War

Blood alone moves the wheels of history.

On August 3rd 1914, on the eve of the Great War, Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary, stood at the window of his office in the summer dusk and observed: “The lamps are going out all over Europe.” Today the lamps are going out on liberty all over the western world in a more subtle and elusive and profound way...

I fear we have awakened a sleeping giant.

They should know about the boys of Pointe du Hoc and Doolit­tle’s Raiders, the bat­tles of Mid­way and Iwo Jima. They should learn about the courage of the young Amer­i­cans who fought the Nazis at the Bat­tle of the Bulge and the Ja­panese on Ok­inawa. They should learn why Amer­ica was right to end the war by drop­ping the atomic bombs on Hi­roshima and Na­gasaki, and about the fun­da­men­tal de­cency of a na­tion that es­tab­lished the Tru­man Doc­trine, the Mar­shall Plan, the Berlin Air­lift and the North At­lantic Treaty Or­ga­ni­za­tion. They need to know about the hor­ror of the Holo­caust, and what it means to prom­ise “never again.”

Mohammedanism (Islam) is a militant and proselytizing faith. ...No stronger  retrograde force exists in the world.

29 April 1938 I have been in considerable trouble over the present danger of war. Twice in one life—and then to find how little I have grown in fortitude despite my conversion. It has done me a lot of good by making me realise how much of my happiness secretly depended on the tacit assumption of at least tolerable conditions for the body: and I see more clearly, I think, the necessity (if one may so put it) which God is under of allowing us to be afflicted—so few of us will really rest all on Him if He leaves us any other support.

Standing there, watching them, it occurred to me that when Hitler watched Joe and the boys fight their way back from the rear of the field to sweep ahead of Italy and Germany seventy-five years ago, he saw, but did not recognize, heralds of his doom. He could not have known that one day hundreds of thousands of boys just like them, boys who shared their essential natures—decent and unassuming, not privileged or favored by anything in particular, just loyal, committed, and perseverant—would return to Germany dressed in olive drab, hunting him down.

They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old.

I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

As for any inner meaning or ‘message’, it has in the intention of the author none. It is neither allegorical nor topical. As the story grew it put down roots (into the past) and threw out unexpected branches: but its main theme was settled from the outset by the inevitable choice of the Ring as the link between it and The Hobbit. The crucial chapter, ‘The Shadow of the Past’, is one of the oldest parts of the tale. It was written long before the foreshadow of 1939 had yet become a threat of inevitable disaster, and from that point the story would have developed along essentially the same lines, if that disaster had been averted. Its sources are things long before in mind, or in some cases already written, and little or nothing in it was modified by the war that began in 1939 or its sequels.

We live now upon an island amid many perils, and our hands are more often upon the bowstring than upon the harp.

‘Yet also I should be sad,’ said Théoden. ‘For however the fortune of war shall go, may it not so end that much that was fair and wonderful shall pass for ever out of Middle-earth?’ ‘It may,’ said Gandalf. ‘The evil of Sauron cannot be wholly cured, nor made as if it had not been. But to such days we are doomed. Let us now go on with the journey we have begun!’

War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend: the city of the Men of Númenor; and I would have her loved for her memory, her ancientry, her beauty, and her present wisdom.

‘Work of the Enemy!’ said Gandalf. ‘Such deeds he loves: friend at war with friend; loyalty divided in confusion of hearts.’

I said victory could not be achieved by arms. I still hope for victory, but not by arms.

We cannot achieve victory by arms, but by arms we can give the Ring-bearer his only chance, frail though it be.

Despite centuries of war, no one has ever done it, he notes: nobody has ever fired a first shot. All strikes are claimed to be counterstrikes. All shots are return fire. “For the Allies, World War II began at the Polish border in 1939; for the Germans, hostilities dated back to Versailles. Your military operation is an attack; mine is a retaliation.“ 84

I came, I saw, I conquered.