War & Peace Quote by Christopher Shays

The sentence reads like a man trying to nail Jell-O to a wall while the cameras roll. Christopher Shays isn’t delivering a moral verdict; he’s building a prosecutable timeline. “First off” is classic committee-room choreography: a signal that evidence is being stacked, methodically, to foreclose easy rebuttals. He immediately splits testimony into categories - “sworn” versus “wasn’t sworn” - not because he’s unsure, but because he’s inoculating himself against the predictable attack that some accounts “don’t count.” He’s telling you he knows the rules of credibility, and he’s choosing to mention the weaker material anyway because it matches the stronger material.

The subject is deceptively small: alarms. In context, this kind of detail typically sits inside a larger inquiry about whether troops were adequately warned, whether systems were functional, or whether officials retrofitted a story after the fact. “Rarely went off” implies neglect or dysfunction. Then comes the more corrosive claim: “they went off after the war in most cases.” That’s an allegation of narrative backfill - alarms as theater once the consequences were over, proof manufactured when proof no longer matters operationally but matters politically. “Went off a lot” adds the sting: not just late, but suspiciously frequent once scrutiny begins, as if someone discovered the volume knob only when auditors arrived.

Shays’s intent is to frame a pattern without yet alleging motive outright. The subtext is bureaucratic self-protection: systems that fail quietly in real time, then perform loudly for the record.