“In the last moments of the great ship’s doom, when all was plainly lost, when braver and hardier men might almost have been excused for doing practically anything to save themselves, they stood responsive to their conductor’s baton and played a recessional tune.”
Source: The Band That Played On (Thomas Nelson, 2011), p. 11
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Steve Turner 29
British writer 1949Related quotes

In "Music in Aspic," Harper's Magazine (October 1939) and A Smattering of Ignorance (1940); as quoted in "Lightning Wit Plays On American Musical Scene; Oscar Levant Answers Unspoken Request for 'Information, Please' With Uncensored Comments on Exalted Persons" by Ray C. B. Brown, in The Washington Post (January 14, 1940), p. E4

Source: Andre Cornelis (1886), Ch. 13
Context: Was I saved? Was I lost? All depended on the moment at which somebody might go into my stepfather's room. If my mother were to return within a few minutes of my departure; if the footman were to go upstairs with some letter, I should instantly be suspected, in spite of the declaration written by M. Termonde. I felt that my courage was exhausted. I knew that, if accused, I should not have moral strength to defend myself, for my weariness was so overwhelming that I did not suffer any longer. The only thing I had strength to do was to watch the swing of the pendulum of the timepiece on the mantelshelf, and to mark the movement of the hands. A quarter of an hour elapsed, half an hour, a whole hour.
It was an hour and a half after I had left the fatal room, when the bell at the door was rung. I heard it through the walls. A servant brought me a laconic note from my mother scribbled in pencil and hardly legible. It informed me that my stepfather had destroyed himself in an attack of severe pain. The poor woman implored me to go to her immediately. Ah, she would now never know the truth!

Milton https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015031297644;view=1up;seq=23 (1900), p. 7

Federer Both Flesh and Not
Essays

Speaking of the 17th Main Volunteer Infantry Regiment in a letter to his mother, in [Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai, Northern Character: College-Educated New Englanders, Honor, Nationalism, and Leadership in the Civil War Era, https://books.google.com/books?id=cFMnDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA160, 2016, Oxford University Press, 978-0-8232-7181-8, 160–]

Though widely attributed to Herodotus this in fact comes from the Histories of Polybius, Book 16, chapter 28: "Some men, like bad runners in the stadium, abandon their purposes when close to the goal; while it is at that particular point, more than at any other, that others secure the victory over their rivals". (Translation of Evelyn S Shuckburgh).
Misattributed

“Emptiness is a conductor
A conductor of heat
A conductor of Anything.”
Emptiness Is A Conductor
Artifacts Of The Winged (2003)

Source: Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time