Daily Inspiration Quote by Martha Gellhorn

Gellhorn’s sentence lands like a quiet accusation dressed up as reportage: the war is “over,” and the reward for bravery is administrative abandonment. The pivot on “But now” is doing the moral work here. It signals the familiar turn from heroic narrative to peacetime bookkeeping, when nations stop needing fighters and start needing them to disappear.

The phrasing “again men without a country” is a knife twist. “Again” implies this isn’t tragedy as exception, but as cycle: displacement as a recurring condition, not a temporary wartime glitch. By stacking “without a country or families or homes or work,” she builds a ladder of losses from the grand to the basic, collapsing patriotism into hunger and loneliness. The line refuses the romantic mythology of guerrilla struggle; it re-centers the aftermath, when the camera crews leave and the state’s gratitude becomes purely ceremonial.

Then comes the most savage irony: “though everyone appreciates very much what they did.” The adverbs “very much” mimic polite speech, the kind offered at banquets or in editorials - appreciation as a substitute for responsibility. Gellhorn isn’t mocking the fighters; she’s indicting the comfortable “everyone,” the faceless public that can applaud without housing, employ, or protect. The subtext is that gratitude is cheap precisely because it asks nothing of the grateful.

Contextually, it reads as a post-conflict snapshot of Spain’s shattered social fabric - veterans and irregulars stranded between regimes, identity papers, and economies. Gellhorn’s intent is to make the victory feel unfinished, because the human wreckage is the real final report.