War & Peace Quote by Albert Bushnell Hart

War isn’t just blood and flags; it’s also contracts, supply chains, and sudden winners. Hart’s line has the cool, almost accountant’s chill of a professional historian refusing to let moral drama crowd out economic fact. “As often happens” is doing quiet, brutal work: it normalizes what people prefer to treat as an aberration. The phrase suggests a pattern, not a scandal - which is exactly the point. Hart is warning the reader that prosperity and catastrophe routinely share a border.

The sharpest word here is “notwithstanding.” It frames “constant loss” as a background condition that doesn’t necessarily interrupt accumulation. That’s the subtext: wartime suffering doesn’t automatically produce shared sacrifice, and it certainly doesn’t prevent segments of the nation from cashing in. Hart’s focus on “some parts” is also a subtle map of inequality. The country is not a single body feeling a single pain; it’s a patchwork where certain regions, industries, and social classes experience war as stimulus.

Context matters: Hart wrote as an interpreter of American political development, an era when historians increasingly tracked material forces alongside heroics. In a U.S. shaped by Civil War memory and, later, World War I mobilization, the observation lands like a corrective to patriotic storytelling. The intent isn’t to sneer; it’s to puncture comforting narratives. Hart’s sentence forces the reader to hold two truths at once: wars drain human life relentlessly, and they can still manufacture prosperity - often in precisely the places with the most leverage to profit from crisis.