Book: War With Honour

Overview
A. A. Milne’s War With Honour, published in 1940, is a brief, urgent argument for why Britain must fight Nazi Germany and how it can do so without abandoning its moral compass. Written by a writer long associated with pacifism, the book attempts to reconcile a humane conscience with the hard necessity of war. Milne contends that Hitlerism represents a tyranny that voids the usual assumptions of negotiation and compromise; resistance, he argues, has become the only path consistent with decency and freedom.

Context and Purpose
The book is framed by Milne’s earlier advocacy in Peace With Honour, where he sought alternatives to armed conflict after the bloodletting of the Great War. By 1940 he acknowledges that the moral landscape has changed. Promises have been broken, small nations crushed, and treaties turned into traps. Appeasement is not condemned as cowardice so much as shown to have been outpaced by a regime that treats good faith as weakness. The central question becomes: if war is unavoidable, how can it be fought rightly?

Core Argument
Milne’s definition of honour pivots on keeping faith with one’s deepest principles even under duress. War is not sanctified merely by necessity; it must be directed toward limited, just ends and pursued by means that do not destroy the civilization they seek to defend. The immediate end is the defeat of Hitlerism, the system that wages war on truth, law, and the rights of small nations, not the destruction or humiliation of the German people. He insists that clarity of aim serves both strategy and conscience: fighting tyranny is not the same as embracing militarism.

What Honour Demands in Conduct
Honour begins with restraint. Milne urges that methods matter: the protection of noncombatants, the fair treatment of prisoners, and an aversion to reprisals that confuse justice with revenge. He argues for truthfulness in public life as a wartime virtue, warning that propaganda which corrodes trust also damages the cause it supports. International law and traditional restraints are not luxuries for peacetime; they are the boundary lines that keep a defensive war from becoming indistinguishable from the aggression it opposes. The point is not squeamishness but moral coherence.

Duty, Conscience, and Unity
Acknowledging his own pacifist instincts, Milne treats conscientious doubt with respect while maintaining that duty now lies in resistance. He calls for national unity without the silencing of conscience, suggesting that a free people can argue, reflect, and still act. The soldier’s courage and the civilian’s endurance are placed on the same moral plane, forms of fidelity to the common good rather than instruments of hatred.

Peace Aims and Aftermath
Milne’s vision extends beyond victory. He warns against repeating a punitive peace that would breed the next conflict. The terms of settlement should be firm against the perpetrators of tyranny yet sparing of collective humiliation. Reconstruction, the restoration of law, and the secure protection of smaller states are presented as the natural corollaries of fighting a just war. The opponent is a system, not a nation; the peace must welcome back those released from that system.

Style and Legacy
The prose is direct, conversational, and morally exacting, seeking to persuade readers who value compassion but fear complicity. Its significance lies in the candid reversal of an earlier stance: the admission that ideals must be reinterpreted when confronted by a power that exploits them. War With Honour becomes a wartime ethic for liberal consciences, arguing that the only tolerable victory is one achieved without forfeiting the very principles for which the fight began.