Wit & Attitude Quote by Margaret Mitchell

Mitchell’s line punctures the battlefield myth with the kind of cold clarity you usually only get after the music stops. The champagne metaphor is a sleight of hand: it frames combat not as a proving ground of character but as an intoxicant, a chemical rush that can make anyone feel enlarged. Courage, in this view, isn’t a virtue so much as a temporary high - and like any high, it’s indiscriminate. Cowards and heroes both get “buzzed” on adrenaline, on group momentum, on the sudden permission to act without reflection.

The nastier insight lands in the second sentence: bravery under duress is cheap. When the options collapse to “be brave or else be killed,” heroism becomes less a moral choice than a survival reflex, a forced performance staged by circumstance. Mitchell is pushing back against the romantic machinery that turns war into a character factory, where the right kind of violence allegedly reveals the “real” man. She suggests the opposite: war can manufacture bravery the way it manufactures propaganda, through necessity and spectacle.

In context, that’s a pointed intervention from a novelist best known for packaging the Civil War as epic tragedy and cultural pageant. The subtext is almost self-incriminating: behind the ribbons, the charges, the grand narratives of honor, there’s a simpler engine - fear. War doesn’t automatically elevate people; it just amplifies them, like champagne, until the hangover arrives.