War & Peace Quote by Dorothy L. Sayers

A perfect Sayers barb: a sentence that walks in wearing a grin and leaves carrying a body. "If it were not for the war" yanks the moral floorboards up; what follows is a cozy idiom of comfort, "suit me down to the ground", the phrase you use for a well-cut coat or a good salary. The collision is the point. Sayers compresses a whole wartime psychology into one neat paradox: the machinery of crisis can be perversely satisfying even as it grinds people up.

The intent isn’t to trivialize suffering so much as to expose the seductive perks of catastrophe for those positioned to benefit from it. War reorders society, hands out sudden purpose, loosens old restrictions, and makes certain kinds of work - writing, organizing, problem-solving - feel urgently consequential. Sayers, an author who understood both the pleasures of competence and the theatricality of public life, is skewering the way emergency flatters the ego: your skills matter, your days have shape, your anxieties get a single convenient cause.

The subtext is an accusation aimed inward and outward. It’s the confession you’re not supposed to make: that you might like the clarity, the camaraderie, the permission to be intense - if only the stakes weren’t human lives. Coming from a sharp-edged interwar British milieu, it also reads as a jab at the home-front romance of "making do", the way rationing and blackouts can become lifestyle aesthetics. Sayers turns that aesthetic into an ethical trap, and springs it with one line.