“What branch do you want to go in?” “I don’ give a god-damn,” said Pilon jauntily. “I guess we need men like you in the infantry.” And Pilon was written so. He turned then to Big Joe, and the Portagee was getting sober. “Where do you want to go?” “I want to go home,” Big Joe said miserably. The sergeant put him in the infantry too.”

“...new discoveries show that American soldiers used the swastika as their symbol early in World War I, and up to 1941, against Germany. The symbol was used by Americans in the French Escadrille Lafayette, by the 45th Infantry Division, and on Boeing P-12 planes. The discoveries are in the growing body of work by the historian Dr. Rex Curry (author of 'Swastika Secrets'). He has previously shown how socialists in the USA originated the modern swastika as overlapping 'S' letters for 'Socialists' joining together in a utopian 'Socialist Society.”

“Wars, wars, wars': reading up on the region I came across one moment when quintessential Englishness had in fact intersected with this darkling plain. In 1906 Winston Churchill, then the minister responsible for British colonies, had been honored by an invitation from Kaiser Wilhelm II to attend the annual maneuvers of the Imperial German Army, held at Breslau. The Kaiser was 'resplendent in the uniform of the White Silesian Cuirassiers' and his massed and regimented infantry...Strange to find Winston Churchill and Sylvia Plath both choosing the word 'roller,' in both its juggernaut and wavelike declensions, for that scene.”

“Hitler derived several things from his experience and achievements in World War I, without which his rise to power in 1933 would have been at the least problematical, and at the most inconceivable. Hitler survived the war as a combat soldier—a rifle carrier—in a frontline infantry regiment. The achievement was an extraordinary one based on some combination of near-miraculous luck and combat skill. The interpretive fussing over whether or not Hitler was a combat soldier because he spent most of the war in the part of the regiment described as regimental headquarters can be laid to rest as follows: Any soldier in an infantry regiment on an active front in the west in World War I must be considered to have been a combat soldier. Hitler’s authorized regimental weapon was the Mauser boltaction, magazine-fed rifle. This gives a basic idea of what Hitler could be called upon to do in his assignment at the front. As a regimental runner, he carried messages to the battalions and line companies of the regiment, and the more important ones had to be delivered under outrageously dangerous circumstances involving movement through artillery fire and, particularly later in the war, poison gas and the omnipresent rifle fire of the skilled British sniper detach”

“Besides the moral courage required to accept commissions in the Fifty-fourth at the time it was organizing, physical courage was also necessary, for the Confederate Congress, on May 1, 1863, passed an act, a potion of which read as follow: -Section IV. That every white person being a commissioned officer, or acting as such, who, during the present war, shall command negroes or mulattoes in arms against the Confederate States, or who shall arm, train, organize, or prepare negroes or mulattoes for military service against the Confederate States, or who shall voluntarily aid negroes or mulattoes in any military enterprise, attack, or conflict in such service, shall be deemed as inciting servile insurrection, and shall, if captured, be put to death or be otherwise punished at the discretion of the Court.”

“The armored infantry was Santa Claus, the battle was out Christmas. What else for the elves to do on Christmas Eve but to let their hair down and drink a a little eggnog.”