War & Peace Quote by George Armstrong Custer

Battle as lifestyle, not last resort: Custer’s line reads like an adrenaline manifesto disguised as duty. The phrasing does the heavy lifting. “Willing” signals rational consent, but he immediately upgrades it to “yes glad,” a little self-correction that exposes the real engine here: appetite. Then he stretches the fantasy to its most revealing extreme - “every day during my life” - turning war from episodic necessity into daily nourishment, something that would structure time the way work or prayer does for other people.

As a career cavalry officer in the mid-19th-century U.S. Army, Custer came up in a culture that rewarded conspicuous daring and treated combat as a ladder: to promotion, to reputation, to the kind of national celebrity he actually achieved after the Civil War. The subtext is ambition, but also a wager that risk can be domesticated, made routine. That’s the seductive lie of martial romanticism: if you can frame violence as repeated proving ground, you don’t have to sit with its randomness or its costs to everyone who didn’t choose it.

The sentence also performs a kind of moral alchemy common to heroic war talk. It shifts the focus from outcomes (who dies, what changes) to the speaker’s internal weather - gladness, vitality, purpose. In that sense it’s less a strategic statement than a self-portrait: a man who needs conflict to feel fully alive, and who mistakes that need for virtue. Read in the shadow of the Indian Wars and Little Bighorn, it lands as both brash confidence and ominous foreshadowing: a public hunger for battle that history would cash out in very real bodies.