War & Peace Quote by Frank B. Kellogg

Memory is doing political work here, and Kellogg knows it. He frames forgetting not as a private lapse but as a public failure with consequences. The opening question, "Have we so soon forgotten...?" is a shaming device: it presumes the answer is yes, then dares the listener to deny it. The phrase "so soon" compresses time, making any drift toward normalcy feel like betrayal. This is less about grief than about leverage.

Kellogg’s diction is ceremonially heavy - "terrible carnage", "greatest war of all time", "supreme sacrifice" - the language of national liturgy. It sanctifies the dead to discipline the living. By piling superlatives, he escalates the moral stakes until complacency looks indecent. The geography matters, too: France and Belgium are named not for scenery but for legitimacy. American bodies "beneath the soil" abroad turn foreign battlefields into shared moral property, a reminder that the U.S. paid into Europe’s catastrophe and therefore has standing to demand a different future.

The subtext is anxiety about drift: the postwar world’s fast return to rivalry, arms-building, and diplomatic cynicism. Kellogg is pushing against amnesia as a political trend - the way societies metabolize mass death into parades and monuments, then quietly resume business as usual. "Sleep the eternal sleep" softens the horror, but it also freezes the dead in a tableau that can be invoked on cue. The intent isn’t just to mourn; it’s to mobilize the memory of World War I as an argument for restraint, international commitment, and the moral urgency of never again - before "never" becomes just another slogan.