Mark Twain Quotes
If the bubble reputation can be obtained only at the cannon's mouth, I am willing to go there for it, provided the cannon is empty.
Twain, Mark. Mark Twain's Speeches. Harper & Brothers, 1910.
This is not the most common view military view which tends to place the senior officers out of harm’s way as they are “too valuable” to become casualties. Among modern armies, Israel stands out as having the same leadership doctrine as Genghis Khan. Those who attack Israel and lose, never have their commanders at the front of the battle. Israel does.
An example of this was the landing in the beaches of Normandy in WWII. Once on the beaches the allied troops had to win or die. Some of the most heroic fighting in American and English military history occurred on those beaches. Another was the Spanish Explorer Hernando Cortez who after landing in the New World, had his ships burned so that he and his soldiers had to conquer or they would die.
Pietro Antonio Domenico Trapassi
The Germans and Americans did this as a standard practice. The French “history” to which the General referred did not involve machine guns and mortars. The entrenching tool (shovel) was a fundamentally important piece of equipment to the Germans and Americans but not the French at the beginning of WWI. Later in the war, the French finally learned.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher, and lecturer. He was lauded as the "greatest humorist the United States has produced," and William Faulkner called him "the father of American literature". His novels include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), the latter often called "The Great American Novel".
