War & Peace Quote by Ernie Pyle

The line lands like a quiet confession from someone who has watched innocence burn off in real time. Pyle isn’t praising bloodlust; he’s documenting a psychological gearshift that happens after a soldier’s first fight, when abstract ideals and homefront rhetoric stop being useful. “That phase of the war” is a deliberately vague dismissal of the earlier story people like to tell themselves - about glory, duty, clean motives. He implies it’s not even worth naming anymore because the battlefield has already rewritten it.

“His blood is up” is the blunt, bodily language of adrenaline and survival, not ideology. Pyle’s intent is to drag war down from posters and speeches into the nervous system. The subtext is unsettling: killing becomes ordinary not because the soldier is monstrous, but because the situation demands a new kind of normal. Calling it “a profession” is the hardest turn of the knife. Professions are structured, repeatable, and socially legible; they come with skills, habits, and a grim competence. Pyle is showing how quickly the unthinkable becomes work.

The final clause - “as much a profession as writing is for me” - is more than a neat analogy. It implicates the journalist. Pyle admits he, too, has a trade built around war’s machinery: the soldier produces death; the writer produces narrative. The comparison narrows the moral distance between frontline action and frontline documentation, reminding readers that war doesn’t just train men to kill; it trains everyone else to consume it.