War & Peace Quote by Allan Massie

Massie’s line lands like a compliment and then twists into an indictment. The soldier, in this framing, isn’t just a fighter; he’s a moral convenience. “Civilised folk” get to enjoy the luxury of abhorring war precisely because someone else has agreed to do the dirty, necessary work that keeps violence at a distance. The sting is in that word “despise”: it’s not “avoid” or “end” war, but despise it from a safe perch, as if disgust were itself a form of virtue.

The subtext is classed and generational: “young man” suggests a lecture, maybe even a rebuke, aimed at comfortable moralizers who treat war as an abstract sin rather than a recurring political instrument. Massie implies a society that wants its hands clean and its borders secure, its conscience intact and its deterrence credible. The soldier becomes the buffer that lets civilians maintain an identity built on refinement and humanitarian sentiment while outsourcing coercion to a professional caste.

Contextually, this feels post-1945 British: the memory of total war, the rise of antiwar politics, and the ongoing need for armed force in a world that didn’t become peaceful just because the West learned to feel guilty about violence. Massie isn’t romanticizing combat; he’s puncturing a fashionable purity. If you can afford to despise war, he suggests, it’s because someone else is paying for your moral posture in risk, trauma, and sometimes death. The line works because it weaponizes irony: the soldier makes “civilisation” possible, and civilisation repays him by treating war as beneath it.