War & Peace Quote by Siegfried Sassoon

Sassoon is doing something quietly explosive here: he’s reframing a soldier’s “duty” as a contract breached by the people who wrote it. The sentence moves like a legal brief, not a trench lyric. “Purpose” and “objects” are bureaucratic nouns, deliberately drained of patriotic heat. That chill is the point. By adopting the language of official justification, Sassoon exposes how malleable and self-serving official justification can be.

The key move is the conditional: the war should have been stated so clearly “as to have made it impossible to change them.” Sassoon isn’t just arguing that the war is mismanaged; he’s accusing its leadership of bait-and-switch. The subtext is consent. Soldiers, he implies, can accept hardship if the terms are fixed and honest. What they can’t accept is an endlessly adjustable mission statement that keeps receding as bodies pile up. His phrasing also dodges the easy smear of cowardice. He doesn’t say he won’t fight. He says the state owes him clarity before it spends him.

Context sharpens the blade: this is Sassoon the decorated officer turning public dissenter during World War I, when “the war aims” were both grandly advertised and strategically vague. He suggests a terrifyingly simple alternative: negotiation. Not because he’s naive about German militarism, but because he’s indicting the political class’s addiction to open-ended sacrifice. The line’s power is its moral accounting: if aims were stable, war could be finite. If they’re flexible, war becomes a machine that manufactures its own reasons.