War & Peace Quote by Mary Roberts Rinehart

Rinehart’s line lands like a courtroom indictment disguised as plain speech: it names the real obscenity of war as a generational con. The target isn’t an abstract enemy or even “war” in the misty, philosophical sense. It’s “those men” who outsource risk. By splitting the world into “old men” who decide and “boys” who die, she turns patriotism’s heroic script into a scandal of logistics: power gets the glory; youth gets the body count.

The phrasing is doing deliberate moral work. “Send into war” makes the act bureaucratic, almost casual, the way you’d send someone on an errand. Then she tightens the screws with “fight and die for them” - not for country, not for principle, for them. That final pronoun is the blade: war as private vanity dressed up as public duty. Her pairing of “pride and cowardice” is especially vicious because it refuses the usual binary where hawkishness equals bravery. In Rinehart’s frame, bellicosity can be a performance precisely because the performer won’t be onstage when bullets arrive.

As a prominent American novelist who wrote through World War I and into the era of World War II, Rinehart is speaking from a culture saturated with recruitment posters, medal myths, and sentimentalized sacrifice. The quote’s intent is to puncture that sentimentality. Its subtext is feminist as much as it is antiwar: it calls out a masculine power structure that treats young male bodies as expendable currency while older men consolidate status. The result is a sentence that doesn’t debate policy; it questions legitimacy.