War & Peace Quote by Paul Fussell

War’s uglier cruelty, Fussell suggests, isn’t only the mortar blasts or the body count. It’s the dead time: the long stretches where nothing happens except the mind turning on itself. “Sitting around” sounds almost comic in its banality, a deliberately deflating phrase that punctures the usual heroic tempo of war stories. Fussell is aiming at the myth of constant action and clear purpose; most combat, especially for the ordinary soldier, is boredom, waiting, and rumor. Into that vacuum floods the question that training and propaganda try to quarantine: what am I doing morally?

The line works because it treats moral doubt as an occupational hazard, like trench foot or dysentery. “Wondering” is the key verb: not deciding, not testifying, just circling the same unresolved problem. That’s how conscience behaves under coercive systems. You can’t litigate ethics when orders arrive, when fear narrows your options, when your survival depends on group compliance. So the thinking gets postponed, then returns in the quiet, sharper for being delayed.

Fussell’s context matters. As a World War II infantryman turned literary historian, he spent decades dissecting the language that makes slaughter narratable - the euphemisms, the patriotic scripts, the pieties that convert chaos into “service.” This sentence is a small act of resistance against those scripts. It reframes war’s psychological toll as not just trauma from what you saw, but corrosion from what you suspect about yourself while you’re waiting: that the moral alibis are thin, and you have time to notice.