Erskine Childers

Take a step or two forward lads.....it will be easier that way.

I want you to shake the hands of every Minister in the Provisional Government ( Irish Free State )who's responsible for my death. I forgive them and so must you, Erskine. The second will apply if ever you go into Irish politics. You must …

I am a birth, domicile, and deliberate choice of citizenship an Irishman...

....death stills the bitterest controversy.

In this supremacy of tragedy, we find it only in our hearts, to wish that God's curse may overwhelm the treacherous...

The treaty, though it has good points, is a vast trap.

And here again, what does the King mean? The functions of a King as an individual, are very small indeed. What the King means, is the British Government, and let there be no mistake, under the terms of this Treaty the British Government …

I served four years in the War under the belief, growing ever fainter but held to the end, that it was fought to make such things impossible, and now I am daily witness to the prostitution of the Army I served in to fulfil the many aims I …

Lieutenant Colonel Malone––was it necessary, in order to carry out the raid, to-ransack the nursery, and to wake up the children?

This Irish war, small as it may seem now, will, if it is persisted in, will corrupt and eventually ruin not only your army, but your Empire itself. What right has England to torment and demoralise Ireland?

Drunk with triumph, I cuddled in my rocking cradle and ransacked every unvisited chamber of the memory....to see the residue take life and meaning in the light of the great revelation.

A keen wind from the west struck our faces, and as swiftly as it had come the fog rolled away from us, in one mighty mass, stripping clean and pure the starry dome of heaven....

What the devil do you mean Carruthers?

It was devotion to the sea, wedded to a fire of pent-up patriotism struggling incessantly for an outlet in strenuous physical expression; a humanity, born of acute sensitiveness to his own limitations, only adding fuel to the flame.

...the Dulcibella had begun to move in her sleep, as it were, rolling drowsily to some faint send of the sea, with an occasional short jump, like the start of an uneasy dreamer.

...to feel oneself a martyr, as everybody knows, is a pleasurable thing...

I leapt into my boots, trousers and jacket, tumbled all my gear, lying ready laid out, into my bag, donned helmet and goggles, seized charts and rushed to the upper deck....the sea was calm under a heaving swell. Engadine towered above my …

I do not know how I stand this parting from Molly, save that by a paradox we are so absoultely one that in the sense we never part, but talk to one another and watch one another and commune night and day, and grip fast the same ideals. The …

Being shot with volcanic suddenness into the Navy at an hour's notice is a queer experience, but I am beginning to get used to the life and to forget that I ever had a moustache or a tweed suit.

The cavalryman, is for practical purposes a compound of three factors; man, horse and rifle. The lance should go altogether.

First let us rid our minds of the fallacy that guerrilla war is a wholly distinct thing in kind from regular war. It is nothing of the sort. War is a science whose fundamental principles are constant however wide or numerous the …

An artillery man is not made in a month, nor an officer in a year; and unless we had had educated men as keen as mustard, and no trouble about discipline, I doubt if the battery in South Africa would have been much good for a long time.

One of the charms of Africa, is the long settled periods of pure unclouded sky, in which the sun rises and sets with no flaming splashes of vivid colours, but by gentle, imperceptible gradations of pure light, waning or waxing.

Most of England's wit and manhood scintillated in the sunlight, while British matrons and England's fairest maids lit up with looks of proud affection; bosoms heaved in sympathetic unison with the measured tramp of the ammunition boots....