Death struggle

“ Who is not wounded by the intemperance of this nation? But of the dead we count, year by year, more than double the number that filled half Britain with mourning. Ah, could we behold the many thousands whom our destroyer annually delivers over unto death, collected together upon one field of slaughter, for one funeral, and one deep and wide burial-place; could we behold a full assemblage of all the parents, widows, children, friends, whose hearts have been torn by their death, surrounding that awful grave, and loading the winds with tales of woe, the whole land would cry out at the spectacle. ”

“ All, all is slumbrous peace; the bonds of the troubled flesh are broken, the tired spirit lulls and is mute, for this hush that broodeth continuously is death in life, and death is the precious goal of our dim, languid thoughts. ”

“ But after all life is but a span, "an inch or two of time," hung upon a slender cord that is momentarily in danger of breaking and in the end-the inevitable end-sure to be cut asunder by the ever-busy hand of man's universal enemy, the dread of all mankind - Death, Death, pitiless, cruel and relentless Death. Sickness, sorrow, pain and death are realities alike in the experience of young and old, rich and poor, great and small, in every land and in every clime. ”

“ If they had but been taught to measure with their pitiful thoughts the tortures of battle-fields--the slowly consuming plagues of death in the starving children, and wasted age, of the innumerable desolate those battles left;--nay, in our own life of peace, the agony of unnurtured, untaught, unhelped creatures, awaking at the grave's edge to know how they should have lived; and the worse pain of those whose existence, not the ceasing of it, is death ”

“ I wish to die with thee, if fate brings thy turn to perish first, and not to prolong my span of life at all, when once dismal death has cast thee to the tomb.
"For if thou chance to close thy eyes for ever, a victim to the maddened attack of the men-at-arms;—by whatsoever doom thy breath be cut off, by sword or disease, by sea or soil, I forswear every wanton and corrupt flame, and vow myself to a death like thine; that they who were bound by one marriage-union may be embraced in one and the same punishment. ”

“ Behind us lies the whole long grim past, a huge grave, with countless gravestones—the silent city of the dead which holds all that has been ever dear to the heart, all youth with their glad faces and forms, all glances of love, all divine moments. And all the dead compel all the living to conflict that the living may be controlled by life and not by death. From their graves the dead direct their deadliest shafts at the heart, at the living, to drag them down into the embrace of death. But something stirs in man that cannot be wounded, cannot be buried—man’s will. ”

“ The death he sought was the death he had always hoped for—the crashing clamour of the battlefield, the wild tumultuous impact of contending forces, with the whining scream of flying bullets in his ears. To die—and, dying, to atone! ”

“ At the moment we are talking, eight or ten thousand more are lying in agony, torn with shot, or gashed with cuts, their wounds all festering, some hourly to die a most excruciating death, others to linger in torture weeks and months, and many doomed to drag on a miserable existence for the rest of their lives, with diseased and mutilated bodies. ”

“ Death on the eve of battle, death on a wedding day—nothing so tragic save that most black mishap, death in action after peace has been signed. Death grins at my elbow. I cannot get him out of my thoughts. ”

“ Those tones, which despots heard with fear and dread
From living lips, ring sterner from the dead;
And he who dies, lives, oft, more truly so
Than had he never felt the untimely blow.
And so with him thus, in an instant, hurled
From earthly hopes and converse with the world.
Each trickling blood-drop shall, with sudden power
Achieve the work of years in one short hour,
And his faint death-sigh more strong arms unite
In stern defence of Freedom and of Right,
Than all he could have said by word or pen,
In a whole life of threescore years and ten!
Dead! fell assassin! ”

“ Closer and closer the death-circle growing, Even the leader's voice, clarion clear, Rang out his words of encouragement glowing, "We can but die once, boys, but SELL YOUR LIVES DEAR!" Dearly they sold them, like Berserkers raging, Facing the death that encircled them round; Death's bitter pangs by their vengeance assuaging, Marking their tracks by their dead on the ground. ”

“ With despair in their hearts they move on, to die of hunger, or cold, or disease, or, if they survive, to be brought within range of a storm of bullets and commanded to kill. They kill and are killed, none of them knows why or to what end. An ambitious stripling has only to brandish his sword and shout a few magniloquent words to induce them to rush to certain death. ”

“ Pain and disease were instinctively as much shunned by me as if I held my life on the frailest tenure; death was as formidable as my natural soldiership would suffer it to be; and even when the thought occurred that I might defy extinction, it threw but a darker shade over the common terrors, to conceive that I must undergo the suffering of death without the peace of the grave. ”

“ Death spares neither age nor rank, talent nor piety. The king of terrors sways the sceptre of absolute authority over all the living; none can elude his grasp, nor resist his power. What a scene is presented where he has achieved a conquest! The sparkling eye become dim, the instructive lips sealed in perpetual silence; the ear deaf alike to the voice of friendship and the song of mirth; and the tabernacle of bliss changed into the house of mourning. ”

“ We proceeded to drag him forwards, in spite of a resistance strengthened by the energy of terror and despair, and heedless of his cries of "Save me, save me! Death, death in any form but being dashed to shivers!" ”

“ There the greatest number and the most mangled of dead and half-dead men are lying, literally torn to pieces with shot; and the dead horses, and the half-dead which raise themselves on their feet—such feet as they have left—to sink again; then raise themselves up once more and fall down again, till they only raise their head to shriek out their pain-laden death-cry. ”

“ In the homes of the fighting men fear reigned supreme—ever the sword of Damocles suspended at the hearth. And then the death lists came and the world was wet with human tears and all the furies flew the earth—grief, hatred, revenge, love, pity and remorse, but the wail of mourning was throughout all lands in all the "sable panoply of woe" attending fast lowering vitality, bred by force of pain and hope deferred. ”

“ Gaunt, slinking dingoes snap and snarl,
Watching his slowly-ebbing breath;
⁠Crows are flying,
⁠Hoarsely crying
Burial service o’er the dying—
Foul harbingers of Death.
Full many a man has perished there,
Whose bones gleam white from the waste of sand—
⁠Who left no name
⁠On the scroll of Fame,
Yet died in his tracks, as well became
A son of that desert land. ”

“ Suffering degrades, humiliates, and leads to blasphemy. The only acceptable death is the noble death, which is not a pathological accident, but a premeditated and precious end before the Everlasting. Death upon the battle-field is the grandest of all ”

“ So stated it is inexplicable, so ruthless, so blundering — this death that we must die. It is the cruel ambush into which we are snared. It is the pit of destruction. It wrecks, it defeats, it shatters. ”

“ And ye shall do as I have done: ye shall not cover your lips, nor eat the bread of men.—So universal and dreadful will be the troubles that the dead will literally lie unburied and unwept. There can be no mourning for the dead in a period when the living are overwhelmed by troubles worse than death. ”

“ The grim monster death having done its terrible work leaves its impress on the faces of its unfortunate victims. Passion, determination and conflicting emotions plainly stamped on the faces of the victims now wrapt in the cold embrace of death. ”

“ Die, die, die, die, death comes to all." Destruction faces us wherever we turn. Destruction below and above, destruction behind and before. Change is the only Eternal,—why not as welcome Death as Life? ”

“ Therefore should every soldier in the wars do as every sick man in his bed, wash every mote out of his conscience: and dying so, death is to him advantage; or not dying, the time was blessedly lost wherein such preparation was gained. ”

“ On he comes, with furious breath Speaking peace, but dealing death; Spreading o’er our native plains Forts and banners, fire and chains. Death comes marching in his train— Death with never-ending pain— Not the pain that warriors fear ”

“ Death, as if spurning the carcass, stands inexorably afar off. Baffler of man’s law, thou, too, hast escaped with life! Not for thee is the sentence, “Blood for blood!” Thou livest, thou mayst pass the extremest boundaries of age. ”

“ Rotting and blotting, roaking, smoking chimneys?
Look, men are dying, women dying, children dying.
They sell their souls for bread, and poison-filths
Whiten their flesh, bow their bodies. Crippled,
Consumption-spotted, feeble-minded, sullen,
They seek, bewildered, out of black despair,
The star of life; so, dying a Christian death,
Lie seven a grave unheedful. “Bad as that? ”

“ Death, far more than a leveler of class, is the melting-pot into which are thrown all antagonisms, all violent discords of character. The one great fact overshadows everything, and the petty stumbling-blocks of daily life are forgotten. ”

“ But more than seven hundred poor fellows were still stretched on the ground—not, like the dead, beyond reach of earthly pain, but covered with wounds and gore—some with their legs and arms shot away, some unable to move, groaning in terrible agony, and wishing in vain for death to put an end to their misery. ”

“ Death, to the suffering body, and the willing soul, is the herald of release. Its terrors, for surely it bath terrors, arise from other sources: from things left undone, that ought to have been done, and from things done, that ought not to have been done. Let us guard against these fearful evils, now in the time of health and hope, and live every day, as if it were to be our last on earth. ”

“ We descended, or rather scrambled, down a flight of broken steps—it seemed we were going into the bowels of the earth—peeped into what looked like dark, narrow graves, where the men used to lie, smothered and half stifled, while they worked their guns, and living through this death in life for four long years, they came out of their darkness to the light of the sun to find their martyrdom had been in vain—their cause was lost. ”

“ The death of others instills in you so much horror that your own death becomes an object of desire; that is to say, if by dying, you would be in some degree useful! One calls to mind deaths which have put an end to angers and to revolts. One only retains this ambition, to be a useful corpse. ”

“ Death meets those myriads whilst indulging the most appalling passions—their hands filled with weapons of carnage, their hearts with fratricidal hate. It is the sense of the moral death involved, searing of conscience, deadening of heart, blunting of moral faculty, fruits of death brought forth in the soul of the survivor, which are more horrifying to the enlightened consciousness than the dying groans of the stricken can be to the more bodily nerve. ”

“ It may be urged, however, that an essential element is lacking in all this discussion—the sobering possibility that in war the supreme surrender of life itself may be required. Death for one’s country is indeed glorious. ”

“ O solemn thought!—well might it sink deeply into my heart, and taking root there spring forth yielding fruits of repentance. Soon may Death, the great enemy of mankind, add one more ghastly victim to the lifeless piles that lie heaped together in every clime and on every shore ”

“ And Death is the price ye pay.
But horrid terror seized upon my heart
Bidding me fight.
So vainly struggling in unequal part
I fought for right.
Seeking by blows my ebbing life to save,
On through the night;
Fighting the fiend, who thirsting, tightly clave ”

“ Yet death, and death alone, has been the key from bondage of millions of souls that have lived before mine; and there are men—men, too—whose lives have been warped and destroyed because death did not come to save them. ”

“ And the realization of death, in the revolt of one’s whole being, is invested with a special horror—that of being crushed and pulverized, of being not even a dead man, but a nameless heap, a handful of fleshly dust. ”

“ And not the violent and honourable death which a combat, even an unequal one, gives, but the unforeseen, insidious death which slowly scents the victim, watches him unweariedly and awaits him in the perfume of a poisoned nosegay, in the clear water of a contaminated spring, in the most impressive cares of a servant who has sold himself. ”

“ And whether I die now, by this assassin's knife, or live a little longer to behold the safety I establish, I have lived long enough, and am content to die!—Whether this death be, as philosophers have told us, a dreamless, senseless, and interminable trance ”

“ Wretched beings at the point of death, thrown by the wayside, continued to call with feeble voice, 'I have not the plague, I am but wounded;' and, to convince those that passed, they might be seen tearing open their real wounds, or inflicting new ones. ”

“ and the more I live, the more I dread death, even while I abhor life. Such an enigma is man--born to perish--when he wars, as I do, against the established laws of his nature. ”

“ Distracted with grief and horror, surrounded with the shades of night, shivering with cold, and appalled with the apprehension of immediate death from the swords of those who had sacrificed their friends and kinsmen, they could not endure such a complication of calamities, but generally perished in the waste, before they could receive the least comfort or assistance. ”

“ It is one of the most astonishing, and, perhaps, shocking traits of barbarous life, that death revolutionises completely the feelings of the survivors towards their deceased husbands, wives, parents, and other relatives. ”