War & Peace Quote by Philip Gibbs

There is a cold, almost theatrical calm in the way Gibbs stages this as a conversation: “Monsieur,” “you ask.” The intimacy is strategic. War propaganda rarely works by shouting; it works by lowering its voice until it sounds like truth confided across a table. The speaker’s readiness for death isn’t presented as despair, but as a moral appetite: dying becomes a form of emotional clarity, even relief.

The intent is to translate the chaos of World War I into a clean, legible motive. “Glad” is the key word - a psychological provocation meant to reverse the reader’s instinctive recoil from death. If a man can be glad to die, then the cause must be pure, the sacrifice inevitable. It’s a conversion narrative in miniature: fear is alchemized into patriotism.

The subtext is more troubling and more effective. Love is paired with hate as if they are equal civic virtues, two sides of a single national loyalty. The sentence offers a ready-made emotional script for civilians: you may be broken, but you must be certain; you may grieve, but you must also blame. “The Germans who have put this war on us” compresses responsibility into a single target, stripping the conflict of entangled alliances, militarism, and political failure. It is less an argument than an exoneration.

Gibbs, a journalist, is working in an era when correspondents were expected to sustain morale as much as report facts. The quote’s power lies in its plausible voice: not a general, not a politician, but an ordinary man who has supposedly reached the simplest conclusion. That simplicity is the point - and the weapon.