War loses a great deal of its romance after a soldier has seen his first battle. I have a more vivid recollection of the first than the last one I was in. It is a classical maxim that it is sweet and becoming to die for one's country; but whoever has seen the horrors of a battlefield feels that it is far sweeter to live for it.

War Loses Its Romance (1887), as quoted at the Veterans Memorial at the Lackawanna County Courthouse in Scranton, Pennsylvania.