Wit & Attitude Quote by John Hay Beith

War gets pitched as civilization’s breakdown; Beith flips it into a perverse cleaning service. The opener, "War is hell and all that", is a shrug dressed as conventional wisdom, a quick nod to moral seriousness before he twists the knife. That "and all that" is doing heavy work: it drains the familiar condemnation of its power, treating it like boilerplate you recite so nobody can accuse you of naivete. Then comes the dare: war has "a good deal to recommend it". Not because it’s good, but because it’s efficient.

The subtext is a satirical diagnosis of peacetime society as petty, clogged, and annoyingly procedural. "Small nuisances" reads like social friction: etiquette, bureaucracy, minor rivalries, the endless trivial irritations that feel large when the stakes are low. Beith suggests that war, by raising the stakes to life-and-death, vaporizes the fussy irritants that peace allows to metastasize. It’s an indictment of a culture so comfortable it begins to hate its own comforts.

Context matters: Beith lived through the era when "the war to end war" curdled into a modern template for mass slaughter. As a playwright, he’s attuned to the way people talk themselves into catastrophe. The line captures a dangerous psychological truth: crisis can feel clarifying, even pleasurable, because it simplifies choices and legitimizes intensity. The barb lands because it implicates the listener. If war’s appeal is that it cancels the annoyances of ordinary life, the real target isn’t war’s brutality; it’s our appetite for escape from the tedious work of peace.