War & Peace Quote by Gerald Scarfe

War’s most damning feature, Scarfe suggests, isn’t strategy or ideology but the blunt arithmetic of reluctance. Calling it “an extremely sad business” sounds almost too plain, until you notice how the sentence quietly strips war of its usual alibis: glory, destiny, righteous necessity. “Business” is the barb. It frames war as a managed enterprise, something processed by institutions, budgets, and slogans, even as it consumes human beings who never signed up for the job.

The real sting sits in “majority.” Scarfe isn’t denying that some people want war - the zealots, the profiteers, the politicians addicted to the theater of resolve. He’s saying they’re not the point. The point is the mass: conscripts, civilians, young soldiers chasing wages, safety, belonging. War depends on turning their ambivalence into compliance, then laundering that compliance into patriotic narrative after the fact. Sadness, here, isn’t sentimental; it’s structural. A system that requires people to do what they don’t want to do at lethal scale has to run on coercion, propaganda, or desperation.

Coming from Scarfe - a cartoonist whose line-work famously exaggerates power into grotesquerie - the quote reads like a sketch in words. He’s drawing the mismatch between who decides and who bleeds. In the late-20th-century British context Scarfe emerged from (Cold War dread, Northern Ireland, Falklands-era nationalism), the remark lands as a refusal to romanticize conflict. It’s anti-heroic on purpose: war is tragic not because it’s dramatic, but because it’s unwanted work forced on the many for the purposes of the few.