War & Peace Quote by Henry L. Stimson

Bureaucratic patience is a scarce resource in wartime, and Stimson is quietly indicting the home front for trying to spend it all at once. Writing as the U.S. Secretary of War, he’s describing a familiar postwar pressure cooker: once victory feels secure, the public stops thinking in terms of national necessity and starts thinking in terms of “my boy,” “my husband,” “our neighbor.” The sentence pretends to be administrative, but the emotional charge sits in that loaded phrase “particular soldier.” It’s a neat bit of distancing that captures how personal loyalty can become political lobbying.

The “carefully arranged system of points” refers to the demobilization scheme that ranked soldiers for discharge based on criteria like time served, combat duty, and dependents. Stimson’s emphasis on “carefully arranged” and “with the approval of the Army itself” is defensive; he’s anticipating accusations that Washington is indifferent or arbitrary. The subtext is: this is fair, it’s been vetted, and if you blow it up for individual cases, you’re not just helping one family - you’re destabilizing the only mechanism keeping demobilization from turning into chaos and favoritism.

What makes the line work is its tension between democratic impulse and institutional necessity. Stimson isn’t mocking grief or longing; he’s warning that mass impatience, scaled across millions of households, becomes a kind of soft mutiny against procedure. In a system built to look impersonal, personalization is the solvent.