War & Peace Quote by Robert E. Lee

A chill runs through Lee's line because it refuses the easy pose of moral purity. He doesn't deny war's allure; he diagnoses it. Spoken in the thick of the American Civil War (often traced to Fredericksburg, amid horrifying casualty counts), the remark reads like a private admission accidentally overheard: battle is not only slaughter, it's seduction. The subtext is less "war is bad" than "war is intoxicating, and that's precisely the danger."

The construction does the work. "It is well" lands with the calm of a man trained to treat catastrophe as weather. Then comes the pivot: "so terrible" isn't just a condemnation, it's a safeguard. Lee implies that only extreme horror keeps war from becoming a hobby for nations and a vocation of vanity for men. The final sentence weaponizes "fond" - a domestic, almost tender word - to expose how easily violence can be romanticized into honor, glory, even pleasure. He knows the feelings officers are rewarded for: adrenaline, comradeship, clarity of purpose, the brutish comfort of a world reduced to winners and losers.

In context, the line also functions as self-justification and self-indictment. Lee, an architect of destruction, gestures toward the paradox of command: the more competent you are at war, the more you risk loving the mastery it grants you. It's a confession that war's propaganda doesn't begin with posters; it starts inside the people best equipped to wage it.