War & Peace Quote by Lloyd Alexander

A line this plain is doing a lot of quiet work. Alexander compresses a whole formative odyssey into a travel itinerary: Wales, Germany, Paris. The understatement feels deliberate, almost protective. “Eventually” suggests a life steered by larger forces, not youthful wanderlust; he’s being moved, assigned, posted. “Sent” is the key verb: it frames Europe not as a romantic destination but as a place entered through duty and upheaval, with the war as the unspoken engine.

The sequence matters. Wales reads as a first encounter with a smaller, storied nation on the margins of empire, a place where language and myth endure under pressure. Germany, by contrast, carries the weight of proximity to the conflict’s center and aftermath; even without dates or details, “Germany” after “the war” hums with occupation, ruins, moral reckoning, and the strange intimacy of living among former enemies. Then Paris: not just a city, but a cultural promise, the classic postwar magnet for artists and writers looking for renewal, style, and a vocabulary for what they’ve seen.

Alexander’s intent seems less to brag than to establish credentials of experience: his imagination was trained abroad, in the shadow of history. The subtext is that his later fantasy and mythmaking weren’t escapism; they were responses to displacement and reconstruction. By refusing melodrama, he trusts the reader to supply the gravity. The restraint is the point: war made the itinerary, and the itinerary made the writer.