War & Peace Quote by Manfred von Richthofen

The punchline lands like a shell you never heard coming: last night’s party, this morning’s marching orders. Richthofen isn’t moralizing or posing as a prophet. He’s showing, with a pilot’s crisp economy, how an entire class of young officers could talk themselves into the “absolute nil” of war right up until the machinery of the state made liars of them.

The operative verb is “convinced.” Not “believed” or “hoped” but persuaded, socially, in a room where optimism functions as etiquette. The line exposes a peculiarly modern denial: war isn’t merely misjudged; it’s actively banished from conversation because admitting it would spoil the evening. “Continued our festivity” reads as both comedy and indictment, a portrait of a culture trained to treat catastrophe as bad manners.

Then comes the bureaucratic snap: “On the next day we were ordered.” No thunderclap, no heroic summons, just an administrative sentence that turns carefree bodies into units. The speed of the reversal is the point. It captures how war arrives less as an argument you lose than a schedule you’re handed.

Context sharpens the irony. Richthofen writes from inside the myth factory of World War I, a conflict sold with romantic rhetoric and endured as industrial slaughter. As an aviator, he’d later embody a chivalric image of combat; here he undercuts that glamour with a memory of collective self-deception. The subtext is not “we were naive” but “we were trained to be naive,” right until the orders came.