War & Peace Quote by Edward Everett

War’s cruel trick is that everyone can feel the oncoming collision, yet no one can name the crossroads where it will happen. Edward Everett, a statesman steeped in the rhetorical habits of his age, writes with the careful authority of someone trying to make uncertainty legible to civilians. The sentence balances two kinds of knowledge: inevitability ("no one could doubt") and ignorance ("impossible to foretell"). That pivot is the point. Everett isn’t dramatizing suspense for its own sake; he’s describing how modern war humiliates prediction, even for well-informed observers.

The most telling move is his hedging: "apparent and perhaps real absence of plan". Everett refuses both the comforting claim that Lee is a mastermind and the equally comforting claim that Union intelligence simply hasn’t caught up. The ambiguity does double duty. It acknowledges Lee’s reputation while quietly undercutting it, and it protects the speaker from being wrong in print. That’s statesman’s prose: calibrated, forward-looking, reputationally insured.

Context matters. Everett lived through the American Civil War and wrote during a period when public morale, markets, and political legitimacy all swung with rumors of troop movements. By framing the coming battle as certain but its location as unknowable, he captures a national mood of waiting: citizens forced into the posture of strategists, scanning maps, guessing at intentions, and learning that even the most consequential events can arrive without a clear script. The line’s power comes from how it converts fog-of-war into a civic experience: anxiety shared, responsibility diffuse, history impending but stubbornly offstage.