War & Peace Quote by Edward Wadsworth

There is a tight, almost theatrical politeness in Wadsworth's opening: "Excuse me" reads like a host apologizing for the mess on the carpet, not a witness invoking mass death. That tonal mismatch is the point. The sentence stages the problem of representing war to civilians who can opt out of looking. He anticipates fatigue, defensiveness, the reflex to change the subject, then pushes past it anyway.

"harrowing" does double duty. It means emotionally wrenching, yes, but it also carries the older sense of a harrow: a tool that tears up soil. War as image is not just sad; it rakes and roughens the viewer, turning complacent ground. Yet he still calls it "this picture of war", reducing catastrophe to a manageable object, framed and portable. The phrase feels like an artist catching himself in the compromise his job requires: translating lived violence into composition, pigment, and audience attention.

The closer, "I am very full of it at present", is candid to the point of awkwardness. It suggests intrusion and saturation, a mind overstuffed with scenes he can't metabolize. Coming from an artist of Wadsworth's generation, formed by the First World War and its machinery, it also hints at a modernist predicament: war as an industrial system that not only kills bodies but colonizes perception. The apology is less about manners than about contagion. He knows the image will pass something along, and he's warning you as he hands it over.