War & Peace Quote by Mary Wesley

The sting here is in the offhand timing: "only recently". Mary Wesley makes a wartime act of intelligence work sound like a clerical errand you stumble into by accident, and that casualness is the point. An "index" is the most domesticated kind of power imaginable: tidy, alphabetical, quietly comprehensive. Pair it with "enemy code signs" and you get a chilling juxtaposition - lethal conflict reduced to paperwork, danger flattened into a system you can file.

Wesley's intent is less to dramatize espionage than to puncture the myth of it. The line carries the dry British talent for understatement, but it's not just style; it's psychology. In large institutions, especially in war, people often participate in consequential operations without being fully told what their labor enables. "We were making" spreads responsibility across a faceless collective, while the passive discovery - "I found out" - hints at how knowledge is rationed, even to insiders. The enemy, too, is abstracted: not bodies, not cities, but "code signs", a set of tokens to be sorted.

Context matters: Wesley lived through World War II and later became known for novels that expose the hidden wiring of English respectability - sex, class, hypocrisy, and the private bargains people make to get through public crises. This sentence is a miniature of that worldview. It suggests how easily moral weight can be smuggled into routine, how history gets made by people doing "useful" tasks before they grasp what, exactly, they've been useful for.