Quotes about war

Under the pressure of a war to the death, all that was best, all that was most human and gentle on each side was crushed out by military necessity. On the one side, the passion for a unified world, where every individual should live a free and full life in service of the world community, was overcome by the passion to punish spies, traitors, and heretics. On the other, vague and sadly misguided yearnings for a nobler, less materialistic life were cleverly transformed by the reactionary leaders into vindictiveness against the revolutionaries.

Radio, which formerly had been the main force making for cosmopolitanism, became suddenly in each country the main stimulus to nationalism. Morning, noon and night, every civilized people was assured that enemies, whose flavor was of course subhuman and foul, were plotting its destruction. Armament scares, spy stories, accounts of the barbarous and sadistic behavior of neighboring peoples, created in every country such uncritical suspicion and hate that war became inevitable...All thought of human brotherhood, and even of personal safety, was swept away by a savage blood-lust.

The governments hated the peace party even more than each other, since their existence now depended on war.

As the months of agony advanced, there was bred in the warring peoples a genuine and even passionate will for peace and a united world. Out of the conflict of the tribes arose, at least for a while, a spirit loftier than tribalism. But this fervour lacked as yet clear guidance, lacked even the courage of conviction.

These are armed enemy, who have hastened to this site with one object only: to take the lives of my comanions and me. I must take theirs first. No truth could be plainer. Yet at the same time nothing can alter the fact that beneath the fascist insignia of their uniforms, these men are fathers, husbands, sons.

Religion, and it can merge into nationalism as orthodoxy does with the Serbs and the Russians, offers both a cause worth dying for and the promise of eternal life. The crusaders did not leave their homes all over Europe and make the long and dangerous journey to the Holy Land just to acquire loot and land. There was more and better to be had much closer to home. They were driven by what they thought was a divine mission, to retrieve the land where Christ had once lived for Christendom. Many crusaders – kings such as Richard I of England, the Lionheart, and Philip II of France and great landed magnates – left behind properties, position and families and many never returned. Egged on by religious leaders such as Pope Gregory VII, who reminded the faithful of the passage from the Book of Jeremiah ‘Cursed be he that keepeth back his sword from blood’, they killed indiscriminately those they thought of as infidels. In the massacres in Jerusalem in 1099 the streets were said to have run with blood, in some places up to the knees of the crusaders’ horses. ‘None of them were left alive; neither women nor children were spared,’ said a contemporary account.

Civil wars are hard to forget, even when peace comes, because they so often leave peoples living side by side who have very recently been enemies. Forgiveness is difficult and it is hard for the losers to accept defeat and the victors to be magnanimous. The Act of Pardon, Indemnity and Oblivion, for crimes committed in and just after the [English] Civil War, which the Parliament passed in 1660, is all too rare in history, although today we are seeing more systematic attempts, in places such as Rwanda, Colombia, Northern Ireland and South Africa, at peace and reconciliation. More usual is what happened in Franco's Spain: "a long uncivil peace", as one historian described it. Order of a sort returns, as it did in Spain or Tito's Yugoslavia, but the bitter memories of the savagery and atrocities on both sides simply go underground. The Roman poet Horace warned of "fire/smouldering under ashes". The arguments over the past can still divide the Spanish today, as the recent furore over the fate of the memorial to General Franco in the Valle de los Caídos shows. In the former Yugoslavia, where memories are much rawer, it is difficult even to discuss what happened in the 1990s. Over a century and a half later, the American Civil War still casts its shadow, in the arguments over the flying of the Confederate flag or the statues of Confederate generals or the tangled racial politics and the lingering resentments of Southern whites.

War has its own laws and one of the oldest and most persistent is that those who have surrendered and civilians, where possible, should be spared. Yet we all know the stories or have seen pictures of the sacking of cities, the execution of prisoners of war, the shelling of churches filled with refugees, or the farm buildings deliberately set on fire, and we remember names such as Oradour or Wounded Knee or Nanjing. For any American who lived through the Vietnam War the incident at My Lai, when a representative group of ordinary American soldiers rampaged through a village, has come to represent the barbarism of much of that war. (The Vietnamese forces committed their own atrocities, but Vietnam has been slow to come to terms with them.) In 1968 American reporters in the country started to hear stories about the murder in cold blood of some 500 villagers, of all ages, by an American patrol. One courageous helicopter pilot who was there did his best to save the Vietnamese and later filed a report with his superiors, who did nothing.

Today of course we have religious wars again and the targets are again without limit until the final goal is achieved. Sadly even wars which are meant to be about ending war itself take on that limitless character. If the purpose is to remove for ever the scourge of war, then whatever atrocities and cruelties are committed in its name will be justified because the sacrifice is surely worth it. In the lead-up to the Thirty Years War radical Calvinists, espousing an extreme form of Protestantism, came to believe that the Habsburg monarchy was the force of darkness which must be eradicated before the righteous could be saved. When the radicals in the French Revolution prepared to wage war on Europe it was for earthly salvation. As one revolutionary said in 1791, ‘It is because I want peace that I am asking for war.’ The enemy, as in religious wars, becomes the enemy of humanity itself and must be utterly destroyed not merely defeated.

The assumption that it is the men who should be warriors seems to be almost universal through time and across cultures and, while there are examples of women warriors, the overwhelming majority of those who have fought are men. And when rules of war have developed in different societies, women, along with old people, children and, sometimes, priests have been classified as non-combatants. The reasons why men have largely done the fighting and women have not are as much debated as the origins of war itself, and again the explanations range from the biological to the cultural. If gender differences are averaged, men come out higher on the scale of strength and size and possibly aggression, but there are many big strong women who can match and surpass men. The fact that men have more testosterone than women may make them more prone to being aggressive – although scientists are far from reaching a consensus – but there are many men who are gentle by nature and do not want to fight. Militaristic societies such as Sparta or the military through the ages would not have spent so much time on training which inculcates the ‘right’ attitudes if the great majority of men were natural-born killers. Women, when they choose or are obliged to fight, can be as fierce as men.

There is no excuse for defeat in the military code, just as success excuses everything.

But there is nothing so fragile as a military plan.