“Chiefly I remember the horsy smells, the quavering bugle-calls (all our buglers were amateurs--I first learned the Spanish bugle-calls by listening to them outside the Fascist lines), the tramp-tramp of hobnailed boots in the barrack yard, the long morning parades in the wintry sunshine, the wild games of football, fifty a side, in the gravelled riding--school.”

Solution Unsatisfactory (p. 67)
Short fiction, Off the Main Sequence (2005)

Danny Deever, Stanza 1.
Barrack-Room Ballads (1892, 1896)

Robert E. Lee Prewitt playing Taps
From Here to Eternity (1951)
Context: He looked at his watch and as the second hand touched the top stepped up and raised the bugle to the megaphone, and the nervousness dropped from him like a discarded blouse, and he was suddenly alone, gone away from the rest of them.
The first note was clear and absolutely certain. There was no question or stumbling in this bugle. It swept across the quadrangle positively, held just a fraction longer than most buglers hold it. Held long like the length of time, stretching away from weary day to weary day. Held long like thirty years. The second note was short, almost too abrupt. Cut short and soon gone, like the minutes with a whore. Short like a ten minute break is short. And then the last note of the first phrase rose triumphantly from the slightly broken rhythm, triumphantly high on an untouchable level of pride above the humiliations, the degradations.
He played it all that way, with a paused then hurried rhythm that no metronome could follow. There was no placid regimented tempo to Taps. The notes rose high in the air and hung above the quadrangle. They vibrated there, caressingly, filled with an infinite sadness, an endless patience, a pointless pride, the requiem and epitaph of the common soldier, who smelled like a common soldier, as a woman had once told him. They hovered like halos over the heads of sleeping men in the darkened barracks, turning all the grossness to the beauty that is the beauty of sympathy and understanding. Here we are, they said, you made us, now see us, dont close your eyes and shudder at it; this beauty, and this sorrow, of things as they are.

Source: Song of Myself

John Banville: claiming Kafka as an Irish writer (2011)

Ikaruga kicks ass http://maddox.xmission.com/c.cgi?u=ikaruga
The Best Page in the Universe

A Toast, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Written in 1997, from the liner notes for Jazz Corps (1998)

Canto VI, stanza 18.
The Lady of the Lake http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/3011 (1810)