War & Peace Quote by Barbara Castle

There is a small, devastating trapdoor in Castle's line: the pause between "hardship" and "They'd thought we'd won". It's not triumph she's recalling, but a particular kind of postwar betrayal - the moment when sacrifice gets cashed out as disappointment. Castle, a Labour politician shaped by the Second World War and the austerity years that followed, is pointing at a psychological contract. People endured rationing, loss, and fear with the implicit promise that peace would deliver something more than a return to the old order. "They'd thought we'd won" implies they were wrong not about the battlefield result, but about what victory would mean for their lives.

The phrasing is doing political work. It's deliberately plain, almost domestic - "people who'd had a lot of hardship" - which sidesteps grand narratives and anchors the war in ordinary bodies and budgets. Then comes the sting: victory is revealed as a story told to those who paid the price. The subtext is classed. The "we" of wartime unity dissolves in peacetime into familiar hierarchies, where some collect the spoils and others get a medal, a memorial, and rent to pay.

Castle's intent reads as both elegy and warning. Elegy for a generation that treated endurance as an investment in a fairer Britain; warning that governments can win wars and still lose the moral right to govern if the peace feels like a downgrade. The line is effective because it turns patriotic certainty into a question of distribution: who gets to experience victory as real?