War & Peace Quote by Erich Maria Remarque

“Anyway” lands like a shrug over a mass grave. Remarque’s line performs one of his signature moves: stripping war of its advertised climax. The fighting may be finished “so far as they are concerned,” but that phrase is a cold audit of who gets to count as “they.” Survivors, officials, people safely elsewhere? Or the dead, whose “concern” has been terminated by paperwork and distance? The sentence exposes how quickly society rebrands catastrophe as closure.

Then he pivots: waiting for dysentery. Not bullets, not heroics, not the clean drama of an armistice, but the slow, humiliating decay that follows armies even after the flags change. Dysentery is the anti-myth of war: banal, preventable, indifferent. By choosing disease, Remarque undercuts the notion that peace automatically restores dignity. The body keeps paying after the politics have moved on.

The specific intent is accusatory but measured. He isn’t arguing; he’s reporting, letting the ugliness indict itself. The subtext is that “over” is a comforting lie told by those not trapped in the aftermath: the wounded, the displaced, the prisoners, the civilians in wrecked infrastructure where sanitation collapses. Contextually, Remarque writes out of World War I’s industrial slaughter and the interwar disillusionment that followed it, when official narratives insisted on meaning and sacrifice while ordinary people endured hunger, infection, and psychic wreckage.

The line works because it refuses catharsis. It replaces the end of war with the continuation of suffering, and it does so in two plain sentences that feel like a verdict delivered without ceremony.