THE SECOND WORLD WAR

'It's everything that matters against everything that mustn't be allowed to matter.'

Geoffrey Faber in Toby Faber, Faber & Faber: The Untold Story, p.158.

WAR CHANGES LESS THAN WE THINK

'...war creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on a precipice.' 

CS Lewis, 'Learning in War-Time' in CS Lewis Essay Collection: Literature, Philosophy and Short Stories, p.172.  

WAR

'War is brutish, inglorious, and a terrible waste. Combat leaves an indelible mark on those who are forced to endure it. The only redeeming factors were my comrades' incredible bravery and their devotion to each other. Marine Corps training taught us to kill efficiently and to try to survive. But it also taught us loyalty to each other - and love. That esprit de corps sustained us.

Until the millenium arrives and countries cease trying to enslave others, it will be necessary to accept one's responsibilities and to be willing to make sacrifices for one's country - as my comrades did. As the troops used to say, "If the country is good enough to live in, it's good enough to fight for." With privilege goes responsibility.'
EB Sledge, With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa, p.344.

WAR

'Just as time-lapse photography makes visible, in ever more compressed and penetrating form, movements that would otherwise not be thus grasped by our vision, so the war makes manifest in particularly drastic and unshrouded forms that which for years has become ever more dreadfully clear to us as the essence of the "world." It is not war that first brings death, nor war that first invents the pains and torments of human bodies and souls, nor war that first unleashes lies, injustice, and violence. It is not war that first makes our existence so utterly precarious and renders human beings powerless, forcing them to watch their desires and plans being thwarted and destroyed by more "exalted powers." But war makes all of this, which existed already apart from it and before it, vast and unavoidable to us who would gladly prefer to overlook it all.'

Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer, p.373.

WARS

'Never think that wars are irrational catastrophes: they happen when wrong ways of thinking and living bring about intolerable situations; and whichever side may be the more outrageous in its aims and the more brutal in its methods, the root causes of conflict are usually to be found in some wrong way of life in which all parties have acquiesced, and for which everybody must, to some extent, bear the blame.'

Dorothy L Sayers, 'Why Work?' in Creed or Chaos? p.48.