
“War is never fatal but always lost. Always lost.”
Wars I Have Seen (1945)
Regarding the fate of World War II (1945), as quoted in "Defeat of Hitler: Enter the Bunker" http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/defeat/enter-bunker.htm (2010), The History Place
1940s
“War is never fatal but always lost. Always lost.”
Wars I Have Seen (1945)
“France has lost a battle, but France has not lost the war.”
La France a perdu une bataille, mais la France n'a pas perdu la guerre.
Poster À tous les Français (To All Frenchmen), August 1940.
À tous les Français was designed and displayed in London to accompany the Appel du 18 juin (Appeal of 18 June) following defeat at the Battle of France. The pair are considered to be the founding texts of the Résistance.
World War II
“The United States never lost a war or won a conference.”
Remark after the Versailles Peace Conference, as quoted in Wit and Wisdom (1936) edited by Jack Lait
As quoted in ...
Context: The moral consciousness can sustain the mocking gaze of the political man only if the certitude of peace dominates the evidence of war. Such a certitude is not obtained by a simple play of antitheses. The peace of empires issued from war rests on war. It does not restore to the alienated beings their lost identity. For that a primordial and original relation with being is needed.
Totality and Infinity (1961)
“In the end, in every war,
whoever won, the people always lost.”
"Oh Stone" (Cambodia, 1989)
Distant Road (1999)
“All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation…”
Statement quoted by Ernest Hemingway in A Moveable Feast (1964) Ch. 3, it had also provided the epigraph to The Sun Also Rises (1926).
Context: All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation... You have no respect for anything. You drink yourselves to death.
“In the lost battle,
Borne down by the flying,
Where mingles war's rattle
With groans of the dying.”
Canto III, stanza 11.
Marmion (1808)
“It would be a fine thing if war could be conducted as a game where no lives were lost.”
Source: Drenai series, Legend, Pt 1: Against the Horde, Ch. 28
Context: It would be a fine thing if war could be conducted as a game where no lives were lost. At the end of a battle combatants could meet [... ] and drink and talk.
“These men too were criminals. Their crime was vast. They had lost a war. And they had lived.”
Prologue
King Rat (1962)
Context: Changi was set like a pearl on the eastern tip of Singapore Island, iridescent under the bowl of tropical skies. It stood on a slight rise and around it was a belt of green, and farther off the green gave way to the blue-green seas and the seas to infinity of horizon.
Closer, Changi lost its beauty and became what it was — an obscene forbidding prison. Cellblocks surrounded by sun-baked courtyards surrounded by towering walls.
Inside the walls, inside the cellblocks, story on story, were cells for two thousand prisoners at capacity. Now, in the cells and in the passageways and in every nook and cranny lived some eight thousand men....
These men too were criminals. Their crime was vast. They had lost a war. And they had lived.