War & Peace Quote by Peter Shaffer

The stuttered opening - "We..". - is doing more work than it seems: it’s a self-correction, a throat-clearing that signals memory under pressure, not polished history. Shaffer frames the war not as an abstract global catastrophe but as a timeline that begins with a date you can point to and ends in a domestic policy you can feel: children removed from their homes. The sentence moves like a mind returning to first principles, from geopolitical trigger (Poland) to the lived atmosphere ("great state of danger") to the blunt bureaucratic conclusion ("necessitated the evacuation").

That word, "necessitated", is the giveaway. It’s a rational, almost administrative verb, deployed to make trauma sound inevitable. Underneath it sits the moral bargain of wartime Britain: safety purchased with separation, protection delivered through rupture. Shaffer’s phrasing doesn’t linger on heroism or vengeance; it lingers on logistics. That’s not coldness so much as a playwright’s instinct for what actually reorganizes lives. Bombings aren’t just explosions; they become policy. Policy becomes childhood.

The context matters, too: for Shaffer’s generation, World War II is less a story of battles than of dislocation - ration books, blackout curtains, trains carrying kids to strangers. By anchoring everything to 3 September 1939, he’s also quietly asserting a British perspective: the war “began” when it became unavoidable for Britain, when distant aggression turned into immediate consequence. The subtext is identity formed by evacuation: a nation that remembers itself through the management of fear.