By coincidence, the first and last British soldiers to be killed in action during World War I lie in graves that face one another.

British Army private John Parr was shot while on a reconnaissance patrol in Belgium on Aug. 21, 1914, 17 days after Britain declared war.

Private George Edwin Ellison was killed on patrol on the outskirts of Mons on Nov. 11, 1918, 90 minutes before the armistice came into effect.

Both are buried in the St. Symphorien military cemetery southeast of Mons, which was lost to the Germans at the start of the war and regained at the very end.

Theodore Roosevelt’s wife and mother died in the same house on the same day, Valentine’s Day 1884. His wife had just given birth to their daughter Alice, and the pregnancy had hidden her kidney disease. He held her for two hours, had to be torn away to see his mother die of typhoid fever, then returned to his wife, who died in his arms.

In his diary he drew a large X and wrote, “The light has gone out of my life.” Then he fled west to grieve in private.

In 1941, New Jersey pacifist Theodore Kaufman self-published Germany Must Perish!, a 104-page booklet advocating the sterilization of the German people and the distribution of their lands. Kaufman was almost a complete nonentity — few shared his views, and the book received few sales or notices. But it made him a giant in Germany, where it became a mainstay of nationalist propaganda, stoking the very fires that Kaufman had hoped to extinguish.

In his diary on Aug. 3, 1941, Joseph Goebbels wrote, “He really could not have done it better and more advantageously for us if he had written the book to order. I will have this book distributed in millions of copies in Germany, above all on the front, and will write a preface and afterword myself. It will be most instructive for every German man and for every German woman to see what would happen to the German people if, as in November 1918, a sign of weakness were given.”

Hitler approved, and soon the propaganda ministry had produced a brochure presenting and commenting on Kaufman’s book. “Above all,” Goebbels wrote, “this brochure will finally and definitively do away with the last remnants of a still-existing softness. In reading this brochure, even the stupidest idiot can figure out what threatens us if we become weak.”

American journalist Howard K. Smith witnessed these effects firsthand in Germany. “No man has ever done so irresponsible a disservice to the cause his nation is fighting and suffering for than [Theodore] Kaufmann,” he wrote. “His half-baked brochure provided the Nazis with one of the best light artillery pieces they have, for, used as the Nazis used it, it served to bolster up that terror which forces Germans who dislike the Nazis to support, fight and die to keep Nazism alive.”

Kaufman protested, weakly, that German anti-Semitism had existed long before his book appeared. But the boost to propaganda was undeniable. “Few Americans have ever heard of a prominent fellow-citizen named Kaufmann,” wrote The Nation in November 1942. “In Germany every child has known of him for a long time. Germans are so well informed about Mr. Kaufmann that the mere mention of his name recalls what he stands for. In one of his recent articles Dr. Goebbels wrote, ‘Thanks to the Jew Kaufmann, we Germans know only too well what to expect in case of defeat.'”

From a letter from George Patton to his son, written on D-Day:

At 0700 this morning the BBC announced that the German radio had just come out with an announcement of the landing of Allied paratroops and of large numbers of assault craft near shore. So that is it. …

All men are timid on entering any fight whether it is the first fight or the last fight all of us are timid. Cowards are those who let their timidity get the better of their manhood. You will never do that because of your blood lines on both sides. I think I have told you the story of Marshal Touraine who fought under Louis XIV. On the morning of one of his last battles — he had been fighting for forty years — he was mounting his horse when a young ADC who had just come from the court and had never missed a meal or heard a hostile shot said: ‘M. de Touraine it amazes me that a man of your supposed courage should permit his knees to tremble as he walks out to mount.’ Touraine replied: ‘My lord duke I admit that my knees do tremble but should they know where I shall this day take them they would shake even more.’ That is it. Your knees may shake but they will always take you toward the enemy.

In 1944, as the Allies were preparing to invade France, British Intelligence sought a way to confuse the Germans as to their plans. They hired Meyrick Clifton James (right), an Australian-born lieutenant in the Army Pay Corps who bore a striking resemblance to Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, who would be commanding the Allied ground troops during the invasion. David Niven, then a colonel in the Army Film Unit, invited James to London under cover as a journalist, and James set about studying the general’s speech patterns and mannerisms. Then he was conspicuously dispatched, as Monty, to Gibraltar and then to Algiers, watched by avid German spies.

It seemed to work. The plot went through “from start to finish without a hitch,” MI5 reported, “and we knew that the main feature of its story had reached the Germans.” The real Monty led the successful landings at Normandy while James recovered from the ordeal in a safe house in Cairo. “He was under terrible pressure and strain,” reported the wife of an intelligence officer detailed to look after him. “Coming out of that part was very difficult for him.” But he had some consolation: Under army rules, he would receive the equivalent of a general’s pay for every day he had impersonated Monty.

On May 29, 1856, Abraham Lincoln spoke “like a giant enraged” for 90 minutes before a crowd of a thousand people at a political convention in Bloomington, Ill. Strangely, no one knows what he said. According to legend his oratory held the audience so spellbound that no one thought to record a word of it; more likely it was such a passionate denouncement of slavery that his political advisers thought it wisest to suppress it. But it electrified the audience, and the convention led to the establishment of the state Republican party.

“What actually did Lincoln say that evening in May, 1856, that made such a stupendous impact … and in ninety minutes transformed Lincoln from a circuit-riding Illinois lawyer and office-seeker into a national leader?” asks Elwell Crissey in Lincoln’s Lost Speech (1967). “Here we encounter a fascinating enigma in American history.”

Ulysses Grant, by contrast, had a “perfect speech” that he used on several occasions beginning in 1865. From Grant: A Biography (1982), by William S. McFeely:

In the afternoon there was a dinner at which tediously predictable worthies of New York — John A. Dix, Horace Greeley, and a divine or two — gave speeches. At the close of the tributes, Grant rose and, as he had done in St. Louis more than a year earlier, gave the speech which was to become his trademark. The New York Times report included the response of his audience: ‘I rise only to say I do not intend to say anything. [Laughter] I thank you for your kind words and your hearty welcome. [Applause].’