“By this time we had reached the trench system. On both sides of us men were going along the trenches with their Tommy guns. A tank assaulted one of the trenches and behind it was a young radio operator calmly chewing a stalk of wheat, waiting to flash the words that the bastion had been taken. Shouts of “come on out of there you Nazi 'so-and-so's'" and "keep your hands up you 'such-and-such'" announced the arrival of the First Troop. Then they began to pop up like prairie dogs.”
Broadcast from Normandy (1944)
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Bill Downs 24
American journalist 1914–1978Related quotes

“Having now been in the trenches for five months, I had passed my prime.”
Source: Goodbye to All That (1929), Ch.16 On being in the trenches in France in 1915.
Context: Having now been in the trenches for five months, I had passed my prime. For the first three weeks, an officer was of little use in the front line... Between three weeks and four weeks he was at his best, unless he happened to have any particular bad shock or sequence of shocks. Then his usefulness gradually declined as neurasthenia developed. At six months he was still more or less all right; but by nine or ten months, unless he had been given a few weeks' rest on a technical course, or in hospital, he usually became a drag on the other company officers. After a year or fifteen months he was often worse than useless.

Salon interview (1997)
Context: The automatic reaction of practically any young person is, at once, against authority. That, I think, began in the First World War because of the trenches, and the incompetence of the people on all fronts. I think that a terrible bitterness and anger began there, which led to communism. And now it feeds terrorism. Anyway, that's my thesis. It's very oversimplified, as you can see.

The Great War: A Combat History of the First World War (2013) by Peter Hart, p. 242
Undated

2000s, Where the Right Went Wrong (2004)

“To the trenches! (A las trincheras! in Spanish)”
On election night, November 4, 1980, in a call to his supporters to protest the election results after a controversial loss to his opponent, Carlos Romero Barceló by 3,503 votes. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,922256-1,00.html