A war doesn’t merely kill off a few thousand or a few hundred thousand young men. It kills off something in a people that can never be brought back. And if a people goes through enough wars, pretty soon all that’s left is the brute, the creature that we—you and I and others like us—have brought up from the slime.
Interpretation
War destroys not just lives but the essence and humanity of a people.
This quote reflects on the profound and irreparable damage that war inflicts on society. Beyond the immediate loss of life, it suggests that war erodes the moral and cultural fabric of a community, ultimately reducing it to a more primal state. As societies experience repeated conflicts, they risk losing their values, compassion, and humanity, resulting in a 'brute' existence that is a far cry from their former selves.
In practice
In a speech about the impacts of conflict on communities.
Sometimes, immersed in his books, there would come to him the awareness of all that he did not know, of all that he had not read; and the serenity for which he labored was shattered as he realized the little time he had in life to read so much, to learn what he had to know.
The love of literature, of language, of the mystery of the mind and heart showing themselves in the minute, strange, and unexpected combinations of letters and words, in the blackest and coldest print—the love which he had hidden as if it were illicit and dangerous, he began to display, tentatively at first, and then boldly, and then proudly.
All you have to do is hold your first soldier who is dying in your arms, and have that terribly futile feeling that I can't do anything about it... Then you understand the horror of war.
But they (the infantry) had no use for boys of twelve and thirteen, and before I had a chance in another war, the desire to kill people to whom I had not been introduced had passed away.
War is a series of catastrophes which result in victory.
Having traveled to parts of the world where war has done its usual nasty work on people's lives, I have come to develop a particular hatred for the shape, the look, the sound of the AK-47.
I think that this is the first war in history that on the morrow the victors sued for peace and the vanquished called for unconditional surrender.
War's dirty little secret is that some men love it.
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