Carolina QuotesThe Soldier is a farmer. He knows how to shape the earth. He is a carpenter; he erects ramparts and palisades. A miner, he digs trenches and tunnels; a mason, he chisels a road from a sheer face of stone. The Soldier is a physician who performs surgery without anesthetic, a priest who inters the dead without psalm. He is a philosopher who plumbs the mysteries of existence, a linguist who pronounces "pussy" in a dozen tongues. He is an architect and a demolition man, a fire brigadier and an incendiary. He is a beast who dwells in the dirt, a worm, owning a mouth and an anus and aught but appetite in between.
Steven Pressfield Connected to the Carolinas
Source
Polemides, p. 79
- work
- Tides of War (2000)
- year
- 2000
- locator
- p. 79
Cite this record
“The Soldier is a farmer. He knows how to shape the earth. He…” Steven Pressfield. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-45B3CF5979. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/45b3cf5979
More from Steven Pressfield
These are armed enemy, who have hastened to this site with one object only: to take the lives of my comanions and me. I must take theirs first. No truth could be plainer. Yet at the same time nothing can alter the fact that beneath the fascist insignia of their uniforms, these men are fathers, husbands, sons.
The foe fell back. Our companies pushed through. For the time it takes to count to five hundred, I thought we might even conquer. For now the mulishness of the Athenian Soldier-farmer, the pigheaded refusal to yield which had at first been scorned by his betters-now this shone to the fore. By the gods, these clodkickers had learned how to fight! [...] They no longer fell apart at the apparition of cowardice among their comrades or themselves, but had come to understand that the same man may play the craven in the morning and the hero in the afternoon. Give them this: they were tough. Tougher than the Scyths and Getai, for all their savage valor, and tougher than the Amazons, despite their dash and dazzle.
This aspis was my father's and his father's before him. I have sworn before God to die before another man took this from my hand. He crossed to the ranks of Thespians, to a man, an obscure warrior among them. Into the fellow's grasp he placed the shield.