War & Peace Quote by Ernie Pyle

Pyle’s line lands with the dry snap of a man who has made endurance sound like a punchline. “See the European war out” borrows the language of waiting out bad weather or a tedious houseguest, and that casual phrasing is the point: it’s a coping mechanism. War has become not just a story he covers but an atmosphere he breathes, something you outlast rather than defeat. Then he undercuts even that modest ambition with “I might feel justified in quitting the war” - not “going home,” not “changing assignments,” but “quitting,” as if he’s enlisted in a job no sane person would keep.

The intent is half confession, half permission slip. Pyle isn’t posturing as the fearless correspondent; he’s sketching the moral trap of proximity. The closer you are to ordinary soldiers, the harder it is to walk away without feeling like you’ve abandoned them. “Justified” does heavy lifting here: he’s not asking whether he’s allowed to stop; he’s asking whether stopping can be made ethically clean.

Context matters. Pyle’s celebrity was built on translating combat into the granular fatigue of men who weren’t famous. By the time he writes like this, the romantic narrative of war-reporting has been replaced by accumulation: days, casualties, mud, nerves. The subtext is burnout before we had a clean public vocabulary for it. He’s anticipating the critique that leaving is cowardice, and pre-answering it with a journalist’s most human move: admitting he’s running out of himself.