"I hated the bangs in the war: I always felt a silent war would be more tolerable"
About this Quote
War is loud before it is lethal, and Pamela Hansford Johnson’s line skewers that ugly fact with a critic’s ear for the wrong note. “I hated the bangs in the war” sounds almost petty on first pass, the kind of complaint you’d expect about fireworks, not artillery. That’s the point. By shrinking combat to “bangs,” she denies war its preferred costume of grandeur and forces it back into the realm of sensory nuisance: noise, interruption, the constant jolt of being unable to think.
The second clause twists the knife: “I always felt a silent war would be more tolerable.” It’s an impossible wish, and Johnson knows it. Silence is what war promises in its propaganda - quick, clean, decisive - and what it delivers only after it’s done: the hush of absence, the quiet of the dead, the stunned afterlife of survivors. Her irony is that if you take away the spectacle, war’s supposed “heroism” evaporates. Without the bangs, there’s no soundtrack for courage, no cinematic punctuation to make destruction feel like narrative.
As a critic writing in a century bookended by world wars, Johnson’s intent reads as aesthetic disgust weaponized into moral judgment. She isn’t pacifism-by-sentiment; she’s anti-romance. The line exposes how much war relies on noise to sell itself - and how unbearable it becomes when you listen closely enough to hear it as just racket.
The second clause twists the knife: “I always felt a silent war would be more tolerable.” It’s an impossible wish, and Johnson knows it. Silence is what war promises in its propaganda - quick, clean, decisive - and what it delivers only after it’s done: the hush of absence, the quiet of the dead, the stunned afterlife of survivors. Her irony is that if you take away the spectacle, war’s supposed “heroism” evaporates. Without the bangs, there’s no soundtrack for courage, no cinematic punctuation to make destruction feel like narrative.
As a critic writing in a century bookended by world wars, Johnson’s intent reads as aesthetic disgust weaponized into moral judgment. She isn’t pacifism-by-sentiment; she’s anti-romance. The line exposes how much war relies on noise to sell itself - and how unbearable it becomes when you listen closely enough to hear it as just racket.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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