Bernard Cornwell Quotes
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Then you start another book and suddenly the galley proofs of the last one come in and you have to wrench your attention away from what you're writing and try to remember what you were thinking when you wrote the previous one.
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The British army fought against other infantry arrayed in two ranks and every man could use his musket, and if cavalry threatened they marched and wheeled into a square of four ranks, and still every man could use his musket, but the soldiers at the heart of the two French columns could never fire without hitting the men in front.
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They haven't made an armor strong enought to resist an English arrow.
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I sometimes wonder what would have happened if the first book had not sold... doesn't bear thinking about, but I suppose we'd have made it work somehow.
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...all battles had to be fought one step at a time. No point in worrying about the future if there was to be no future, so he and and Harper worked patiently away.
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'There are men in Spain who need me, who trust me. They're not special men, they wouldn't look very well in Carlton House, but they are fighting for all of you. That's why I'm here.'
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Remember, Mr Sharpe, an officer's eyes are more valuable than his sword!
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And the good news is that you've got a brain. You do! Honest! I saw it with my own eyes, thus disproving the navy's stubborn contention that soldiers have nothing whatsoever inside their skulls. I shall write a paper for the Review. I'll be famous! Brain discovered in a soldier.
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'Nondum amabam, et amare amabam. I did not love, but yearned to love.' 'A very elaborate way of saying you're lonely.'
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For five thousand infantry would now cross the Kaitna at a place where men said the river was uncrossable, then fight an enemy horde at least ten times their number. ... The enemy had stolen a march, the redcoats had journeyed all night and were bone tired, but Wellesley would have his battle.
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Forrest saw the war as a moral crusade, a fight for decency and order, and victory to the British would mean that the Almighty, who could not possibly be suspected of Republican sentiments, had blessed the British effort.
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He wondered again, for the hundredth hundredth time, why these men, reckoned by their country to be the dregs of society, fought so well, so willingly, so bravely.
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They thought war was a game and every defeat only made them more eager to play.
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'Sensible thing to do, is for us to bugger off out of here and got to bed.' 'Sensible thing to do, is get out the bloody army and die in bed.' 'But that's not why we joined, is it?' 'Speak for yourself, sir. I just joined to get a square meal. Getting killed wasn't really part of the idea at all.'
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Sharpe, Lossow suspected, often got what he wanted, but the achievements never seemed to satisfy. His friend, the German decided, was like a man who, searching for a crock of gold, found ten and rejected them all because the pots were the wrong shape.
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A charge of knights was supposed to be thundering death on hooves, a flail of metal driven by the ponderous weight of men, horses and armor, and properly done, it was a mass maker of widows.
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'I'll put a word in for you, Sharpe, because a man shouldn't be disciplined for killing the enemy, but I don't suppose my help will do you any good.'
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If you capture a ship, Sharpe, you keep the old name unless it's really obnoxious. Nelson took the Franklin at the Nile, an eighty gun thing of great beauty, but the navy will be damned if it has a ship named after a traitorous bloody Yankee so we call her the Canopus now.
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The first bombs looked like livid shooting stars. Then, as they began their shrieking fall, the bomb trails converged. God had not shown mercy, the British possessed none and Copenhagen must suffer.
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'It is you, sir?' 'Sergeant Barret, isn't it?' 'Yes, sir.' 'It is me' They bloody hung you, sir.' 'This army can't do anything right, Sergeant.'
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Sir Thomas was a sentimental man. He loved Soldiers. He had once thought all men who wore the red coat were rogues and thieves, the scourings of the gutters, and since he had joined the army he had discovered he was right, but he had also learned to love them. He loved their patience, their ferocity, their endurance, and their bravery.
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'Would you give my warmest regards to Sir Arthur Wellesley? Or Lord Wellington as we must now call him.' 'You know him, sir?' 'Of course. We were at the Royal Academy of Equiation together, at Angers. It's strange, Major, how your greatest soldier was taught to fight in France.'
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'The door is locked, Captain.' 'Then I'll break it down.' 'It is a shrine.' 'Then I'll say a prayer of forgiveness after I've knocked it down.'
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'But the implication of the psalm, is it not, is that we are sheep and that God is our shepherd? Why else would He put us in a pasture and protect us with a staff? But what I have never fully understood is why the shepherd blames the sheep when they become ill.'