Life & Mortality Quote by B. H. Liddell Hart

“In reality, it is more fruitful to wound than to kill” is the kind of sentence that lands like a cold hand on the neck: clinical, unromantic, and strategically correct. Liddell Hart isn’t moralizing about war’s horror; he’s describing how modern war functions as a system of logistics and morale, where bodies are units and suffering is a resource to be exploited. The diction matters. “Fruitful” turns injury into yield, as if casualties are crops. “Progressive drain” sounds like accounting language, the ledger-book side of slaughter.

The intent is narrowly instrumental: a dead soldier is a subtraction; a wounded soldier is an ongoing expense. He requires extraction under fire, medical staff, transport, supplies, hospital beds, convalescence, paperwork, and the attention of comrades who might otherwise be fighting. The subtext is even darker: wounding spreads fear in ways killing can’t. The injured body is a message delivered back into the unit, a moving demonstration of what the enemy can do.

Contextually, this fits Liddell Hart’s broader preoccupation with the indirect approach and with war as a contest of systems rather than heroic clashes. Writing in the shadow of the industrial slaughter of World War I and the mechanized planning that followed, he frames violence as operational design. The sentence also quietly indicts that design: once war is managed like an economy, cruelty becomes not an excess but an efficiency.