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As we approached the brow of the hill from which it was expected we could see Harris' camp, and possibly find his men ready formed to meet us, my heart kept getting higher and higher until it felt to me as though it was in my throat. I would have given anything then to have been back in Illinois, but I had not the moral courage to halt and consider what to do; I kept right on. When we reached a point from which the valley below was in full view I halted. The place where Harris had been encamped a few days before was still there and the marks of a recent encampment were plainly visible, but the troops were gone. My heart resumed its place. It occurred to me at once that Harris had been as much afraid of me as I had been of him. This was a view of the question I had never taken before; but it was one I never forgot afterwards. From that event to the close of the war, I never experienced trepidation upon confronting an enemy, though I always felt more or less anxiety. I never forgot that he had as much reason to fear my forces as I had his. The lesson was valuable.
--
Account of his effort as Colonel of the 21st Infantry of Illinois, to engage Confederate Colonel Thomas Harris in northern Missouri Ch. 18.

 

Ulysses S. Grant

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Attlee: I'm one of those people who are incapable of religious feeling.
Harris: Do you mean you have no feeling about Christianity, or that you have no feeling about God, Christ, and life after death?
Attlee: Believe in the ethics of Christianity. Can't believe in the mumbo jumbo.
Harris: Would you say you are in agnostic?
Attlee: I don't know.
Harris: Is there an after-life, do you think?
Attlee: Possibly.

 

Clement Attlee

 

When I reached C Company lines, which were at the top of the hill, I paused and looked back at the camp, just coming into full view below me through the grey mist of early morning.

 

Evelyn Waugh

 

'Beautifully written . . . the webs of imagery that Harris has so carefully woven . . . contains writing of which our best writers would be proud . . . there is not a singly ugly or dead sentence . . .' - or so sang the critics. Hannibal is a genre novel, and all genre novels contain dead sentences - unless you feel the throb of life in such periods as 'Tommaso put the lid back on the cooler' or 'Eric Pickford answered' or 'Pazzi worked like a man possessed' or 'Margot laughed in spite of herself' or 'Bob Sneed broke the silence.' What these commentators must be thinking of, I suppose, are the bits when Harris goes all blubbery and portentous (every other phrase a spare tyre), or when, with a fugitive poeticism, he swoons us to a dying fall: 'Starling looked for a moment through the wall, past the wall, out to forever and composed herself...' 'It seemed forever ago...' 'He looked deep, deep into her eyes...' 'His dark eyes held her whole...' Needless to say, Harris has become a serial murderer of English sentences, and Hannibal is a necropolis of prose.

 

Martin Amis

 

...soldierly simplicity of character that has always represented the military at its best. In the higher ranks it is different. The higher a man is placed, the broader his point of view. Different interests and a wide variety of passions, good and bad, will arise on all sides. Envy and generosity, pride and humility, wrath and compassion - all may appear as effective forces in this great drama.

 

Carl von Clausewitz

 

Whoso maintains that I am humbled now
(Who wait the Awful Day) is still a liar;
I hope to meet my Maker brow to brow
And find my own the higher.

 

Frances Cornford