War & Peace Quote by Simon Raven

Raven nails a peculiarly British contradiction: reverence for the machine, contempt for the motions it demands. The line is funny because it’s too neat to be merely a complaint. “Loved the Army as an institution” has the chill of a man admiring architecture from the outside - symmetry, tradition, the reassuring fiction that someone, somewhere, is in charge. Then he snaps the trap shut: he “loathed every single thing it required me to do.” Not most things. Not the worst things. Every single thing. The absolutism turns personal grumpiness into a diagnosis of temperament.

The intent isn’t just to confess discomfort with military life; it’s to expose how institutions seduce people who are ill-suited to their demands. Raven’s subtext is about class and style as much as service. For an English public-school sensibility, the Army can function like a social club with weapons: a hierarchy you can read, rituals you can perform, a ready-made identity that spares you the indignity of self-invention. Loving that while hating the actual labor - obedience, boredom, paperwork, discipline, physical hardship - is a way of admitting that the attraction was aesthetic and tribal, not practical or moral.

Context matters: Raven’s generation grew up with the Army as both national myth and lived bureaucracy, a place where “duty” was supposed to refine character and often just rearranged it. The line works because it punctures the romance of service without lapsing into sermon. It’s not anti-Army so much as anti-self-deception: the institution remains beautiful at a distance; up close, it wants your body, your time, your will.