Battle Casualties Quotes

It is a long-cherished tradition among a certain type of military thinker that huge casualties are the main thing. If they are on the other side then this is a valuable bonus.

The look Anthony shot at his sister was so comically malevolent Simon nearly laughed. He managed to restrain himself, but mostly just because he was fairly certain that any show of humor would cause Anthony's fist to lose its battle with his brain, with Simon's face emerging as the conflict's primary casualty.

The battle was over. Our casualties were some thirteen thousand killed--thirteen thousand minds, memories, loves, sensations, worlds, universes--because the human mind is more a universe than the universe itself--and all for a few hundred yards of useless mud.

A battle is won by the side that is absolutely determined to win. Why did we lose the battle of Austerlitz? Our casualties were about the same as those of the French, but we had told ourselves early in the day that the battle was lost, so it was lost.

The first casualty of any battle is the plan of attack.

He is a true casualty of battle. There's not a physical scar, but look at the man's heart, and his head, and there are scars galore.

This is a battle, a war, and the casualties could be your hearts and souls.

In the first half of 1944, battle casualty rates for every 1,000 bomber crewmen serving six months in combat included 712 killed or missing and 175 wounded: 89 percent. By one calculation, barely one in four U.S. airmen completed twenty-five missions over Germany, a minimum quota that was soon raised to thirty and then thirty-five on the assumption that the liberation of France and Belgium and the attenuation of German airpower made flying less lethal.

IT’S UNFORTUNATE BUT TRUE: IF ENTREPRENEURSHIP IS A BATTLE, most casualties stem from friendly fire or self-inflicted wounds.

The first kill is the one you remember—but the hundredth? That is what history will.

The previous 24 hours had resulted in 17,000 casualties—some 8,000 Confederates and some 9,000 Federals—most of them strewn across the ground around the salient.

Therefore, those who display ignorance concerning spiritual warfare will continue to be casualties on the field of battle.

When you lose a friend [in battle] you have an overpowering desire to go back home and yell in everybody's ear, "This guy was killed fighting for you. Don't forget him--ever. Keep him in your mind when you wake up in the morning and when you go to bed at night. Don't think of him as the statistic which changes 38,788 casualties to 38,789. Think of him as a guy who wanted to live every bit as much as you do. Don't let him be just one of 'Our Brave Boys' from the old home town, to whom a marble monument is erected in the city park, and a civic-minded lady calls the newspaper ten years later and wants to know why that 'unsightly stone' isn't removed.

The casualties at Antietam numbered four times the total suffered by American soldiers at the Normandy beaches on June 6, 1944. More than twice as many Americans lost their lives in one day at Sharpsburg as fell in combat in the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the Spanish-American War combined.

In my younger days dodging the draft, I somehow wound up in the Marine Corps. There's a myth that Marine training turns baby-faced recruits into bloodthirsty killers. Trust me, the Marine Corps is not that efficient. What it does teach, however, is a lot more useful. The Marine Corps teaches you how to be miserable. This is invaluable for an artist. Marines love to be miserable. Marines derive a perverse satisfaction in having colder chow, crappier equipment, and higher casualty rates than any outfit of dogfaces, swab jockeys, or flyboys, all of whom they despise. Why? Because these candy-asses don't know how to be miserable. The artist committing himself to his calling has volunteered for hell, whether he knows it or not. He will be dining for the duration on a diet of isolation, rejection, self-doubt, despair, ridicule, contempt, and humiliation. The artist must be like that Marine. He has to know how to be miserable. He has to love being miserable. He has to take pride in being more miserable than any soldier or swabbie or jet jockey. Because this is war, baby. And war is hell." Page 68

My apologies, see, I forgot my manners. I get on the mic ’cause it’s my life. You show off for girls and cameras. You a pop star, not a rapper. A Vanilla Ice or a Hammer. Y’all hear this crap he dumping out? Somebody get him a Pamper. And a crown for me. The best have heard about me. You can only spell “brilliant” by first spelling Bri. You see, naturally, I do my shit with perfection. Better call a bodyguard ’cause you gon’ need some protection, And on this here election, the people crown a new leader. You didn’t see this coming, and your ghostwriters didn’t either. I came here to ether. I’m sorry to do this to you. This is no longer a battle, it’s your funeral, boo. I’m murdering you. On my corner they call me coroner, I’m warning ya. Tell the truth, this dude is borin’ ya. You confused like a foreigner. I’ll explain with ease: You’re just a casualty in the reality of the madness of Bri. No fallacies, I spit maladies, causin’ fatalities, And do it casually, damaging rappers without bandaging. Imagining managing my own label, my own salary. And actually, factually, there’s no MC that’s as bad as me. Milez? That’s cute. But it don’t make me cower. I move at light speed, you stuck at per hour. You spit like a lisp. I spit like a high power. Bri’s the future, and you Today like Matt Lauer. You coward. But you’re a G? It ain’t convincing to me. You talk about your clothes, about your shopping sprees. You talk about your Glock, about your i-c-e. But in this here ring, they all talking ’bout me, Bri!

It is amazing that the refugees stay sane. First the bombs, perhaps the "battle" around them, their casualties, their naked helplessness; then the flight, leaving behind everything they have worked for all their lives; then the semi-starvation and ugly hardship of the camps or the slums; and as a final cruelty, the killing diseases which only strike at them.

On September 9, the day after Prevost’s armistice ends, Napoleon launches and, at great cost, wins the Battle of Borodino, thus opening the way to Moscow. The casualties on that day exceed eighty thousand—a figure greater than the entire population, of Upper Canada.

Despite Bria’s icy attitude, Finn didn’t give up. He focused all of his attention on her, as if he were a general and she was just another battle to be won no matter what casualties he might suffer along the way—including the complete and utter loss of his self-respect, pride, and dignity. Bria coolly rebuffed all of his advances, but she wasn’t completely immune to his charms. Interest sparked in her gaze whenever she looked at him out of the corner of her eye. Bria enjoyed being chased just as much as Finn liked running after her.

The marine corps teaches you how to be miserable. This is invaluable for an artist. Marines love to be miserable. Marines derive a perverse satisfaction in having colder chow, crappier equipment, and higher casualty rates than any outfit of dogfaces, swabjockies, or flyboys, all of whom they despise. Why? Because those candyasses don't know how to be miserable. The artist committing himself to his calling has to be miserable. The artist committing himself to his calling has volunteered for hell, whether he knows it or not, he will be dining for the duration on a diet of isolation, rejection, self-doubt, despair, ridicule, contempt, and humiliation. The artist must be like that marine: he has to know how to be miserable. He has to love being miserable. He has to take pride in being more miserable than any soldier, or swabbie, or desk jockey, because this is war, baby, and war is hell.

The 608-day campaign to liberate Italy would cost 312,000 Allied casualties, equivalent to 40 percent of Allied losses in the decisive campaign for northwest Europe that began at Normandy. Among the three-quarters of a million American troops to serve in Italy, total battle casualties would reach 120,000, including 23,501 killed.

In war, truth is the first casualty. —AESCHYLUS

Jackson became a national hero when in 1814 he fought the Battle of Horseshoe Bend against a thousand Creeks and killed eight hundred of them, with few casualties on his side. His white troops had failed in a frontal attack on the Creeks, but the Cherokees with him, promised governmental friendship if they joined the war, swam the river, came up behind the Creeks, and won the battle for Jackson.

On April 11, 1945, my father’s infantry company was attacked by German forces, and in the early stages of battle, heavy artillery fire led to eight casualties. According to the citation: “With complete disregard for his own safety, Private Pausch leaped from a covered position and commenced treating the wounded men while shells continued to fall in the immediate vicinity. So successfully did this soldier administer medical attention that all the wounded were evacuated successfully.” In recognition of this, my dad, then twenty-two years old, was issued the Bronze Star for valor. In the fifty years my parents were married, in the thousands of conversations my dad had with me, it had just never come up. And so there I was, weeks after his death, getting another lesson from him about the meaning of sacrifice—and about the power of humility.

Allied casualty rates averaged 6,674 a day for the seventy-seven days of the Normandy campaign. Those numbers would have been far higher, had it not been for a small and most peculiar band of men and women fighting a secret battle.

The Russian Civil War lasts almost six years and ends in victory for the Bolsheviks. It claims the lives of more than 10 million people—five times more than the number of Russian casualties in the First World War, which the Bolsheviks promised to end. Of that figure, 2.5 million are killed in battle, another 2 million fall victim to the Red (and White) Terror, while around 6 million die from hunger and disease. On top of that, approximately 2 million emigrate.

During the forty-five months of World War II, the United States lost just under 1 percent of its adult male population; during the Civil War the casualty rate was somewhere between 4 and 5 percent; during the fourteen months of King Philip’s War, Plymouth Colony lost close to 8 percent of its men. But the English losses appear almost inconsequential when compared to those of the Indians. Of a total Native population of approximately 20,000, at least 2,000 had been killed in battle or died of their injuries; 3,000 had died of sickness and starvation, 1,000 had been shipped out of the country as slaves, while an estimated 2,000 eventually fled to either the Iroquois to the west or the Abenakis to the north. Overall, the Native American population of southern New England had sustained a loss of somewhere between 60 and 80 percent.

Who, in Europe, can take this bloodless colonial fracas seriously? On September 9, the day after Prevost’s armistice ends, Napoleon launches and, at great cost, wins the Battle of Borodino, thus opening the way to Moscow. The casualties on that day exceed eighty thousand—a figure greater than the entire population, of Upper Canada.

Wherever battles are waged there are casualties, and death is a common occurrence. But what is closest to our hearts is the best interest of the people and the suffering of the vast majority, and when we die for the people, it is an honorable death. Nevertheless we should do our best to avoid unnecessary casualties. Mao Zedong, 1944

Maybe it’s just me, but I think imperfections build character. The most interesting people seem to have the bumpiest pasts. You ever talk to a “perfect” person? What a snooze! I don’t even trust people with no scars. Whether for casual conversation or companionship on any level, I prefer to connect with someone who has experienced the casualties of life’s battles.

Listening to the shrill rhetoric of hard line Brexiteers - either extolling the virtues of a 'no deal' Brexit, or suggesting its inevitability is simply down to the intransigence of the EU - I am reminded of another great folly in British history: 'The Charge of the Light Brigade'. It is as if we are witnessing a modern day re-enactment of that foolhardy military manoeuvre in which a mix of poor communication, rash decisions and vainglorious personalities led to the needless massacre of countless cavalrymen. Messrs. Fox, Johnson and Rees-Mogg may relish the idea of charging headlong into battle against a well prepared and strongly defended position, immune to the ensuing casualties and collateral damage. It would be appreciated if they could kindly leave the rest of us out of their futile and reckless endeavours.

Fifty-five thousand casualties for five hundred yards’ gain on the Champagne front in February 1915; 60,000 lost again that spring at the Battle of Saint-Mihiel; 120,000 in May at Arras. The next year brought the slaughter at Verdun stretching from February to June, with 315,000 total French casualties. Then came the French support for the British offensive along the Somme from July to November, in which another 200,000 were killed or wounded—all for little significant gain.

The military historian John Keegan notes that by the middle of the 2nd millennium BCE, the chariot allowed nomadic armies to rain death on the civilizations they invaded. “Circling at a distance of 100 or 200 yards from the herds of unarmored foot soldiers, a chariot crew—one to drive, one to shoot—might have transfixed six men a minute. Ten minutes’ work by ten chariots would cause 500 casualties or more, a Battle of the Somme–like toll among the small armies of the period.”14

I knew people were dying around me on the railway but I didn't really want to know. It was too dispiriting. It was difficult to judge the full toll of casualties and by this stage I had become so self-obsessed, in a true mental battle just to get through each day. I had very few friends at Hellfire Pass and most of us were the same. We all worked so hard that, just trying to survive, each person became more and more insular as it became more difficult. It required a superhuman effort to make it to the end of each day.

I am talking about something more than just the gauzy circle of life. Sure, you're older now and one day you're going to die, but before that, you have to *die*. Your child has arrived and the battle has been joined. It is the battle to the death of your ego. The demise of your selfishness and impatience. The end of your idle distractions and carelessness. The decline and fall of Numero Uno. Or so you must pray, because in this contest, you must lose or lose quickly. Pray that you will never bear the shattered consequences of winning when your child's safety, trust, and happiness are the casualties.

It was the Battle of the Somme—or what the Germans, who suffered massive casualties as well, referred to in letters home as “the bath of blood.” On the first day of the offensive, nearly twenty thousand British soldiers died and almost forty thousand were wounded. It was the greatest loss of life in the history of the British military, and many in the West began to portray the “savage” as European rather than as some native in the jungle. Fawcett, quoting a companion, wrote that cannibalism “at least provides a reasonable motive for killing a man, which is more than you can say for civilized warfare.

In contrast to most cultures’ nurturing, peaceful take on childbirth, Aztecs viewed labour as a war. Pregnant women were warriors, readied to take on a bloody battle by their sergeants-at-arms, midwives, who prepared them for motherhood in a series of sweat bath rituals. This acceptance of, and preparation for, the visceral process of childbirth was a realistic view – these mothers didn’t bring a child into the world smilingly and serene, they fought hard to keep the baby and themselves alive and healthy. Some historians have even argued that motherhood was established as the blueprint for bravery before Meso-American society required fighters. Women who died during childbirth were considered to be casualties of combat and honoured accordingly.

With the onset of successive days of high winds and snow blizzards, the battle of Ypres faded away, leaving both sides to hold their blood-soaked positions. The most significant territorial outcome was that the Germans had gained the high ground along the Messines ridge, and held it until June 1917. But they had suffered 80,000 casualties around Ypres, many regiments losing two-thirds of their strength or even more. A German wrote home: ‘I have been living through days that defy imagination. I should never have thought men could stand it … Our 1st battalion, which has fought with unparalleled bravery, is reduced from 1200 men to 194. God grant that I may see you again soon and that this horror may soon be over.’ The writer was fortunate enough to be taken prisoner soon afterwards.

The Germans suffered 800,000 casualties in the same period, including three times as many dead as during the entire Franco-Prussian War. This also represented a higher rate of loss than at any later period of the war. The British in August fought two actions, at Mons and Le Cateau, which entered their national legend. In October their small force was plunged into the three-week nightmare of the First Battle of Ypres. The line was narrowly held, with a larger French and Belgian contribution than chauvinists acknowledge, but much of the old British Army reposes forever in the region’s cemeteries: four times as many soldiers of the King perished in 1914 as during the three years of the Boer War. Meanwhile in the East, within weeks of abandoning their harvest fields, shops and lathes, newly mobilised Russian, Austrian and German soldiers met in huge clashes; tiny Serbia inflicted a succession of defeats on the Austrians which left the Hapsburg Empire reeling, having by Christmas suffered 1.27 million casualties at Serb and Russian hands, amounting to one in three of its soldiers mobilised.

Under the cover of darkness, Kutuzov withdrew that night, having lost an immense number of casualties – probably around 43,000, though so dogged was the Russian resistance that only 1,000 men and 20 guns were captured.106 (‘I made several thousand prisoners and captured 60 guns,’ Napoleon nonetheless told Marie Louise.107) The combined losses are the equivalent of a fully laden jumbo jet crashing into an area of 6 square miles every five minutes for the whole ten hours of the battle, killing or wounding everyone on board. Kutuzov promptly wrote to the Tsar claiming a glorious victory, and another Te Deum was sung at St Petersburg. Napoleon dined with Berthier and Davout in his tent behind the Shevardino Redoubt at seven o’clock that evening. ‘I observed that, contrary to custom, he was much flushed,’ recorded Bausset, ‘his hair was disordered, and he appeared fatigued. His heart was grieved at having lost so many brave generals and soldiers.’108 He was presumably also lamenting the fact that although he had retained the battlefield, opened the road to Moscow and lost far fewer men than the Russians – 6,600 killed and 21,400 wounded – he had failed to gain the decisive victory he so badly needed, partly through the unimaginative manoeuvring of his frontal assaults and partly because of his refusal to risk his reserves. In that sense, both he and Kutuzov lost Borodino. ‘I am reproached for not getting myself killed at Waterloo,’ Napoleon later said on St Helena. ‘I think I ought rather to have died at the battle of the Moskwa.

IN BERLIN, JOSEPH GOEBBELS contemplated the motivation behind Churchill’s broadcast, and its potential effect. He kept careful watch on the evolving relationship between America and Britain, weighing how his propagandists might best influence the outcome. “The battle over intervention or non-intervention continues to rage in the USA,” he wrote in his diary on Monday, April 28, the day after the broadcast. The outcome was hard to predict. “We are active to the best of our ability, but we can scarcely make ourselves heard against the deafening Jew-chorus. In London they are placing all their last hopes in the USA. If something does not happen soon, then London is faced with annihilation.” Goebbels sensed mounting anxiety. “Their great fear is of a knock-out blow during the next weeks and months. We shall do our best to justify these fears.” He instructed his operatives on how best to use Churchill’s own broadcast to discredit him. They were to mock him for saying that after he visited bombed areas, he came back to London “not merely reassured but even refreshed.” In particular, they were to seize on how Churchill had described the forces he had transferred from Egypt to Greece to confront the German invasion. Churchill had said: “It happened that the divisions available and best suited to this task were from New Zealand and Australia, and that only about half the troops who took part in this dangerous expedition came from the Mother Country.” Goebbels leapt on this with glee. “Indeed, it so happened! It invariably ‘so happens’ that the British are in the rear; it always so happens that they are in retreat. It so happened that the British had no share in the casualties. It so happened that the greatest sacrifices during the offensive in the West were made by the French, the Belgians and the Dutch. It so happened that the Norwegians had to provide cover for the British flooding back from Norway.

Hitler initially served in the List Regiment engaged in a violent four-day battle near Ypres, in Belgian Flanders, with elite British professional soldiers of the initial elements of the British Expeditionary Force. Hitler thereby served as a combat infantryman in one of the most intense engagements of the opening phase of World War I. The List Regiment was temporarily destroyed as an offensive force by suffering such severe casualty rates (killed, wounded, missing, and captured) that it lost approximately 70 percent of its initial strength of around 3,600 men. A bullet tore off Hitler’s right sleeve in the first day of combat, and in the “batch” of men with which he originally advanced, every one fell dead or wounded, leaving him to survive as if through a miracle. On November 9, 1914, about a week after the ending of the great battle, Hitler was reassigned as a dispatch runner to regimental headquarters. Shortly thereafter, he was awarded the Iron Cross Second Class. On about November 14, 1914, the new regimental commander, Lieutenant Colonel Philipp Engelhardt, accompanied by Hitler and another dispatch runner, moved forward into terrain of uncertain ownership. Engelhardt hoped to see for himself the regiment’s tactical situation. When Engelhardt came under aimed enemy smallarms fire, Hitler and the unnamed comrade placed their bodies between their commander and the enemy fire, determined to keep him alive. The two enlisted men, who were veterans of the earlier great four-day battle around Ypres, were doubtlessly affected by the death of the regiment’s first commander in that fight and were dedicated to keeping his replacement alive. Engelhardt was suitably impressed and proposed Hitler for the Iron Cross Second Class, which he was awarded on December 2. Hitler’s performance was exemplary, and he began to fit into the world around him and establish the image of a combat soldier tough enough to demand the respect of anyone in right wing, Freikorps-style politics after the war. -- Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny, p. 88

The strategic level is concerned with the use of military force to achieve national objectives. In the new American style of war, it has come to be interpreted as the highest political and diplomatic level at which decisions are made to collect and deploy military forces to a distant theater. The size of strategic land forces varies, depending on the nature of the topography and the seriousness of the enemy threat. In past limited wars, deployments involved relatively large armies consisting of multiple corps of 50,000 soldiers each. The numbers of soldiers deployed in more recent campaigns have been considerably smaller. The strategic challenge in the years ahead will center on "time versus risk"-that is, the decisions that must be made to balance the size of the strategic force to be projected versus the time necessary for the force to arrive ready to fight. The United States must be able to overcome the problems of distance and time without unnecessarily exposing early arriving forces to an enemy already in place within a theater of war. The operational level of warfare provides a connection between strategic deployments and the tactical engagements of small units. The "art" of maneuvering forces to achieve decisive results on the battlefield nest here. As with the deployments of strategic level forces, the basic elements of operational maneuver have shrunk as the conflict environment has changed since the end of the Second World War. During the Cold War, corps conducted operational maneuver. More recently, the task has devolved to brigades, usually self contained units of all arms capable of independent maneuver. An independent brigade consists of about 5,000 soldiers. At the operational level, ground forces will face the challenge of determining the proper balance between "firepower and maneuver" resources and technologies to ensure that the will of the enemy's army to resist can be collapsed quickly and decisively. Battles are fought at the tactical level. In the past, the tactical fight has been a face-to-face endeavor; small units of about company size, no more that several hundred soldiers, are locked in combat at close range. The tactical fight is where most casualties occur. The tactical challenge of the future will be to balance the anticipated "ends," or what the combat commander is expected to achieve on the battlefield, with the "means," measured in the lives of soldiers allocated to achieve those ends. Since ground forces suffer casualties disproportionately, ground commanders face the greatest challenge of balancing ends versus means. All three challenges must be addressed together if reform of the landpower services - the Army and the Marine Corps - is to be swift and lasting. The essential moderating influence on the process of change is balance. At the strategic level, the impulse to arrive quickly must be balanced with the need for forces massive and powerful enough to fight successfully on arrival. The impulse to build a firepower-dominant operational forces will be essential if the transitory advantage of fires is to be made permanent by the presence of ground forces in the enemy's midst. The impulse to culminate tactical battle by closing with and destroying the enemy must be balanced by the realization that fighting too close may play more to the advantage of enemy rather than friendly forces.

Brent Nosworthy’s excellent work on Napoleonic battle tactics concluded that ‘at close range, artillery was generally unable to inflict a greater number of casualties than competent well-led infantry occupying the same frontage’. The complications of providing that intimate level of artillery support

The Battle of the Thames (known as the Battle of Moraviantown in Canada) was a great victory for the United States. Although the casualties on both sides were light, close to 600 British soldiers were captured. The Americans also captured a large quantity of war material, including a cannon that had been taken at Saratoga in 1777 and then lost by Hull in 1812.

For sheer mindless futility, though, it was hard to compete with the newly opened Southern Front in northeastern Italy. Having belatedly joined the war on the side of the Entente, by November 1915 Italy had already flung its army four times against a vastly outnumbered Austro-Hungarian force commanding the heights of a rugged mountain valley, only to be slaughtered each time; before war’s end, there would be twelve battles in the Isonzo valley, resulting in some 600,000 Italian casualties.

I ran into similar, though less dramatic events after moving to Yale Law School, where I spent two years as a Senior Research Scholar. Hawaii’s two Democratic U.S. Senators once contacted the law school to complain about testimony that I gave before the Hawaii state legislature. They blamed me for somehow single-handedly scuttling the new gun registration laws that were being considered. The associate dean of the law school called me up about the complaints and grilled me about my testimony. I am certain that neither of these incidents would have occurred if I had been on the other side the gun debate. Over the years, many academics have told me that they would have studied gun control if not for fear of damage to their careers. They didn’t want to run the risk of coming out on the wrong side of the debate. From my experience, that is understandable. Eventually, I was forced out of academia. There is only an abundance of funding for those researchers who support gun control. There is a war on guns. Just like with any war there are real casualties. Police are probably the single most important factor in reducing crime, but police themselves understand that they almost always show up at the crime scene after the crime has been committed. When the police can’t be there, guns are by far the most effective way for people to protect themselves from criminals. And the most vulnerable people are the ones who benefit the most from being able to protect themselves: women and the elderly, people who are relatively weaker physically, as well as poor blacks who live in high crime urban areas—the most likely victims of violent crime. When gun control advocates can’t simply ban guns outright, they impose high fees and taxes on guns. When the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. territory, had their handgun ban struck down as unconstitutional by a federal judge in March 2016, they passed a $1,000 excise tax on guns—a tax they hoped would serve as a model for the rest of the U.S.8 I hope that this book provides the ammunition people need for some of the major battles ahead. We must fight to keep people safe.

The 112th Infantry Regiment of Cota’s 28th Division found that ‘on the morning of the initial assault, there were strong indications that the German infantry had imbibed rather freely of alcoholic beverage . . . They were laughing and shouting and telling our troops not to open fire, as it disclosed our positions. We obliged until the head of the column was 25 yards to our front. Heavy casualties were inflicted. Examination of the canteens on several of the bodies gave every indication that the canteen had only a short time before contained cognac.

Our troops know of the atrocities committed by the enemy and know that now it is a matter of life or death, we or they.’ A number of senior officers made it clear that they approved of revenge killing. When General Bradley heard soon afterwards that prisoners from the 12th SS Panzer-Division Hitler Jugend had spoken of their heavy casualties, he raised his eyebrows sceptically. ‘Prisoners from the 12th SS?’ ‘Oh, yes sir,’ the officer replied. ‘We needed a few samples. That’s all we’ve taken, sir.’ Bradley smiled. ‘Well, that’s good,’ he said.

In the series of great offensive pressures which Joffre delivered during the whole of the spring and autumn of 1915, the French suffered nearly 1,300,000 casualties. They inflicted upon the Germans in the same period and the same operations 506,000 casualties. They gained no territory worth mentioning, and no strategic advantages of any kind. This was the worst year of the Joffre régime. Gross as were the mistakes of the Battle of the Frontiers, glaring as had been the errors of the First Shock, they were eclipsed by the insensate obstinacy and lack of comprehension which, without any large numerical superiority, without adequate artillery or munitions, without any novel mechanical method, without any pretence of surprise or manœuvre, without any reasonable hope of victory, continued to hurl the heroic but limited manhood of France at the strongest entrenchments, at uncut wire and innumerable machine guns served with cold skill. The responsibilities of this lamentable phase must be shared in a subordinate degree by Foch, who under Joffre’s orders, but as an ardent believer, conducted the prolonged Spring offensive in Artois, the most sterile and prodigal of all.

The Battle of Mogadishu on October 3, 1993, was part of Operation Restore Hope. We remember it now as “Black Hawk Down” from the novel (and subsequent film) of that name by an on-the-scene journalist, Mark Bowden. Army Rangers paid a heavy price for not looking “too intimidating” or “like invaders,” valiantly fighting while stripped of the equipment they requested. Had the administration not ignorantly meddled with events, the 160 Special Forces operators of Army Rangers and Delta wouldn’t have taken so many casualties. And here is what the Clinton Machine didn’t comprehend: Our guys wouldn’t have had to inflict as many casualties either, shooting their way out against 4,000–6,000 Somalis with an entire city of civilians trapped in the crossfire. The Rangers became a legend that day but lost eighteen fine men and suffered seventy-three wounded.

After the bloodbath of the First World War, army commanders from western democracies were under great pressure at home to reduce their own casualties, so they relied on a massive use of artillery shells and bombs. As a result far more civilians died. White phosphorus especially was a weapon of terrible indiscrimination.

But on the whole American soldiers demonstrated great sympathy for civilians trapped in the battle, and US Army medical services did whatever they could to treat civilian casualties. The

It is possible that illness took more casualties than bullets or shrapnel during the battle.

The staunch defense of Bastogne had impeded the Fifth Panzer Army drive to the west, just as the desperate rear guard battle by the 7th Armored at St. Vith had slowed the advance of the Sixth, demonstrating the axiom of World War I that no salient thrust into the defender's position can be expanded rapidly and successfully if the shoulders of the salient are firmly held by the defender. The human cost of the Bastogne battle, therefore, probably was not out of proportion to the military gains achieved. The 101st Airborne Division suffered battle casualties numbering 105 officers and 1,536 men. CCB of the 10th Armored Division had approximately 25 officers and 478 men as battle casualties. There is no means of numbering the killed, wounded, and missing in the miscellany of unrecorded tankers, gunners, infantry, and others who shared in the defense of Bastogne. Nor can any casualty roster now be compiled of those units which fought east of Bastogne prior to 19 December and gave the 101st Airborne Division the time and the tactical opportunity to array itself in the defense of that town.

The total of American battle casualties reported for the period 16 December through 2 January (although these probably were incomplete returns) numbered 41,315 officers and men, of which 4,138 were known to be killed in action, 20,231 were wounded in action, and 16,946 were reported missing.

In some battles, there are unexpected casualties, and the fight can rob a person of everything they have, leaving them battered and broken.

At this battle, as in all the other battles, however, no actual fighting occurs! As noted above, we learn the fate of the enemies of God, but this is more of a battle summary or report of casualties (e.g. Rev 19:20–21). To repeat: there is no actual final battle in Revelation. Why? Because the images of battle are supposed to suggest to us the promise and reality of God’s defeat of evil, but they are not the means of that defeat. There is no literal battle, no literal war of the Lamb for those present at the second coming to join in (as the “Left Behind” series imagines it), no literal pre-Parousia campaign conducted by human soldiers, Christian or otherwise, on behalf of God. “[I]n the cataclysmic battle of Revelation 19, what do the heavenly armies do? Nothing. . . . All the actions belong to Christ,”33 and his only weapon is the “sword” of his word.

Of the 120,000 British troops who went into battle on July 1, 1916, more than 57,000 were dead or wounded before the day was over—nearly two casualties for every yard of the front. Nineteen thousand were killed, most of them within the attack’s first disastrous hour, and some 2,000 more who were badly wounded would die in hospitals later.

Deuteronomy 20: 1- 5, 8 When you go to war against your enemies and see horses and chariots and an army greater than yours, do not be afraid of them, because the Lord your God, who brought you up out of Egypt, will be with you. When you are about to go into battle, the priest shall come forward and address the army. He shall say: “Hear, Israel: Today you are going into battle against your enemies. Do not be fainthearted or afraid; do not panic or be terrified by them. For the Lord your God is the one who goes with you to fight for you against your enemies to give you victory.” The officers shall say to the army: “… Is anyone afraid or fainthearted? Let him go home so that his fellow soldiers will not become disheartened too.

A short time later, Haganah officers came to take the village from the Irgun. One officer remarked, “All of the killed, with very few exceptions, were old men, women, or children.” He noted, “The dead we found were all unjust victims and none of them had died with a weapon in their hands.” Another Haganah commander sneered, “You are swine,” and ordered his men to surround the militiamen. A tense standoff ensued as the Haganah commanders debated about forcibly disarming the dissidents and shooting them if they refused. At last, the Haganah commander ordered the Irgun to clean the village and bury the dead. They carried the bodies to a rock quarry and set them ablaze. “It was a lovely spring day,” the Haganah commander recorded. “The almond trees were in bloom, the flowers were out, and everywhere there was the stench of the dead, the thick smell of blood, and the terrible odor of the corpses burning in the quarry.”8 The next day, the Haganah commander issued a communiqué: “For a full day Etzel [Irgun] and Lechi [Stern] soldiers stood and slaughtered men, women, and children—not in the course of the operation, but in a premeditated act which had as its intention slaughter and murder only. They also took spoils, and when they finished their work, they fled.” Irgun and Stern leaders denied that any deliberate killings of civilians occurred at Deir Yassin. Menachem Begin noted that they had set up a loudspeaker at the entrance of the village, warning civilians to leave: “By giving this humane warning, our fighters threw away the element of complete surprise, and thus increased their own risk in the ensuing battle. A substantial number of the inhabitants obeyed the warning and they were unhurt. A few did not leave their stone houses—perhaps because of the confusion. The fire of the enemy was murderous—to which the number of our casualties bears elegant testimony. Our men were compelled to fight for every house; to overcome the enemy they used large numbers of hand grenades. And the civilians who had disregarded our warnings suffered inevitable casualties.”9 The Jewish Agency did not accept Begin’s explanation and immediately condemned the killings. Regardless of which view was correct, the events at Deir Yassin would have a more far-reaching impact than anyone could have imagined.

When Cortés and his Indian allies finally attacked, the Mexica resisted so fiercely despite their weakness that the siege has often been described as the costliest battle in history—casualty estimates range up to 100,000. Absent smallpox, it seems likely that Cortés would have lost. In the event, he was able to take the city only by systematically destroying it. The Alliance capitulated on August 21, 1521. It was the end of an imperial tradition that dated back to Teotihuacan a millennium before.

Mortar fragments caused 70 percent of the battle casualties among four U.S. infantry divisions in Normandy;

When a company starts to lose its major battles, the truth often becomes the first casualty. CEOs and employees work tirelessly to develop creative narratives that help them avoid dealing with the obvious facts. Despite their intense creativity, many companies often end up with the same false explanations.

If pastors become preoccupied with the dragons, afraid to challenge them, or at least too concerned about “fighting only battles that need to be fought,” they often lose their spontaneity and creativity. Change is stifled, growth stunted, and the direction of ministry is set by the course of least resistance, which as everyone knows, is the course that makes rivers crooked. If the first casualties in dragon warfare are vision and initiative, the next victim is outreach. When a pastor is forced to worry more about putting out brush fires than igniting the church’s flame, the dragons have won, and the ministry to a needy world has lost.

Males in every species possess ample fertility to make up for a few battle casualties.  ​On the contrary, if a civilization’s economy collapses, if capital stops circulating, women and children starve and the population disappears.  No economy; no women and children; no future civilization.

For me, the most interesting people seem to have the bumpiest pasts. I prefer to connect with someone who has experienced the struggles, battles, and casualties of life’s journey. There is beauty, wisdom, and truth to be found in the scars.

That Allied victory had cost them 44,000 casualties since DIADEM began on May 11: 18,000 Americans—among them more than 3,000 killed in action—along with 12,000 British, 9,600 French, and nearly 4,000 Poles. German casualties were estimated at 52,000, including 5,800 dead. Americans

Kuribayashi had the benefit of having traveled in the United States, and he had even attended Harvard for a short time. In his travels, he learned that American industry could be militarized at the touch of a button, and that American popular opinion was sensitive to high casualties in conflicts. If anything, his openly stated view that the U.S. should not be engaged as a military enemy may have contributed to his being given the task of defending Iwo Jima by leadership who may have viewed the defense of the island as a suicide mission. Once assigned his post, however, he took on the matter of American sensitivity to casualties as a tangible strategy – “If American casualties are high enough, Washington will think twice before launching another invasion against Japanese territory.”[2] As for the Japanese view of casualties, a different mindset altogether was predominant: the strategy of sacrifice with no survivors. When

Ironically, the last aircraft carrier to sink as a result of the Battle of Midway was an American one. By the early afternoon on June 6, there was some optimism about the prospect of saving the Yorktown, as salvage crews had put out the fires and stabilised the vessel using pumps. The Yorktown was also surrounded by 6 protective destroyers as an escort. However, these destroyers failed to detect the Japanese submarine I-168, which crept to within easy torpedo range. In the middle of the afternoon on June 6, the submarine fired four torpedoes, two of which punched through the Yorktown’s hull, causing more extensive flooding. The third hit the destroyer Hammann, sinking the destroyer within three minutes and causing mass casualties. The fourth torpedo missed, and the I168 was chased off by the remaining American destroyers.

From the Inquisition to the Gestapo and the “Battle of Algiers,” history teaches us that, in the production of reliable intelligence, regardless of the moral issue, torture is counter-productive. As a further footnote to my tenet, learned in Algeria, that torture should never, never, never be resorted to by any Western society, I draw readers once again to the testimony of Prefect Teitgen of Algiers (see) which —three decades on—I still find deeply moving. Teitgen had been informed by the Algiers police that they had intelligence of a bomb which could have caused appalling casualties. Could they put a suspect to “the question”?

Even Colonel Lang, watching the Americans from the other side of Djebel Naemia, had been surprised by their timid initial approach to the Maknassy heights; a more forceful attack, he concluded, could have shortened the Tunisian campaign by weeks. In his view, the Americans appeared reluctant to risk heavy casualties in a decisive battle, preferring to crush their foes with material superiority even if that meant extending the fight. There was truth in that assessment too.

To me, the heart of all successful human interactions is we look at each other and we know we’re about to attempt something that is difficult/ impossible. And we look in each other’s eyes, and we shake hands, and we both vow to die before we quit. And that’s what I thought we did. This is such a simple idea to me. The vows are “til death do us part”—God agrees with me. The vow is not to your partner—the vow is to the weakest part of yourself. How could you not quit if that’s one of the options? The reason you say you’re gonna do it or die is because death is what happens when you don’t do it. Your mind is trying to protect you from hard things, to defend you from pain. The problem is, all of your dreams are on the other side of pain and difficulty. So, a mind that tries to seek pleasure and comfort and the easy way inadvertently poisons its dreams—your mind becomes a barrier to your dreams, an internal enemy. If it was easy, everybody would do it. The reason we make vows is because we know we’re about to do a hell walk. You don’t have to vow to do easy things. No one ever said, “I vow to eat every ounce of this crème brulee—I swear to the wide heavens that I will not leave one speck on my plate! And I vow to skip my run tomorrow morning, and I vow to sleep in!” We wouldn’t need to make vows if it was easy. The reason the vows are so extreme—“in sickness and in health, till death do us part”—is because life is so extreme. Nothing else can keep us there. That’s the point of devotion. I’m not against divorce, and I’m not against surrendering in a battle, but it has to be at the end of the battle—not while you’re putting your armor on, not the first scary moment, not the first casualty. In my experience, most people get divorced too soon, before they’ve extracted the lessons that will keep them from doing the exact same things in their next relationships. I’m still not totally sure what I was thinking. Maybe it was pain; maybe it was delirium. Maybe I wasn’t thinking at all. Maybe I didn’t need to think, because I was clear. I could see the North Star through the fog. On February 19, only five days after I received my divorce papers, I called Jada. I hadn’t seen her, or heard from her, in months. The phone seemed to ring forever. Click. “Hello?” “Whatup, Jada. It’s Will.” “Heyyyy!” she said. Her voice seemed to still echo with the magic of our night at the Baked Potato. “How you doin’?” “I’m good. Better now that I’m talkin’ to you.” In hindsight, I probably could have given her a little more context, or warning. “Hey, are you seeing anybody?” I said. Jada hesitated—partly stunned, partly confused. “Um, no. Why?” “Cool, you’re seeing me now,

Satan would willingly lose every battle to us, so long as he could successfully steal the attention that belongs to God.

Pandemic planning became a casualty of the austerity years,

they lost nearly 200,000 killed, with another 80,000 estimated casualties. In the process, the 87th and 88th were all but wiped out. There was understandably a lot of criticism of Chiang’s strategy within China

Wounded pride," Temul said. "It is one thing to suffer defeat on a field of battle, it is another to be crushed when your foe has no need even to draw a sword." "Humiliated in Raraku," Gall said, nodding. "The growing cancer in their souls. This cannot be carved out. The Malazans must be made to know pain." "That is ridiculous," Keneb said. "Was not the Chain of Dogs glory enough for the bastards?" "The first casualty among the defeated is recalling their own list of crimes, Fist.

By 14 November, when the Canadians withdrew, the corps had suffered a total of 15,654 battle casualties. Within six months the Germans were to retake all the ground that the Allies had so dearly paid for.

Battle of Cannae in 216 BCE, Hannibal’s cavalry surrounded a Roman army twice their size and inflicted punishing casualties.

The Japanese forces which numbered 4,000 suffered less than one hundred casualties.

Prepare drones," Metatron commanded. Nephilim grabbed her backpack and put it on the ground beside her feet. She opened it and revealed a black metallic cube. It made a soft click as it came to life. Within seconds it enfolded itself and turned into a flying drone—slightly resembling a black firefly—that was about the size of a small eagle. It hovered next to Nephilim's head, humming softly. Each one of the soldiers had unique drones, directly linked to their neural system. Some drones had flying capabilities, others resembled ground predators in the form of insects or mammals. To be able to simultaneously, mentally control a drone during actual combat was difficult, required years of practice, and brought the term multi-tasking to a whole new level. However, once mastered, it was an incredibly effective combat tool. Nephilim held still and waited for the commander to order the assault. She wasn't excited or scared that she was about to go into battle. Her artificially augmented heart didn't beat faster. Her lungs, securely sealed through a silicate membrane from any kind of poison or chemical warfare attack, didn't enhance their pace. Her mind was focused and clear. So were her ice-cold, artificially blue eyes, studying the target area. She came here to do her job, her duty. What she had been created for. The righteous thing. Furthermore, it was something she was very good at. Adriel had stated, prior to leaving Olympias, that they should be back by breakfast. The target area ahead was in shabby condition. Shacks and makeshift houses built in and around the ruins of old, overgrown industrial premises. The location was partly hidden by the remains of an old Highway bridge, its old asphalt cracked, with weeds growing everywhere, and some of its circling sidearms had collapsed. The ancient roads and self-made paths were covered with mud. It had been raining a lot, as it almost always did in this area. This was only one of the reasons why any sane person would never understand that people actually chose to live here. The small settlement was surrounded by some archaic plantations and little fields, hidden in between old buildings. Everything here was designed to stay unnoticed, to not be found. And yet they had been discovered. Eventually, all of them were. Metatron was right. These subjects here were completely oblivious of what was coming their way. Only a few guards were on duty, sitting on two of the old chimneys of the facility. They would have no chance to spot the attacking troops before sharpshooters took them out. After that, they would ambush those that remained in their sleep. Standard procedure, requiring a minimum of time, resources, and casualties. Nephilim's scanner showed one hundred twenty-six human life forms in the settlement. There wouldn't be any left when the sun rose in less than an hour. *** Jeff woke up from a bad dream. He couldn't remember what it was he had dreamt, but it had left him with this uneasy feeling

Another important lesson from the time was that mass self-deception is simply a sedative prescribed by leaders who cannot face reality themselves. And as the Spanish Civil War proved, the first casualty of war is not truth, but its source: the conscience and integrity of the individual.

The results were convincing. During two summer months of 1943 in Sicily, the US Army had 21,482 hospital admissions for malaria compared to 17,375 battle casualties (wounded and dead). A public health poster had it right: “The malaria mosquito knocks out more men than the enemy.” Field testing of DDT began in Italy in August 1943; by 1945 new cases of malaria had declined by more than 80 percent, and DDT was also in use, in an indiscriminate but highly effective fashion, to stop the typhus epidemic in Naples.

As it was, D-Day was a damn close-run thing and a brutal struggle: Allied casualty rates averaged 6,674 a day for the seventy-seven days of the Normandy campaign. Those numbers would have been far higher, had it not been for a small and most peculiar band of men and women fighting a secret battle.

The reason there are so many casualties among believers in spiritual warfare is that we have lost sight of the fact that we are in a perpetual state of warfare, which demands constant alertness. And so we let down our guards. We open ourselves to attack. We forget that we are warriors, not tourists, in God’s kingdom on earth.

It would be forty-four years before physicist Donald Olson would discover that D-Day at Tarawa occurred during one of only two days in 1943 when the moon's apogee coincided with a neap tide, resulting in a tidal range of only a few inches rather than several feet. The actions of these Marines trapped on the reef would determine the outcome of the battle for Tarawa. If they hesitated or turned back, their buddies ashore would be decimated. But they didn't hesitate. They were Marines. They jumped from their stranded landing crafts into chest-deep water holding their arms and ammunition above their heads. In one of the bravest scenes in the history of warfare, these Marines slogged through the deep water into sheets of machine-gun bullets. There was nowhere to hide, as Japanese gunners raked the Marines at will. And the Marines, almost wholly submerged and their hands full of equipment, could not defend themselves. But they kept coming. Bullets ripped through their ranks, sending flesh and blood flying as screams pierced the air. Japanese steel killed over 300 Marines in those long minutes as they struggled to the shore. As the survivors stumbled breathlessly onto shore their boots splashed in water that had turned bright red with blood. This type of determination and valor among individual Marines overcame seemingly hopeless odds, and in three days of hellish fighting Tarawa was captured. The Marines suffered a shocking 4,400 casualties in just seventy-two hours of fighting as they wiped out the entire Japanese garrison of 5,000.

In the first weeks of the Battle of Bataan, the Japanese incurred heavy losses as the Americans and Filipinos fought furiously to protect their last stronghold. The Allies incurred far fewer casualties, but their dead could not be replaced. The Japanese had an endless supply of men and armaments, and as the weeks wore on they bombarded their prey with heavy artillery and relentless air attacks.

Bunker Hill proved a Pyrrhic victory, for the British registered more than a thousand casualties. Americans had shown not only pluck and grit but excellent marksmanship as they picked off British officers; firing at officers was then considered a shocking breach of military etiquette. The Americans suffered 450 casualties, including the death of Major General Joseph Warren. Even while it dented British confidence, the Battle of Bunker Hill stirred patriotic spirits, exposing the first chinks in the British fighting machine and suggesting, wrongly, that green American militia troops could outfight British professionals.

In the first day of the fighting, America’s new president, Joe Biden, called me. We had known each other for close to forty years, from the time we both came to Washington, he as a young senator from Delaware and I as deputy chief of Israel’s embassy to the United States. Four days after the 2020 elections Biden was declared president-elect. In the twenty-four hours after that declaration I followed twenty other world leaders in offering my congratulations. This elicited the ire of President Trump, who to this day believes that I was the first to do so. Now in our phone call President Biden said that America stood by Israel’s right to defend itself. But in the coming days, as the fighting escalated and the press reported on mounting Palestinian casualties, he began to push for a cease-fire. “Bibi, I gotta tell you, I’m coming under a lot of pressure back here,” he said. “This is not Scoop Jackson’s Democratic Party,” referring to the strikingly pro-Israel senator whose long tenure ended in the 1980s. “I’m getting squeezed here to put an end to this as soon as possible.” I responded that I was getting squeezed by millions of Israelis in underground shelters who rightfully expected me to knock the daylight out of the terrorists. For this the IDF needed a few more days to complete the destruction of the Hamas terrorist infrastructure. Our intelligence could pick off more prime targets, especially since Hamas’s underground bunkers were no longer secure. Biden agreed but resumed the pressure to end the fighting the next day. As I did earlier with Obama during Operation Protective Edge in 2014, I asked and got from Biden during Operation Guardian of the Walls a commitment to fund the replenishing of Iron Dome interceptors, a defensive weapon system that enjoyed broad bipartisan support in the US Congress. Each phone conversation with the president brought the end of the fighting closer. I could buy a little more time, but it was clear that we would not have the seemingly unlimited time we had in 2014. Nor did we need it. Within a little over a week, the IDF’s main battle goals were achieved, but I had one more objective in mind. With some luck and a bit more intelligence work, we might be able to pick off Mohammed Deif, the Hamas terrorist chief who was responsible for the murder of hundreds of Israelis and who had managed to evade all our previous efforts to target him.

Russia won the Battle of Stalingrad not based on tactics or technology, but on numbers. The same proved true for follow-on battles at Kursk and the Mius and Belgorod and Kharkov and Smolensk and the Dnieper and Kiev and the Crimea and Narva and Debrecen. In each fight, the Russians brought wave after wave of disposable troops. Most of these Soviet wins took a second attempt. Some took four. In some battles, the casualty ratios were five to one against the Soviets, but they . . . just . . . kept . . . coming.

Young bodies are beautiful, strong, flexible, and resilient. They have the fire of hope in their hearts. However, the fire can be a bit feral, like a young alley cat. It can go everywhere, in all directions, willy-nilly. It can turn all claws and spit or get nervous and run away. It pretends things that aren’t true and is afraid of showing what is true. The older cat bides their time. They have patience. They pull the fire inside and let it smoulder. They don’t waste energy on fights not worth the battle or where the casualties would be greater than the goal. They own their failures like scars, saying it would be wise to take them seriously. They are not ashamed of their loves. They value their spirit and let it grow. It’s in the eyes. The body may move less, but it has presence and power of a different sort. It is authentic.

sense of fatalism. Pvt. Ken Webster of the 101st Airborne expressed his feelings and insights in a letter to his mother: “I am living on borrowed time. . . . If I don’t come back, try not to take it too hard. I wish I could persuade you to regard death as casually as we do over here. In the heat of battle you expect casualties, you expect somebody to be killed and you are not surprised when a friend is machine-gunned in the face. You have to keep going. It’s not like civilian

Another catastrophic defeat, this time at the Battle of Friedland in which Russia suffered more than 20,000 casualties,

The civilian casualties and urban destruction we’ve inflicted make Israel’s battles look like child’s play.

The Israel Defense Forces were routinely experiencing ambushes along Sidon Road, their main supply route, that resulted in high casualties. The Marines’ assigned position at BIA was adjacent to the MSR, which led to several ugly confrontations between the IDF and the Marines. Prior to our mission in Lebanon, the Marine-IDF relationship reflected a mutual respect between two warrior cultures. Many Israelis were U.S. citizens, had attended our service schools, and enjoyed a hard-earned reputation for winning decisive victories on the field of battle. The Marines were not alone in embracing the Israelis’ demonstrated courage and sacrifice in defense of their homeland. However, this relationship changed in Lebanon. The Israelis had a long-established policy of mercilessly responding to any attack against them, even minor ones. A sniper round from a village would cause the IDF to open up with .50-caliber machine gun fire from a convoy in many directions. This indiscriminate fire caused numerous civilian casualties, which

Israelis cannot be blamed for the conflicts and civilians casualties nor do the Palestinians. We can argue endlessly about it, the only one that can be blamed for this lasting battle is the Saudis fueling the conflicts for enduring their supremacy in the Arab world.

The Karabu had trained for this war all of their lives. They had built strength, developed technique, and placed their faith in Elohim. Thus, their casualties at the walls of Mount Sahand were a mere dozen after slaughtering three thousand giants at war. They moved like ghosts The giants considered them demons. They fought with an acrobatic technique the giants did not recognize. The Nephilim were occultic creatures that were hard to kill for normal humans. But the Karabu were occultic assassins trained by God’s archangels specifically to fight Nephilim. It was not an even fight. Unfortunately, Inanna was right. The numbers favored her. Even though the Karabu were able to take down astonishing numbers of giants and scatter a goodly number of them in fear, they could not win the battle in time to stop the other six thousand Nephilim already cresting the top of the Sahand ridge The climbers prepared for their sail-chute descent into the Garden.

When that grenade blew me over the cliff, it probably should have killed me, but the only new injury I had sustained was a broken nose, which I got when I hit the deck semiconscious. To be honest, it hurt like hell, along with my back, and I was bleeding all over my gear. However, I had not been seriously shot, as two of my team had. Axe was holding the tribesmen off, leaning calmly on a rock, firing up the hill, the very picture of an elite warrior in combat. No panic, rock steady, firing accurately, conserving his ammunition, missing nothing. I was close to him in a similar stance, and we were both hitting them pretty good. One guy suddenly jumped up from nowhere a little above us, and I shot him dead, about thirty yards range. But we were trapped again. There were still around eighty of these maniacs coming down at us, and that’s a heck of a lot of enemies. I’m not sure what their casualty rate was, because both Mikey and I estimated Sharmak had thrown 140 men minimum into this fight. Whatever, they were still there, and I was not sure how long Danny could keep going. Mikey worked his way alongside me and said with vintage Murphy humor, “Man, this really sucks.” I turned to face him and told him, “We’re gonna fucking die out here — if we’re not careful.” “I know,” he replied. And the battle raged on. The massed, wild gunfire of a very determined enemy against our more accurate, better-trained response, superior concentration, and war-fighting know-how. Once more, hundreds of bullets were ricocheting around our rocky surroundings. And once more, the Taliban went to the grenades, blasting the terrain around us to pieces. Jammed between rocks, we kept firing, but Danny was in all kinds of trouble, and I was afraid he might lose consciousness.

Young dancers have a beautiful, strong, flexible, and resilient body. And they have the fire of hope in their heart. However, the fire can be a bit feral like a young alley cat. It can go everywhere, in all directions, willy-nilly. It can turn all claws and spitting or it can get nervous and run away. It pretends things that aren’t true and is afraid of showing what is true. The older cat bides his time. He has patience. He pulls the fire inside and lets it smoulder. He doesn’t waste his energy on fights not worth the battle or where the casualties would be greater than the goal. He owns his failures like scars that say it would be wise to take him seriously. He is not ashamed of his loves. He values his spirit and lets it grow. It’s in the eyes. The body may move less but it has presence and a power of a different sort. It is authentic.

total of 895,000 French soldiers died in battle during the Great War, but a further 420,000 died of wounds in the casualty clearing stations, from gangrene or septicaemia or some other sickness, much of it preventable.