War & Peace Quote by Eamon de Valera

In that clipped, grim line, de Valera isn’t describing a battlefield so much as constructing one in the listener’s mind. “Here” pins responsibility to a specific place, refusing the comfort of abstraction. “In Cork district” does extra work: Cork was a republican stronghold and a frequent site of reprisals during the Irish revolutionary period, so naming it signals both urgency and a kind of insider credibility. He’s not warning from a distance; he’s pointing at a live wire.

The key phrase is “in combination.” War usually arrives as a sequence of horrors - scarcity, terror, retaliation, distrust - that people try to compartmentalize. De Valera collapses that illusion. The threat isn’t one danger but a stacking effect: violence plus economic breakdown plus civic paralysis plus the moral corrosion that turns neighbors into informers and militias into governments. “All the dangers which war can inflict” is deliberately broad, almost legalistic, because specificity would invite argument about numbers or blame. He’s selling the totality of risk.

The subtext is political triage. De Valera often spoke as someone trying to keep the nationalist project from being defined by uncontrolled violence, especially as conflict threatened to metastasize into civil war logic: friend/enemy sorting, local feuds, permanent emergency. The sentence is engineered to make escalation feel not heroic but comprehensive, contagious, and hard to reverse - a warning that the cost won’t be paid only by combatants, but by the social fabric Cork represents.