War & Peace Quote by Allan Massie

War doesn not reward clean decisions; it punishes them. Allan Massie’s line works because it strips military leadership of its usual romance and replaces it with something closer to triage. “Blunders” aren’t presented as moral failures or rare incompetence. They’re “inescapable,” baked into the machinery of conflict, because war forces action under radical uncertainty: imperfect maps, unreliable intelligence, exhausted troops, political pressure, and an enemy actively trying to make your information wrong.

The real punch sits in “choice.” Massie quietly reframes what we call strategy as a constrained menu. Military mythology loves the decisive commander, the brilliant plan, the elegant victory. Massie suggests that much of command is selecting damage: the “bad” option that hemorrhages resources versus the “worse” one that collapses morale, invites invasion, or fractures an alliance. That’s not fatalism; it’s a critique of the public’s demand for omniscience. If the range of available moves is already grim, judging outcomes as if leaders had a full set of good alternatives becomes a category error.

Context matters: Massie, a novelist and historian steeped in imperial and classical narratives, is pushing back against the tidy hindsight that turns messy campaigns into morality plays. The subtext is political, too. Democracies and empires alike need war to feel controllable; it justifies sacrifice and sustains legitimacy. Massie punctures that comfort. He implies that the scandal isn’t that blunders happen; it’s that we keep pretending war is a domain where blunders can be engineered away, rather than the predictable consequence of choosing between losses.