War & Peace Quote by Martha Gellhorn

Gellhorn writes like someone trying to make endurance legible without turning it into a postcard. The sentence begins with a drumbeat of “after... after... after,” stacking time the way trauma stacks in the body: their own war, then repression, then exile. It’s a reporter’s move - chronology as evidence - but it’s also moral accounting. She wants the reader to feel the weight of years, not just register a tragic situation.

The key turn is “remain intact in spirit.” Intact doesn’t mean unscarred; it means unbroken as a political and human fact. In the context of post-Civil War Spain - Franco’s victory, the long clampdown, the scattered Republican diaspora - the expectation from comfortable outsiders is either resignation (“they lost”) or romantic ruin (“they are shattered”). Gellhorn rejects both. She’s documenting a third state: people whose lives have been dismantled, yet whose inner orientation hasn’t been surrendered.

“Armed with a transcendent faith” is deliberately provocative. Faith here isn’t necessarily religious; it’s the stubborn metaphysics of justice when history refuses to cooperate. By calling it a weapon, she flips the usual hierarchy of power: the regime has guns and prisons, the exiles have conviction and memory - and those can outlast a dictatorship.

The final paradox - “never won, and yet... never accepted defeat” - is the thesis and the challenge. Gellhorn is quietly rebuking the tidy scoreboard approach to politics. Victory is a moment; refusal is a practice. In her framing, survival itself becomes a form of resistance, and the reader is asked to decide which kind of “realism” they’re willing to live with.