If I happen to live through this war, which I mean to do, I wonder how I'll ever settle down at home again.

Father will say to me: 'Get the plough and break up the five-acre field for corn,' and me, maybe a veteran of a dozen pitched battles in every one of which anywhere from one hundred thousand to two hundred thousand men have been engaged, not to mention fifty or a hundred smaller battles and four or five hundred skirmishes.
"When the flies begin to buzz around me I'll think they make a mighty poor noise compared with the roar of three or four hundred big cannon and a hundred thousand rifles that I've listened to so often.

If a yellow jacket should sting me, I'd say what a little thing it is, compared with the piece of shrapnel that hit me at some battle not yet fought.

Maybe I'd find things so quiet I just couldn't stand it.

Wars are mighty unsettling." "I'm thinking," said Dick, "that before this war is over all of us will get enough of it to last a lifetime.