"The man who gets drunk in peacetime is a coward. The man who gets drunk in wartime goes on being a coward"
About this Quote
Jose Bergamin turns a common alibi inside out. When people drink to escape everyday responsibilities, he calls it cowardice. When they drink to blunt the fear and horror of war, he refuses to grant them the heroism that folklore attaches to the bottle. No change of circumstance converts flight from reality into bravery. Intoxication is not courage in disguise; it is the same evasion under harsher light.
The phrasing is deliberate. By saying the man in wartime goes on being a coward, Bergamin stresses continuity. War tempts us to absolve behaviors that dull pain and fear, but the moral nature of the act does not shift with the calendar. Courage, for him, requires clear consciousness: to see, to judge, to answer for what one does. Numbing oneself might quiet terror for a moment, yet it also suspends judgment, responsibility, and solidarity. In peacetime, that suspension shirks ordinary duties; in wartime, it abandons others when vigilance and witness are most needed.
Bergamin was a Spanish writer steeped in paradox and aphorism, active among the Generation of 27 and later a supporter of the Republic during the Spanish Civil War. He saw both the complacencies of peace and the brutal urgencies of conflict, and he watched how art, ideology, and intoxication could all become refuges from reality. His line cuts against bohemian romanticism and against the myth of liquid courage. It also challenges the intellectual who seeks refuge in aestheticized despair instead of action.
The ethic beneath the epigram is stark: do not anesthetize your conscience. Peace demands responsibility; war demands it even more. To be sober, in Bergamin’s sense, is not puritanism but lucidity, a refusal to hand over one’s faculties when history calls. He strips away excuses and leaves the hard task of courage where it always is, in wakeful, accountable presence.
The phrasing is deliberate. By saying the man in wartime goes on being a coward, Bergamin stresses continuity. War tempts us to absolve behaviors that dull pain and fear, but the moral nature of the act does not shift with the calendar. Courage, for him, requires clear consciousness: to see, to judge, to answer for what one does. Numbing oneself might quiet terror for a moment, yet it also suspends judgment, responsibility, and solidarity. In peacetime, that suspension shirks ordinary duties; in wartime, it abandons others when vigilance and witness are most needed.
Bergamin was a Spanish writer steeped in paradox and aphorism, active among the Generation of 27 and later a supporter of the Republic during the Spanish Civil War. He saw both the complacencies of peace and the brutal urgencies of conflict, and he watched how art, ideology, and intoxication could all become refuges from reality. His line cuts against bohemian romanticism and against the myth of liquid courage. It also challenges the intellectual who seeks refuge in aestheticized despair instead of action.
The ethic beneath the epigram is stark: do not anesthetize your conscience. Peace demands responsibility; war demands it even more. To be sober, in Bergamin’s sense, is not puritanism but lucidity, a refusal to hand over one’s faculties when history calls. He strips away excuses and leaves the hard task of courage where it always is, in wakeful, accountable presence.
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