Amusing quotes from the 1850-1920 era

[Baris]

Not amusing but amasing maybe.

'Men, I am not ordering you to attack. I am ordering you to die. In the time that it takes us to die, other forces and commanders can come and take our place.' M.Kemal Atatürk.
Orders to the 57th Infantry Regiment, at the Battle of Gallipoli (25 April 1915); as quoted in Studies in Battle Command by Combat Studies Institute, US Army Command and General Staff College, p. 89; also quoted in Turkey (2007) by Verity Campbell, p. 188
Variant translation: I am not ordering you to fight, I am ordering you to die.

[yellow ribbon]

well Baris, they asked for amusing quotes two years ago, exceptions may be allowed for us for a moment...

first, the quote is interesting, but to be right, wasnt he still named M. Kemal Bey / Kemal Pasa at that time ? so with a lower title?

second:

another exception, in time and cause, to burden the thread:

""Now I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. You won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country. Men, all this stuff you've heard about America not wanting to fight, wanting to stay out of the war, is a lot of horse dung. Americans traditionally love to fight. All real Americans, love the sting of battle. When you were kids, you all admired the champion marble shooter, the fastest runner, the big league ball players, the toughest boxers ... Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time. I wouldn't give a hoot in Hell for a man who lost and laughed. That's why Americans have never lost and will never lose a war. Because the very thought of losing is hateful to Americans. Now, an army is a team. It lives, eats, sleeps, fights as a team. This individuality stuff is a bunch of crap. The Bilious bastards who wrote that stuff about individuality for the Saturday Evening Post, don't know anything more about real battle than they do about fornicating. Now we have the finest food and equipment, the best spirit, and the best men in the world. You know ... My God, I actually pity those poor bastards we're going up against. My God, I do. We're not just going to shoot the bastards, we're going to cut out their living guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks. We're going to murder those lousy Hun bastards by the bushel. Now some of you boys, I know, are wondering whether or not you'll chicken out under fire. Don't worry about it. I can assure you that you'll all do your duty. The Nazis are the enemy. Wade into them. Spill their blood, shoot them in the belly. When you put your hand into a bunch of goo, that a moment before was your best friends face, you'll know what to do. Now there's another thing I want you to remember. I don't want to get any messages saying that we are holding our position. We're not holding anything, we'll let the Hun do that. We are advancing constantly, and we're not interested in holding onto anything except the enemy. We're going to hold onto him by the nose, and we're going to kick him in the ass. We're going to kick the hell out of him all the time, and we're going to go through him like crap through a goose. Now, there's one thing that you men will be able to say when you get back home, and you may thank God for it. Thirty years from now when you're sitting around your fireside with your grandson on your knee, and he asks you, What did you do in the great World War Two? You won't have to say, Well, I shoveled shit in Louisiana. Alright now, you sons of bitches, you know how I feel. I will be proud to lead you wonderful guys into battle anytime, anywhere. That's all."

General George S. Patton, Jr., 31 MAY 1944

[Baris]

well Baris, they asked for amusing quotes two years ago, exceptions may be allowed for us for a moment...

first, the quote is interesting, but to be right, wasnt he still named M. Kemal Bey / Kemal Pasa at that time ? so with a lower title?

Thanks. But maybe the amusing part of the battle is one soldier carrying 250 kilograms of ammunition byhimself to coastal batteries to shoot passing ships
Anyway, history is always speculative.

[yellow ribbon]

oh, i also like the point when they shipped an allied fleet into the Dardanelles but didnt secure the entrance....

...MINES...

[Baris]

Whether Dardanelles got the name 'impassable' due to mines, anzacs. I got the impression it was one of the battle series of heroism that deserves an ageod game
But indeed M.Kemal added an identity to himself as 'Atatürk'(Unlike Stalin add identity to Lenin after his death;M.Kemal added while alive) just like he added an identity to the peoples in Ottoman Empire(from community to citizenship) that there were no other chance to survive as a community.

[Le Ricain]

Not amusing but amasing maybe.

'Men, I am not ordering you to attack. I am ordering you to die. In the time that it takes us to die, other forces and commanders can come and take our place.' M.Kemal Atatürk.
Orders to the 57th Infantry Regiment, at the Battle of Gallipoli (25 April 1915); as quoted in Studies in Battle Command by Combat Studies Institute, US Army Command and General Staff College, p. 89; also quoted in Turkey (2007) by Verity Campbell, p. 188
Variant translation: I am not ordering you to fight, I am ordering you to die.

A version of Ataturk's famous order has entered into the Allied Gallipoli tradition as a joke:

Senior English Officer to a young Australian soldier: "Soldier, have you come here to die?"

Australian soldier: "No Sir. I came here yesterday."

[yellow ribbon]

The cavalry, in particular, were not friendly to the aeroplane, which it was believed, would frighten the horses.

Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh

[Random]

An ode to that indispensable tool for the advancement of civilization, the Machine Gun:

Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim Gun, and they have not

Hilaire Belloc

[yellow ribbon]

not amusing, but i just watched news and it crossed my mind, if you know what i mean...

"From the time I took office as Chancellor of the Exchequer, I began to learn that the State held, in the face of the Bank and the City, an essentially false position as to finance. The Government itself was not to be a substantive power, but was to leave the Money Power supreme and unquestioned."

William Ewart Gladstone (1809-98)

[yellow ribbon]

"I have two great enemies, the Southern Army in front of me, and the financial institutions in the rear. Of the two, the one in my rear is my greatest foe."

President Abraham Lincoln 1809-65

[Le Ricain]

"She was Kane, but was he Able?"

Reference to British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston, who in 1863 was named as a co-respondent in the divorce of the radical Irish journalist Timothy O'Kane and his wife Margaret. O'Kane also claimed £20,000 in damages from Palmerston. Palmerston was aged 79 years in 1863. The case and the damages were dismissed on a technicality.

[Philippe]

Does anyone happen to have access to the text of the letter than Napoleon III sent to the emperor Franz Joseph shortly after France declared war on Austria? I've looked for it on the internet but have never managed to find it. It says something to the effect that the emperor should not take the recent outbreak of war between the two nations as an indication that Napoleon's personal feeling towards the emperor have in any way been diminished. I think it may actually have been quoted in Age of Rifles in the introduction to the description of the battle of Magenta. I'd love to see the full text, and not have to rely on an increasingly faulty memory.

[Le Ricain]

"The French Army is an army of lions led by donkeys"
Eduard Totleben (Russian General of Engineers), 1855

This quote has been used often to describe the British Army during WWI. It was originally coined by Totleben to describe the French Army during the Crimean War.

[Le Ricain]

Speaking of quotes from the PoN era, I would add my signature quote to the list.

[yellow ribbon]

WE PROUDLY PRESENT:

THE IRON CHANCELLOR! - and Helmuth Karl Bernhard von Moltke [color="Red"]or: could we also integrate a new audio file in PON[/color] (no spam intended, just for fun)

Restored Edison Records Revive Giants of 19th-Century Germany
By RON COWEN
Published: January 30, 2012


Tucked away for decades in a cabinet in Thomas Edison’s laboratory, just behind the cot in which the great inventor napped, a trove of wax cylinder phonograph records has been brought back to life after more than a century of silence.

The wax cylinder containing Otto Von Bismarck's voice.

The cylinders, from 1889 and 1890, include the only known recording of the voice of the powerful chancellor Otto von Bismarck. Two preserve the voice of Helmuth von Moltke, a venerable German military strategist, reciting lines from Shakespeare and from Goethe’s “Faust” into a phonograph horn. (Moltke was 89 when he made the recordings — the only ones known to survive from someone born as early as 1800.) Other records found in the collection hold musical treasures — lieder and rhapsodies performed by German and Hungarian singers and pianists at the apex of the Romantic era, including what is thought to be the first recording of a work by Chopin.

Officials at Edison’s old laboratory in West Orange, N.J., now the Thomas Edison National Historical Park, unveiled the newly identified recordings on Monday.

“This is sensational,” said Ulrich Lappenküper, director of the Otto von Bismarck Foundation in Friedrichsruh, Germany. The Bismarck cylinder is documented in the foundation’s archive, but after searching for it in the United States and Germany since 2005, Dr. Lappenküper and his colleagues assumed it had been lost forever.

The unlabeled recordings, all housed in the same wooden box, had been found in 1957. But their contents remained unknown until last year, when Jerry Fabris, the curator at the Edison laboratory, used a playback device called the Archeophone to trace the grooves of 12 of the 17 cylinders in the box and convert the analog electrical signals into broadcast WAV files.

He then enlisted two sound historians, Patrick Feaster of Indiana University and Stephan Puille of the University of Applied Sciences in Berlin , to help identify the faint recordings.

The lid of the box held an important clue. It had been scratched with the words “Wangemann. Edison.”

The first name refers to Adelbert Theodor Edward Wangemann, who joined the laboratory in 1888, assigned to transform Edison’s newly perfected wax cylinder phonograph into a marketable device for listening to music. Wangemann became expert in such strategies as positioning musicians around the recording horn in a way to maximize sound quality.

In June 1889, Edison sent Wangemann to Europe, initially to ensure that the phonograph at the Paris World’s Fair remained in working order. After Paris, Wangemann toured his native Germany, recording musical artists and often visiting the homes of prominent members of society who were fascinated with the talking machine.

Until now, the only available recording from Wangemann’s European trip has been a well-known and well-worn cylinder of Brahms playing an excerpt from his first Hungarian Dance. That recording is so damaged “that many listeners can scarcely discern the sound of a piano, which has in turn tarnished the reputations of both Wangemann and the Edison phonograph of the late 1880s,” Dr. Feaster said. “These newly unearthed examples vindicate both.”

In October 1889 Wangemann and his wife visited the 74-year-old Bismarck, then chancellor of the German empire, at his castle in Friedrichsruh. Bismarck listened to recordings made in Paris and Berlin, and at his wife’s urging, he made his own. He recited snippets of poetry and songs in English, Latin, French and German. Perhaps surprisingly, given his involvement in the Franco-Prussian War, he chose to recite lines from the French national anthem.

“Bismarck was a very, very witty man” and reciting the Marseillaise “would tickle him,” said Jonathan Steinberg, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of the new biography “Bismarck: A Life.”

Bismarck ends the recording with some advice, apparently for his son Herbert, who heard the recording a few weeks later in Budapest, to live life in moderation. “Bismarck was a gigantic man with gigantic appetites and a gigantic temper,” Dr. Steinberg said. “He never did anything in moderation, and Herbert was just as immoderate.”

Mr. Puille, the sound historian in Berlin, said it was not easy to identify Bismarck’s voice. But after he deciphered a reference to Friedrichsruh, Bismarck’s estate, in the announcement of one of the cylinders, “I immediately knew that I was on the right track,” he continued in an e-mail message.

“Bismarck’s name is not mentioned in the recording, but I had collected all available information about his cylinder in the contemporary press, and the content of the cylinder matched perfectly.”

He added, “No doubt this find is the culmination of my researcher’s life.”

The panoply of musical artists on the cylinders “represented the prominent musicians of the day,” said Jonathan Berger, a musicologist at Stanford.

“The fact that their musical lineage and circle of friends included the great composers of the 19th century makes their recordings valuable documents of performance practices and musical sensibilities of the time,” he added.

The Wangemann cylinders are just the latest in an explosion of discoveries in early recorded sound over the last five years, said Tim Brooks, a sound historian in Greenwich, Conn. In 2008, Dr. Feaster and his colleagues at FirstSounds.org succeeded in playing a version of the French lullaby “Au Clair de la Lune,” deciphered from a tracing in soot-coated paper dating from 1860 — the earliest sound ever recovered. A trove of cylinders recorded in Russia in the 1890s was also recently uncovered.

The ability to digitize old recordings and the use of new imaging techniques to map the grooves of damaged cylinder records without touching them has contributed to the onslaught, Mr. Brooks said, adding, “You can actually hear history as well as read about it.”
A version of this article appeared in print on January 31, 2012, on page D3 of the New York edition with the headline: Restored Edison Records Revive Giants of 19th-Century Germany.