Trench Foot Quotes

Day one, the van broke down. It was so cold the accelerator cable froze, so when Tony [Iommi] put his foot down it snapped in half. Which meant we were stranded in the middle of f**king nowhere, halfway to Copenhagen. There was a blizzard outside, but Tony said it was my job – as the band’s ‘public representative’ – to go and find some help. So out I walked into this field, snow blowing into my face, two icicles of snot hanging out of my nose, until finally I saw the lights of a farmhouse up ahead. Then I fell into a trench. After finally pulling myself out of the f**king thing, I waded through the snow until I reached the front door, then knocked loudly. ‘Halløj?’ said the big, red-faced Eskimo bloke who opened the door. ‘Oh, thank f**k,’ I said. [...] ‘Halløj?’ I didn’t know any Danish, so I pointed towards the road, and said, ‘Van. El kaputski. Ya?'

She managed a bored sigh. “I suppose we could do one picture, but a group shot won’t work. Nyx, how about one of you with your favorite child? Which one is that?” The brood rustled. Dozens of horrible glowing eyes turned toward Nyx. The goddess shifted uncomfortably, as if her chariot were heating up under her feet. Her shadow horses huffed and pawed at the void. “My favorite child?” she asked. “All my children are terrifying!” Percy snorted. “Seriously? I’ve met the Fates. I’ve met Thanatos. They weren’t so scary. You’ve got to have somebody in this crowd who’s worse than that.” “The darkest,” Annabeth said. “The most like you.” “I am the darkest,” hissed Eris. “Wars and strife! I have caused all manner of death!” “I am darker still!” snarled Geras. “I dim the eyes and addle the brain. Every mortal fears old age!” “Yeah, yeah,” Annabeth said, trying to ignore her chattering teeth. “I’m not seeing enough dark. I mean, you’re the children of Night! Show me dark!” The horde of arai wailed, flapping their leathery wings and stirring up clouds of blackness. Geras spread his withered hands and dimmed the entire abyss. Eris breathed a shadowy spray of buckshot across the void. “I am the darkest!” hissed one of the demons. “No, I!” “No! Behold my darkness!” If a thousand giant octopuses had squirted ink at the same time, at the bottom of the deepest, most sunless ocean trench, it could not have been blacker. Annabeth might as well have been blind. She gripped Percy’s hand and steeled her nerves. “Wait!” Nyx called, suddenly panicked. “I can’t see anything.” “Yes!” shouted one of her children proudly. “I did that!” “No, I did!” “Fool, it was me!” Dozens of voices argued in the darkness. The horses whinnied in alarm. “Stop it!” Nyx yelled. “Whose foot is that?” “Eris is hitting me!” cried someone. “Mother, tell her to stop hitting me!” “I did not!” yelled Eris. “Ouch!” The sounds of scuffling got louder. If possible, the darkness became even deeper. Annabeth’s eyes dilated so much, they felt like they were being pulled out of their sockets. She squeezed Percy’s hand. “Ready?” “For what?” After a pause, he grunted unhappily. “Poseidon’s underpants, you can’t be serious.” “Somebody give me light!” Nyx screamed. “Gah! I can’t believe I just said that!” “It’s a trick!” Eris yelled. “The demigods are escaping!” “I’ve got them,” screamed an arai. “No, that’s my neck!” Geras gagged. “Jump!” Annabeth told Percy. They leaped into the darkness, aiming for the doorway far, far below.

Buried seeds thrown to the surface by explosion and trench digging have resulted in surreal sprays of early spring flowers, growing among bones and mess tins.

An adventure is somebody else slogging through the mud and snow while suffering from trench foot, ringworm, dysentery and starvation being chased by people with their hearts set on murder or more. I have been there. I have done that, playing both parts. I do not recommend it. Be content with a nice farm or shop. Make lots of babies and bring them up to be good people.,

The bravest are usually those whom we do not know or hear about, those anonymous men who dig the trenches, who produce the food. They are the corpus--you understand that word--the body and also the soul of a nation. Eustaquio, my words are just words, but all through history--and you have studied it--it has always been the many faceless men, those foot soldiers, who have suffered most, who have died. It is they who make a nation." -The Cripple

I was determined to know beans. When they were growing, I used to hoe from five o'clock in the morning till noon, and commonly spent the rest of the day about other affairs. Consider the intimate and curious acquaintance one makes with various kinds of weeds—it will bear some iteration in the account, for there was no little iteration in the labor—disturbing their delicate organizations so ruthlessly, and making such invidious distinctions with his hoe, levelling whole ranks of one species, and sedulously cultivating another. That's Roman wormwood—that's pigweed—that's sorrel—that's piper-grass—have at him, chop him up, turn his roots upward to the sun, don't let him have a fibre in the shade, if you do he'll turn himself t' other side up and be as green as a leek in two days. A long war, not with cranes, but with weeds, those Trojans who had sun and rain and dews on their side. Daily the beans saw me come to their rescue armed with a hoe, and thin the ranks of their enemies, filling up the trenches with weedy dead. Many a lusty crest—waving Hector, that towered a whole foot above his crowding comrades, fell before my weapon and rolled in the dust.

Occasionally we glimpse the South Rim, four or five thousand feet above. From the rims the canyon seems oceanic; at the surface of the river the feeling is intimate. To someone up there with binoculars we seem utterly remote down here. It is this know dimension if distance and time and the perplexing question posed by the canyon itself- What is consequential? (in one’s life, in the life of human beings, in the life of a planet)- that reverberate constantly, and make the human inclination to judge (another person, another kind of thought) seem so eerie… Two kinds of time pass here: sitting at the edge of a sun-warmed pool watching blue dragonflies and black tadpoles. And the rapids: down the glassy-smooth tongue into a yawing trench, climb a ten-foot wall of standing water and fall into boiling, ferocious hydraulics…

IT is not impossible that among the English readers of this book there may be one who in 1915 and 1916 was in one of those trenches that were woven like a web among the ruins of Monchy-au-Bois. In that case he had opposite him at that time the 73rd Hanoverian Fusiliers, who wear as their distinctive badge a brassard with ' Gibraltar ' inscribed on it in gold, in memory of the defence of that fortress under General Elliot; for this, besides Waterloo, has its place in the regiment's history. At the time I refer to I was a nineteen-year-old lieutenant in command of a platoon, and my part of the line was easily recognizable from the English side by a row of tall shell-stripped trees that rose from the ruins of Monchy. My left flank was bounded by the sunken road leading to Berles-au-Bois, which was in the hands of the English ; my right was marked by a sap running out from our lines, one that helped us many a time to make our presence felt by means of bombs and rifle-grenades. I daresay this reader remembers, too, the white tom-cat, lamed in one foot by a stray bullet, who had his headquarters in No-man's-land. He used often to pay me a visit at night in my dugout. This creature, the sole living being that was on visiting terms with both sides, always made on me an impression of extreme mystery. This charm of mystery which lay over all that belonged to the other side, to that danger zone full of unseen figures, is one of the strongest impressions that the war has left with me. At that time, before the battle of the Somme, which opened a new chapter in the history of the war, the struggle had not taken on that grim and mathematical aspect which cast over its landscapes a deeper and deeper gloom. There was more rest for the soldier than in the later years when he was thrown into one murderous battle after another ; and so it is that many of those days come back to my memory now with a light on them that is almost peaceful.

Accordingly tree trunks or very stout boughs were cut and their tops stripped of bark and sharpened; they were then fixed in long trenches dug five feet deep, with their lower ends made fast to one another to prevent their being pulled up and the branches projecting. There were five rows in each trench, touching one another and interlaced, and anyone who went among them was likely to impale himself on the sharp points. The soldiers called them boundary posts. In front of them, arranged in diagonal rows forming quincunxes, were pits three feet deep, tapering gradually towards the bottom, in which were embedded smooth logs as thick as a man’s thigh, with the ends sharpened and charred, and projecting only three inches above ground. To keep the logs firmly in position, earth was thrown into the pits and trodden down to a depth of one foot, the rest of the cavity being filled with twigs and brushwood to hide the trap. These were planted in groups, each containing eight rows three feet apart, and they were nicknamed lilies from their resemblance to that flower. In front of these again were blocks of wood a foot long with iron hooks fixed in them, called goads by the soldiers. These were sunk right into the ground and strewn thickly everywhere.

There, at the top of the stairs, was the world: acres and miles of open land, an arc of the planet, curving off and lighted in the distance under the morning sky. The building we had just passed through was, it turned out, only the entrance to an open dig, where Chinese archaeologists were in the years-long process of excavating a buried army of life-sized clay soldiers. I saw what looked like human bodies coming out of the earth. Straight trenches cut the bare soil into deep corridors or long pits. From the trench walls emerged an elbow here, a leg and foot there, a head and neck. Everything was the same color, the terra-cotta earth and the people: the color of plant pots. Seeing the broad earth under the open sky, and a patch of it sliced into deep corridors from which bodies emerge, surprises many people to tears. Who would not weep from shock? I seemed to see our lives from the aspect of eternity. I seemed long dead and looking down. For it is in our lifetimes alone that people can witness the unearthing of the deep-dwelling army of Emperor Qin—the seven thousand or the ten thousand soldiers, their real crossbows and swords, their horses and chariots, bared to the light for the first time in 2,200 years. “In the pictures of the old masters,” Max Picard wrote in The World of Silence, “people seem as though they had just come out of the opening in a wall; as if they had wriggled their way out with difficulty. They seem unsafe and hesitant because they have come out too far and still belong more to silence than themselves.

The Great Expansion has come to Earth at last. We will celebrate Mogadorian Progress together, granddaughter.’ 2 From the cracked second-floor window of an abandoned textile factory, I watch an old man in a ragged trench coat and filthy jeans crouch down in the doorway of the boarded-up building across the street. Once he’s settled, the man pulls a brown-bagged bottle from his coat and starts drinking. It’s the middle of the afternoon – I’m on watch – and he’s the only living soul I’ve seen in this abandoned part of Baltimore since we got here yesterday. It’s a quiet, deserted place, and yet it’s still preferable to the version of Washington, D.C. I saw in Ella’s vision. For now at least, it doesn’t look like the Mogadorians have pursued us from Chicago. Although, technically, they wouldn’t have to. There’s already a Mogadorian among us. Behind me, Sarah stomps her foot. We’re in what used to be the foreman’s office, dust everywhere, the floorboards swollen and mildewed. I turn around just in time to see her frowning at the remains of a cockroach on the bottom of her sneaker. ‘Careful. You might go crashing right through the floor,’ I tell her, only half joking. ‘I guess it was too much to ask for all your secret bases to be in penthouse apartments, huh?’ Sarah asks, fixing me with a teasing smile. We slept in this old factory last night, our sleeping bags laid on the sunken floorboards. Both of us are filthy, it’s been a couple of days since our last real shower, and Sarah’s blond hair is caked with dirt. She’s still beautiful to me. Without her at my side, I might’ve totally lost it

In a matter of moments a quivering bunch of weedy children was coated in raw sewage, and suffering the festival full house: shell-shock and trench foot. Was this biblical shower of shit on the dance tent God's judgment on our festival scene? I think theologians should be telling us straight. If God wants to bum flush the show, then us mere mortals should be warned. It's not like he has no history of smiting, it totally fits his modus operandi of Old Testament ferocity. Back when 'the God of Love' hadn't been invented, and we still had the Right-wing God of Austerity. Pillars of salt, plague, locusts, dead first born children... right through to today's whirling heathen dervishes showered in cold shit.

She stopped in her tracks. Her frightened eyes locked onto a black figure standing before her, a smoky human form, darker than the deepest caves and trenches of the known world. Light would not penetrate it, as it hovered motionlessly, a foot above the floor.

The bravest are usually those whom we do not know or hear about, those anonymous men who dig the trenches, who produce the food. They are the corpus—you understand that word—the body and also the soul of a nation. Eustaquio, my words are just words, but all through history—and you have studied it—it has always been the most faceless men, those foot soldiers, who have suffered most, who have died. It is they who make a nation.

Everyone of stature available gathered to await Suvrin’s report. A couple of subalterns took turns running up to the headquarters’ roof to check the progress of the torches descending the long scarp from the Shadowgate. Local boys, they seemed to feel that their great adventure had begun at last. They were fools. An adventure is somebody else slogging through the mud and snow while suffering from trench foot, ringworm, dysentery and starvation, being chased by people with their hearts set on murder or more. I have been there. I have done that, playing both parts. I do not recommend it. Be content with a nice farm or shop. Make lots of babies and bring them up to be good people.

Rats, the only creatures that seemed to flourish in the trenches, were quite brave and were often a foot long (not including the tail), the size of a small cat. They grew fat on the corpses in No Man’s Land and were known to bite sleeping soldiers’ faces and gather around the eating areas. The French left the rats alone. Like a canary in a coal mine, the rats were a warning that gas shells had been fired. At the slightest whiff of gas, the large rats flipped feet up, dead. The Americans hated them too much to leave them alone. They bludgeoned the rats with shovels and rifle butts or shot them with their side arms.

He promptly shared his views about women in the infantry. "It's nothing personal, but I don't believe women should be in the combat arms. However, I'm willing to give you a fair chance to prove me wrong. Good Luck." That's kind of like throwing someone down in a twenty-foot trench and saying, "Okay, dig yourself out now, while I have the pleasure of watching you fail.

The trenches', wrote Robert Kee fifty years later, 'were the concentration camps of the First World War'; and though the analogy is what an academic reviewer would call unhistorical, there is something Treblinka-like about almost all accounts of July 1st, about those long docile lines of young men, shoddily uniformed, heavily burdened, numbered about their necks, plodding forward across a featureless landscape to their own extermination inside the barbed wire. Accounts of the Somme produce in readers and audiences much the same emotions as do descriptions of the running of Auschwitz - guilty fascination, incredulity, horror, disgust, pity and anger - and not only from the pacific and tender-hearted; not only from the military historian, on whom, as he recounts the extinction of this brave effort or that, falls an awful lethargy, his typewriter keys tapping leadenly on the paper to drive the lines of print, like the waves of a Kitchener battalioon failing to take its objective, more and more slowly towards the foot of the page; but also from professional soldiers [...] Why did the commanders not do something about it? Why did they let the attack go on? why did they not stop one battalion following in the wake of another to join it in death?