British writers on peace and war

Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

British writers on peace and war

Maria Abdy: May the gentle Dove of Peace extend her snowy pinions o’er us

Joseph Addison: Already have our quarrels fill’d the world with widows and with orphans

Joseph Addison and Richard Steele: It is a stupid and barbarous way to extend dominion by arms

Lucy Aikin: Gentle Peace with healing hand returns

Lucy Aikin: Freedom and Peace with radiant smile now carol o’er the dungeon vile

Lucy Aikin: Sickening I turn on yonder plain to mourn the widows and the slain

Mark Akenside: The hidden plan whence every treaty, every war began

Mark Akenside: Statesmanship versus war

Richard Aldington: Selections on war

Richard Aldington: All the decay and dead of battlefields entered his blood and seemed to poison him

Richard Aldington: The Blood of the Young Men

Richard Aldington: The criminal cant and rant of war

Richard Aldington: How can we atone for the lost millions and millions of years of life, how atone for those lakes and seas of blood?

Richard Aldington: How well the premeditated mass murder of war is organized

Richard Aldington: It is so important to know how to kill

Richard Aldington: It was a war of missiles, murderous and soul-shaking explosives, like living in the graveyard of the world

Richard Aldington: Pools and ponds of blood, the huge black dogs of hell

Richard Aldington: Why so sentimental? Why all this fuss over a few million men killed and maimed?

Grant Allen: How can he be good if he hires himself out indiscriminately to kill or maim whoever he’s told to?

Grant Allen: I cannot contribute to making peaceable Canadian citizens throw themselves into the devouring whirlpool of militarism

Grant Allen: War and blood money

James Allen: A Prayer for Peace

Eric Ambler: It is not good for those who fight to know too much. Speeches, yes. The truth, no!

Eric Ambler: The Law did not think killing for money was insane

Edwin Arnold: Heaven’s love descending in that loveliest word, PEACE!

Edwin Arnold: My chariot shall not roll with bloody wheels till earth wears the red record of my name

Matthew Arnold: Man shall live in peace, as now in war

Matthew Arnold: New Age. Uphung the spear, unbent the bow.

Matthew Arnold: Tolstoy’s commandments of peace

W.H. Auden: A land laid waste, its towns in terror and all its young men slain

W. H. Auden: O What Is That Sound

W. H. Auden: The shield of Achilles

Alfred Austin: The White Pall of Peace

Francis Bacon: Arts benefit man more than arms

Joanna Baillie: And shall we think of war? 

Joanna Baillie: Do children return from rude jarring war?

Joanna Baillie: Making his simple audience to shrink with tales of war and blood

Joanna Baillie: Thy native land, freed from the ills of war, a land of peace!

Isabella Banks: The bugle of war, the bugle of peace

Isabella Banks: “Glory, glory, glory!” As if murder were not sin!

Isabella Banks: Lay down weapons, war should cease

Anna Laetitia Barbauld: Peace and Shepherd

Anna Laetitia Barbauld: The storm of horrid war rolls dreadful on

Anna Laetitia Barbauld: War’s least horror is th’ ensanguined field

Mary Barber: The officer’s widow

Maurice Baring: August, 1918

Maurice Baring: The greater fools are you who seek the wars

Maurice Baring: Unalterable horror, misery, pain and suffering which is caused by modern war

Maurice Baring: The Wounded

Charlotte Alington Barnard: Peace Hovers

James Beattie: Ode to Peace

Thomas Lovell Beddoes: War’s harvest

Aphra Behn: No rough sound of war’s alarms

Aphra Behn: The pen triumphs over the sword

Hilaire Belloc: After the tempest and destruction of universal war, permanence

Hilaire Belloc: War, propaganda and lies

Arnold Bennett: The miraculous lunacy of war

Arnold Bennett: The Primary Object of War

Arnold Bennett: The Slaughterer

Arnold Bennett: War casualties and war profiteers

Arthur Christopher Benson: No carnal triumph of the empurpled sword

Robert Hugh Benson: The whole human race will be at war

Jeremy Bentham: A Plan for an Universal and Perpetual Peace

Jeremy Bentham: War is mischief upon the largest scale

Elizabeth Bentley: On the return of celestial peace

Elizabeth Bentley: Terror-striking War shalt be banish’d far

George Berkeley: Continuing dishonorable war is committing murder, rapine, sacrilege and violence

Walter Besant: War and the destruction of London, a city lone and widowed

Walter Besant: Wisdom and war

Matilda Betham: All the horrid charms of war

Augustine Birrell: Richard Cobden, visionary of world peace

William Black: Better small farms, thriving and prosperous, than splendid ruins that tell of the fierceness of war

William Black: Military glory, the most mean, the most cruel and contemptible thing under the sun!

William Black: When Caesar’s legions turn on him

Robert Blair: Where are the mighty thunderbolts of war?

William Blake: Selections on war and peace

William Blake: Be withdrawn cloudy war, troops of warriors depart, nor around our peaceable city breathe

William Blake: Groaning among the happier dead

William Blake: O for a voice like thunder, and a tongue to drown the throat of war!

William Blake: O go not forth in Martyrdoms & Wars

William Blake: To peaceful arts shall envy bow

Susanna Blamire: When the eye sees the grief that from one battle flows, small cause of triumph can the bravest feel

Mathilde Blind: All vile things that batten on disaster follow feasting in the wake of war

Mathilde Blind: Reaping War’s harvest grim and gory

Mathilde Blind: Widowing the world of men to win the world

Edmund Blunden: Writings on war

Edmund Blunden: The black fiend leaps brick-red as life’s last picture goes

Edmund Blunden: The bondservice of destruction

Edmund Blunden: Death could not kneel

Edmund Blunden: Harsher screamed the condor war

Edmund Blunden: How silver clear against war’s hue and cry each syllable of peace the gods allowed

Edmund Blunden: Initiation into war

Edmund Blunden: One needed no occult gift to notice the shadow of death

Edmund Blunden: War tableaux

Edmund Blunden: War’s harvest

Edmund Blunden: War’s undormant cemetery

Edmund Blunden: We stood estranged with the ghosts of war between

Edmund Blunden: A whole sweet countryside amuck with murder

Wilfrid Scawen Blunt: “How I am wounded for thee in these wars”

George Borrow: Prisoners of war: misery on one side, disgrace on the other

James Boswell: On War

James Boswell: Samuel Johnson – war is worst type of all violence

James Boswell: Who profits by war?

Jane Bowdler: War’s deadly futility

William Lisle Bowles: Selections on war and peace

William Lisle Bowles: As War’s black trump pealed its terrific blast

William Lisle Bowles: The dread name of the hideous war-fiend shall perish

William Lisle Bowles: The Fiend of War, sated with slaughter

William Lisle Bowles: Grim-visaged War drowns with his trumpet’s blast a brother’s cries

William Lisle Bowles: Oh, when will the long tempestuous night of warfare and of woe be rolled away!

William Lisle Bowles: When her war-song Victory doth sing, Destruction flaps aloft her iron-hurtling wing

Henry Noel Brailsford: Waiting for the horrors of a war that was coming

Henry Noel Brailsford: Who is the happy warrior?

F. V. Branford: Over the Dead

Robert Bridges: And this is War!

Vera Mary Brittain: August, 1914

Frances Brown: An avenger mightier than war

Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Exalt the name of Peace and leave those rusty wars that eat the soul

Elizabeth Barrett Browning: War’s human harvest

Robert Browning: Selections on peace and war

Robert Browning: The devil’s doctrine, the paraded shame of war

Robert Browning: Far and wide the victims of our warfare strew the plain

Robert Browning: Peace, in whom depths of wealth lie

Robert Browning: Peace rises within them ever more and more

Robert Browning: They sent a million fighters forth South and North

John Buchan: That night I realized the crazy folly of war

Robert Buchanan: The moon gleamed on the dreadful drifts of dead

Edward Bulwer Lytton: Selections on peace and war

Edward Bulwer Lytton: Ghouls on the field of slaughter

Edward Bulwer Lytton: The heartless and miserable vanity from which arose wars neither useful nor honourable

Edward Bulwer Lytton: The sword, consecrating homicide and massacre with a hollow name

Edward Bulwer Lytton: War and wrath and rapine cease, O Messenger of Peace!

Edward Bulwer Lytton: “We poor men have no passion for war”

Robert Burns: I hate murder by flood or field

Robert Burns: Peace, thy olive wand extend and bid wild War his ravage end

Robert Burns: Wars, the plagues of human life

Robert Burton: Hypocrites who make the trumpet of the gospel the trumpet of war

Robert Burton: War’s nuptials, war’s justice

Robert Burton: We hate the hawk because it is always at war

Robert Burton: What fury first brought so devilish, so brutish a thing as war into men’s minds?

Samuel Butler: Religion of war

Samuel Butler: Valor in modern warfare

Byron: Selections on war

Byron: The age of beauty will succeed the sport of war

Byron: All ills past, present and to come yield to the true portrait of one battle-field

Byron: Blasted below the hot breath of war

Byron: The drying up a single tear has more of honest fame than shedding seas of gore.

Byron: Gore and glory seen in hell alone

Byron: The Grave shall bear the chiefest prize away

Byron: I loathe all war and warriors

Byron: I made no wars

Byron: Just ponder what a pious pastime war is

Byron: Such is the absorbing hate when warring nations meet

Byron: The time is past when swords subdued

Byron: War, banquet for wolf and worm

Byron: War cuts up not only branch, but root

Byron: War did glut himself again, all earth was but one thought – and that was death

Byron: War feeds the vultures, wolves and worms

Byron: War returns on its perpetrator

Byron: War’s a brain-spattering, windpipe-slitting art

Thomas Campbell: Selections on peace and war

Thomas Campbell: Maddening strife and blood-stain’d fields to come

Thomas Campbell: Men will weep for him when many a guilty martial fame is dim

Thomas Campbell: Sending whirlwind warrants forth to rouse the slumbering fiends of war

Thomas Campbell: Shall War’s polluted banner ne’er be furl’d?

Thomas Campbell: The snow shall be their winding-sheet, every turf a soldier’s sepulchre

Thomas Campbell: That first spoke peace to man

Thomas Campion: Raving war wastes our empty fields

Thomas Campion: Then bloody swords and armour should not be

Thomas Campion: Upright man needs neither towers nor armour

Thomas Carew: Lust for gold fills the world with tumult, blood, and war

Thomas Carew: They’ll hang their arms upon the olive bough

Thomas Carlyle: Selections on war

Thomas Carlyle: Fighting with steel murder-tools

Thomas Carlyle: Inept government’s sole achievement, getting together men to kill other men

Thomas Carlyle: War is a quarrel between two thieves

Thomas Carlyle: What blood-filled trenches, and contentious centuries, may still divide us!

Thomas Carlyle: The works of peace versus battles and war-tumults

Mary Chandler: The noise of war is hushed

George Chapman: Men’s want of peace, which was from want of love

George Chapman: Peace with all her heavenly seed

Thomas Chatterton: Peace, gentlest, softest of the virtues

Geoffrey Chaucer: The city to the soldier’s rage resigned; successless wars and poverty behind

G.K. Chesterton: In modern war defeat is complete defeat

G. K. Chesterton: War’s regressive tendency

Charles Churchill: Thousands bleed for some vile spot where fifty cannot feed

Caroline Clive: The bloody words of ruffian war

Arthur Hugh Clough: For an impalpable odour of honour armies shall bleed

Arthur Hugh Clough: Ye vulgar dreamers about peace

Elizabeth Cobbold: Earth’s bosom drenching with her children’s blood

Margaret Postgate Cole: They fell, like snowflakes wiping out the noon

Mary Elizabeth Coleridge: Lilies and Doves

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Selections on peace and war

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: All our dainty terms for fratricide

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: And war still violates the unfinished works of peace

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The demon War and its attendants, maniac Suicide and giant Murder

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Fire, Famine, And Slaughter: A War Eclogue

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: From all sides rush the thirsty brood of War!

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: War and all its dread vicissitudes pleasingly agitate their stagnant hearts

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: War is a murderous fiend, by fiends adored

William Collins: Ode to Peace

William Congreve: Cursed ambition wakes the world to war and ruin

William Congreve: No more do youth leave the sacred arts for stubborn arms

Joseph Conrad: Selections on war

Joseph Conrad: Democratic, commercial wars more ferocious than those of kings

Joseph Conrad: Firing into a continent, a touch of insanity in the proceeding

Joseph Conrad: From the frozen ground of battlefields a chorus of groans calls for vengeance from Heaven

Joseph Conrad: Humanity’s inhuman toleration of war

Joseph Conrad: In modern war mankind cannot resist the temptation to use any stealthy, murderous contrivance

Joseph Conrad: Men go mad in protest against “peculiar sanity” of war

Joseph Conrad: Moral cannibals feeding on each other’s misfortunes: ‘It’s a damned bad war, but it’s better than no war at all.’

Joseph Conrad: Never before has war received so much homage at the lips of men

Joseph Conrad: War makes earth a pagan planet

Joseph Conrad: With earth soaked in blood, all men seek some formula of peace

Eliza Cook: Selections on peace and war

Eliza Cook: Crimson battlefield. When the world shall be spread with tombless dead.

Eliza Cook: I felt a shuddering horror lurk, to think I’d mingled in such work

Eliza Cook: No bloodstain lingers there. The plough and the spear.

Eliza Cook: Not where bullet, sword, and shield lie strown with the gory slain

Eliza Cook: Who can love the laurel wreath, plucked from the gory field of death?

Joseph Cottle: Selections on war

Joseph Cottle: If on the slaughter’d field some mind humane…

Joseph Cottle: Know you their crimes on whom you warfare wage?

Joseph Cottle: Plant the seeds of universal peace

Joseph Cottle: Torn from their cots to wield the murderer’s blade

Joseph Cottle: Warn mankind to shun the hostile spear

Joseph Cottle: War’s noxious breath fills earth with discord, dread, and death

Peter L. Courtier: Ode to Peace

Francis Coutts: Why was no better gift by thee bequeathed than a sword unsheathed?

Abraham Cowley: Like the peace, but think it comes too late

Abraham Cowley: Only peace breeds scarcity in Hell

Abraham Cowley: To give peace and then the rules of peace

William Cowper: Selections on peace and war

William Cowper on war and man’s inhumanity to man: Homo homini lupus

William Cowper: In every heart are sown the sparks that kindle fiery war

William Cowper: Never shall you hear the voice of war again

William Cowper: O place me in some heaven-protected isle where no crested warrior dips his plume in blood

William Cowper: Peace, both the duty and the prize

William Cowper: They trust in navies and armies

William Cowper: Universal soldiership has stabbed the heart of man

Richard Crashaw: In Hell’s palaces

William Crowe: On poets who sing of war

Ann Batten Cristall: Pity, Liberty, and Peace

Ann Batten Cristall: Relief for nature, man at war with themselves

William Cunningham: A thousand gifts are thine, Sweet Peace! – which War can never know

Charlotte Dacre: Peace

Charlotte Dacre: War

William Davenant: War, the sport of kings, increases the number of dead

John Davidson: Blood in torrents pour in vain, for war breeds war again

John Davidson: The blood of men poured out in endless wars

W.H. Davies: The blind hatred engendered by war

Thomas Day: Wages abhorred war with humankind

Cecil Day-Lewis: Newsreel

Daniel Defoe: Mammon and Mars, twin deities

Thomas Dekker: Lands ravaged by soldiers and war

Charles Dickens: Waging war to perpetuate slavery

Sydney Dobell: The Army Surgeon

Austin Dobson: Before Sedan

Alfred Dommett: A Christmas hymn. The peaceful Prince of earth and heaven.

John Donne: The horror and ghastliness of war

John Donne: War and misery are one thing

Augusta Theodosia Drane: It needs must be that gentle Peace prevail!

Michael Drayton: All your banks with peace preserved be

John Drinkwater: I sing of peace while nations market in death

John Drinkwater: We Mothers Know

John Dryden: All your care is to provide the horrid pomp of war

John Dryden: In peace the thoughts of war he could remove

John Dryden and Horace: Happy is he who trumpets summon not to war

John Dryden and Lucretius: Venus and Mars: Lull the world in universal peace

Edward Dyer: So that of war the very name may not be heard again

George Eliot: Tart rebuke of crude war propaganda

Havelock Ellis: War, a relapse from civilisation into barbarism, if not savagery

William Norman Ewer: Five Souls

Eleanor Farjeon: Now that you too join the vanishing armies

Eleanor Farjeon: Peace Poem

George Farquhar: What induced you to turn soldier?

Joseph Fawcett: Selections against war

Joseph Fawcett: Broken hearts to broken limbs reply. War expands in space and time.

Joseph Fawcett: Civilized war! The cool carnage of the cultured world.

Joseph Fawcett: The contemptible wagers of civilized war

Joseph Fawcett: The deep scarlet shame of unceasing war

Joseph Fawcett: The distempered dream of war

Joseph Fawcett: Law prosecutes single murder, ignores mass murder

Joseph Fawcett: Uncurs’d the ornamented murderers move

Joseph Fawcett: War and music. Perversion most perverse! Misapplication monstrous!

Joseph Fawcett: War Elegy

Joseph Fawcett: War mocks and degrades nature, God, mind, commerce, agriculture

Padraic Fiacc: Credo Credo

Padraic Fiacc: Der Bomben Poet

Henry Fielding: An alternative to heaps of mangled and murdered human bodies

Henry Fielding: On the condign fate of Great Men and conquerors

Henry Fielding: War creates the professors of human blood-shedding

Anne Finch: Enquiry After Peace

Ford Maddox Ford: Millions massacred for picturesque phrases in politicians’ speeches

Ford Maddox Ford: Preparing men likes bullocks for the slaughterhouse

E.M. Forster: The Imperialist is not what he thinks or seems. He is a destroyer.

E.M. Forster: Wars spurred on by persistent talk of war, amplified by the gutter press

James George Frazer: Purifying the defilement of war

James George Frazer: Saturn’s reign of peace

Thomas Fuller: As though there were not enough men-murdering engines

Thomas Fuller: When all the world might smile in perfect peace

Richard Furness: Selections on war

Richard Furness: Death and demons laugh’d in horrid joy

Richard Furness: The plough and the sword

Richard Furness: War and Love

Richard Furness: Whatever monster rose to mar the happiness of earth by war

Richard Furness: Who wasted earth with sword and flame and murdered millions for a name

John Galsworthy: Selections on war

John Galsworthy, 1911: Air war last and worst hideous development of the black arts of warfare

John Galsworthy: Achieving perpetual peace by securing the annihilation of our common enemies

John Galsworthy: Air war leads to reverse evolution

John Galsworthy: Friend becomes foe with war psychosis

John Galsworthy: Grandiloquent phrases are the very munitions of war

John Galsworthy: History, made up of wars and intrigues which have originated in the brains of public men

John Galsworthy: The monstrous injustice of conflating chauvinism with common drunkenness

John Galsworthy: No one who disagrees with me must say anything if we are to save the cause of freedom and humanity

John Galsworthy: On the drawbacks of uttering pro-war cant

John Galsworthy: On the embarrassing consequences of bellicose pontification

John Galsworthy: Only a helpless or wicked God would allow the slaughter of millions

John Galsworthy: The procreative demands of war

John Galsworthy: The pure essence of humanitarian warfare sentiments

John Galsworthy: Rivers of blood and tears. When would killing go out of fashion?

John Galsworthy: Trading in fanatical idiocy at expense of others’ blood and sweat

John Galsworthy: Valley of the Shadow

John Galsworthy: War and the microbe of fatalism

John Galsworthy: The war brought in ugliness

John Galsworthy: The war made us all into barbarians

John Galsworthy: War moves mankind towards the manly and unforgiving vigour of the tiger and the rat

John Galsworthy: “The war! The cursed war!”

John Galsworthy: War, where Christ is daily crucified a million times over

John Galsworthy: Would they never tire of making mincemeat of the world?

David Garnett: Criminal to welcome war

David Garnett: War is the worst of the epidemic diseases which afflict mankind

John Gay: Parallel lives. Highwaymen and soldiers.

Thomas Gent: Sonnet to Peace

Wilfrid Wilson Gibson: Selections on war

Wilfrid Wilson Gibson: The Bayonet

Wilfrid Wilson Gibson: Between The Lines

Wilfrid Wilson Gibson: The Conscript

Wilfrid Wilson Gibson: Dance of death

Wilfrid Wilson Gibson: He who killed men in foreign lands bore my name

Wilfrid Wilson Gibson: Nine O’Clock News

George Gissing: Selections on war

George Gissing: “Civilisation rests upon a military basis”

George Gissing: Culpable fatalism: war is assured by perpetual prophecies of statesmen and journalists

George Gissing: Games and war

George Gissing: The imposition of military servitude

George Gissing: Large-scale murder as fair sport

George Gissing: Letter to a son killed in war: War is a horrible thing that ought to be left to savages

George Gissing: Lord of Slaughter commands curse of universal soldiering

George Gissing: The morbid love of war

George Gissing: Next stage in civilization: peace made a religion

George Gissing: A parable on war, industry and the press

George Gissing: Peace, no word more beautiful

George Gissing: War turns science into enemy of man

George Gissing: When the next great war comes, newspapers will be the chief cause of it

William Godwin: Inventions of a barbarous age, deluging provinces with blood

Oliver Goldsmith: Selections on war

Oliver Goldsmith: A thousand hecatombs for mere trumperies. Imperial contest that no honest man can wish either side wins.

Oliver Goldsmith on war: Hundreds of thousands killed without consequence

Oliver Goldsmith: I am an enemy to nothing in this good world but war

Oliver Goldsmith: To make one man happy is more truly great than having ten thousand captives groaning at the wheels of his chariot

Oliver Goldsmith: War and its servile press

Edmund Gosse: War and the brutalities of the real thing

John Gower: Peace is chief of all world’s wealth, war is mother of all wrongs

Robert Graves: Selections on war

Robert Graves: Accommodations for a million men killed in war

Robert Graves: A certain cure for lust of blood

Robert Graves: Even its opponents don’t survive war

Robert Graves: The grim arithmetic of war

Robert Graves: Men at arms and men of letters, the birth of English pacifism in the First World War

Robert Graves: Military madness degenerating into savagery

Robert Graves: Peace

Robert Graves: Recalling the last war, preparing for the next

Robert Graves: War follows its victims back home

Robert Graves: War should be a sport for men above forty-five only

Robert Graves: War’s path of death, decay and decomposition

Robert Graves: War’s ultimate victors, the rats

Robert Graves: When even war’s gallows humor fails

Thomas Gray: Clouds of carnage blot the sun; weave the crimson web of war

Thomas Gray: Poetry subdues war

Graham Greene: He carried the war in his heart, infecting everything

Graham Greene: A hundred English Guernicas

Graham Greene: Letter On NATO Threat To Cuba

Graham Greene: None of us can hate any more – or love. You have to feel something to stop a war.

Robert Greene: Then the stormy threats of wars shall cease

Fulke Greville: The shames of peace are the pride of war

Thomas Hardy: Selections on war

Thomas Hardy: All-Earth-gladdening Law of Peace, war’s apology wholly stultified

Thomas Hardy: As war-waste classed

Thomas Hardy: The battle-god is god no more

Thomas Hardy: Channel Firing

Thomas Hardy: Ever consign all Lords of War to sleep

Thomas Hardy: How long must your wroth reasonings trade on lives like these?

Thomas Hardy: The Man He Killed

Thomas Hardy: Vaster battalions press for further strands to argue in the self-same bloody mode

Thomas Hardy: War’s annals will fade into night

Frank Harris: Soulless selfishness of war; Anglo-Saxon domineering combativeness greatest danger to Humanity

Frank Harris: Henri Barbusse and the war against war

William Hazlitt: Selections on war

William Hazlitt: And this is patriotism. Practitioners of eternal war.

William Hazlitt: Difference between a war-expenditure and what ought to be a peace-establishment

William Hazlitt: Effects of war and taxes

William Hazlitt: Harpies of the press. Juggling fiends. Systematic opponents of peace. Ceaseless partisans of interminable hostilities.

William Hazlitt: High-priests of Moloch foam at the mouth at the name of peace

William Hazlitt: Keystone of indestructible war-system: Closing up the avenues to peace, shutting the gates of mercy on mankind

William Hazlitt: Poets outlive conquerors

William Hazlitt: Systematic patrons of eternal war

William Hazlitt: Ultima ratio regum: liberals and conservatives united by leaden bullets and steel bayonets

William Hazlitt: War is in itself is a thriving, sensible traffic only to cannibals

Felicia Hemans: Selections on peace and war

Felicia Hemans: Say to the hurricane of war, – “Be still”

Felicia Hemans: Speak not of death, till thou hast looked on such

Felicia Hemans: A thousand voices echo “Peace!”

Felicia Hemans: Thousands doomed to moan, condemned by war to hopeless grief unknown

Felicia Hemans: War and Peace

Felicia Hemans: War has still ravaged o’er the blasted plain

George Herbert: Make war to cease

Mary Heron: Bid brazen-throated war and discord cease

Mary Heron: Ode on the General Peace

Robert Herrick: The Olive Branch

Robert Herrick: The olive branch, the arch of peace

Maurice Hewlett: In the Trenches

Maurice Hewlett: O, this war, what a glorious game!

Maurice Hewlett: Who prayeth peace?

Thomas Hobbes: Divine law is the fulfilling of peace

Thomas Hobbes: There was never such a time of war all over the world

Thomas Hobbes: War, where every man is enemy to every man

James Hogg: Few such monsters can mankind endure: The fields are heaped with dead and dying.

James Hogg: Millions have bled that sycophants may rule

Thomas Holcroft: In wars and wretchedness I cannot say that I delight

Thomas Holcroft: Reaping vast crops of famine, sword, and fire

Thomas Hood: As gentle as sweet heaven’s dew beside the red and horrid drops of war

Thomas Hood: Freelance soldiering

Thomas Hood: When war has ceased with all its Ills, Captains should come like sucking Doves, With Olive Branches in their Bills

Gerard Manley Hopkins: What pure peace allows alarms of wars?

W. H. Hudson: A mother’s plea

David Hume: War’s double standards

Leigh Hunt: Captain Sword and Captain Pen

Leigh Hunt: The devilish drouth of the cannon’s ever-gaping mouth

Leigh Hunt: Some Remarks On War And Military Statesmen

Francis Hutcheson: To poets, war is impetuous, cruel, undistinguishing monster

Aldous Huxley: Selections on war

Aldous Huxley: Absurdity of talking about the defence of democracy by war

Aldous Huxley: All devote themselves methodically and scientifically to general massacre and wholesale destruction

Aldous Huxley: The first of the political causes of war is war itself

Aldous Huxley: How are we to get rid of war when we celebrate militarists?

Aldous Huxley: Imposition of permanent military servitude upon the masses

Aldous Huxley: Manufacturing of arms, an intrinsically abominable practice

Aldous Huxley: Nuclear weapons, establishing world domination for one’s gang

Aldous Huxley: One cannot be ruler of militaristic society without being militarist oneself

Aldous Huxley: Peace of the world frequently endangered in order that oil magnates might grow a little richer

Aldous Huxley: Rhetorical devices used to conceal fundamental absurdity and monstrosity of war

Aldous Huxley: Science, technology harnessed to the chariot of war

Aldous Huxley: Scientific workers must take action against war

Aldous Huxley: Shifting people’s attention in world where war-making remains an almost sacred habit

Aldous Huxley: War is mass murder organized in cold blood

Aldous Huxley: War is not a law of nature, nor even of human nature

Aldous Huxley: War is now the affair of every man, woman and child in the community

Aldous Huxley: War shatters precarious crust of civilization, precipitates vast numbers of human beings into abyss of misery and frenzied diabolism

Elizabeth Inchbald: War, a choice of words

Jean Ingelow: And the dove said, “Give us peace!”

Jean Ingelow: Methought the men of war were even as gods

Richard Jefferies: The raven, a fable

James Jennings: Reign goddess, Peace, throughout eternal years

Soame Jenyns: One good-natured act more praises gain than armies overthrown, and thousands slain

Soame Jenyns: The soldier’s scarlet glowing from afar shows his bloody occupation’s war

Jerome K. Jerome: Go for a soldier

Samuel Johnson: Selections on war

Samuel Johnson: I to nobler themes aspire

Samuel Johnson: Reason frowns on War’s unequal game

Samuel Johnson: The violence of war admits no distinction

Samuel Johnson: War is heaviest of national evils, a calamity in which every species of misery is involved

Samuel Johnson: War is the extremity of evil

Henry Jones: Bid discord cease, and open wide the gates of peace

John Keats: Days innocent of scathing war

John Keats: The fierce intoxicating tones of trumpets, drums and cannon

John Keats: Sonnet on Peace

Harriet King: Life is Peace

Charles Kingsley: Empire, a system of world-wide robbery, and church

Charles Kingsley: Tyrannising it luxuriously over all nations, she had sat upon the mystic beast

Henry Kirke White: Far better music inspire peace than war

Henry Kirke White: The red-eyeballed warrior doomed to ruin

Charles Lamb: More-wasting War, insatiable of blood

Walter Savage Landor: Some stopped revenge athirst for slaughter

D. H. Lawrence: Selections on war

D.H. Lawrence: All modern militarism is foul

D.H. Lawrence: Future War, Murderous Weapons, Refinements of Evil

D. H. Lawrence: If they do not kill him in this war

D.H. Lawrence: In 1915 the world ended with the slaughter-machine of human devilishness

D. H. Lawrence: No romance of war. The soul did not heal.

D.H. Lawrence: The price to pay at home for terrible, terrible war

D.H. Lawrence: War adds horror to horror, becomes horrible piratic affair, dirty sort of freebooting

Richard Le Gallienne: Selections on war

Richard Le Gallienne: Christ at Notre Dame: abhorred be they who ever draw again the sword

Richard Le Gallienne: The Illusion of War

Richard Le Gallienne: Is this to be strong, ye nations, your vulgar battles to fight?

Richard Le Gallienne: A nation is merely a big fool with an army

Richard Le Gallienne: Poetry and war

Richard Le Gallienne: The Rainbow

Joseph Lee: German Prisoners

Vernon Lee: Satan’s rules of war

Doris Lessing: With war every event has the quality of war, nothing of peace remains

Charles Lever: The self-serving drunken oblivion of war

C. S. Lewis: The folly and danger of noble and humanitarian war

Isabella Lickbarrow: Invocation To Peace

John Locke: State of war and state of nature are opposites

William J. Locke: Following war

William J. Locke: I’m good at killing things, I ought to have been a soldier

William J. Locke: Life in its fullness and glory, war’s orgies of horror

Samuel Lover: The demon of war casts his shadows before

Samuel Lover: The trumpet and the sword

Thomas Macaulay: Drive for transatlantic dominion leads to endless wars, empty treasuries

Thomas Macaulay: Loving war for its own sake

Thomas Macaulay: The self-perpetuating role of the army

Hugh MacDiarmid: A war to save civilization, you say?

George MacDonald: War-cry of every opinion. Battle of the dead.

Charles Mackay: Awake the song of peace!

Charles Mackay: Hung the sword in the hall, the spear on the wall

Charles Mackay: War in all men’s eyes shall be a monster of iniquity

Bernard Mandeville: How to induce men to kill and die

Frederic Manning: War poems

Frederic Manning: Blow, wind! Drown the senseless thunder of the guns.

Frederic Manning: Grotesque

Frederic Manning: Shells hounding through air athirst for blood

Frederic Manning: The Trenches

Frederic Manning: The very mask of God, broken

Christopher Marlowe: Accurs’d be he that first invented war!

Christopher Marlowe: Parricide and filicide. While lions war, poor lambs perish.

Andrew Marvell: War all this doth overgrow

Andrew Marvell: When roses only arms might bear

William Mason: Il Pacifico: Joys that peace inspires

Gerald Massey: Curst, curst be war, the World’s most fatal glory!

Gerald Massey: Sweet peace comes treading down war’s cruel spears

Philip Massinger: Famine, blood, and death, Bellona’s pages

Philip Massinger: Mustn’t change ploughshares into swords

George Meredith: Selections on peace and war

George Meredith: All your gains from War resign

George Meredith: Bellona’s mad halloo

George Meredith: Nations at war are wild beasts

George Meredith: The Olive Branch

George Meredith: On the Danger of War

George Meredith: Think war the finest subject for poets?

George Meredith: War wife, as good as widowed

George Meredith: War’s rivers of blood no crown for future generations

George Meredith: Women and war

Leonard Merrick: Strange there weren’t more that didn’t think it a virtue to commit murder if you put on khaki

Alice Meynell: The true slayers are those who sire soldiers

Thomas Middleton: Selections on peace and war

Thomas Middleton: All made to make a peace, and not a war

Thomas Middleton: Blood-quaffing Mars, who wash’d himself in gore

Thomas Middleton: Let them that seek Peace, find Peace and enjoy Peace

Thomas Middleton: O thrice-peaceful souls, whom neither threats nor strife nor wars controls!

Thomas Middleton: The Peacemaker

Thomas Middleton: The soldier’s fate

John Milton: Men levy cruel wars, wasting the earth, each other to destroy

John Milton: No war or battle’s sound was heard the world around

John Milton: What can war but endless war still breed?

John Milton: Without ambition, war, or violence

Mary Russell Mitford: Sheath thy gory blade in peace

Charles Edward Montague: Selections on war and its aftermath

Charles Edward Montague; Aloof, detached officers lead to thousands of little brown bundles

Charles Edward Montague: The disconcerting bombs of Christian pacifism

Charles Edward Montague: Post-war prescription for peace

Charles Edward Montague: Soldier politician, recruiter of other men for battles that he avoided himself

Charles Edward Montague: War must first slay natural sentiment of brotherhood

Charles Edward Montague: War propaganda leaves bill to be settled in peacetime

Charles Edward Montague: War’s demoralization

James Montgomery: Selections on war and peace

James Montgomery: Farewell to War

James Montgomery: Fratricidal war speeds on inexorability of Death

James Montgomery: The poet tracks not the warrior’s fiery road

James Montgomery: ‘Twas but a dream. But one word found utterance – “Peace, peace! peace!”

James Montgomery: War, that self-inflicted scourge of man

Robert Montgomery: Field of Death

Robert Montgomery: War

George Moore: Murder pure and simple, impossible to revive the methods of Tamburlaine

George Moore: War and disillusionment

Thomas Moore: Famine comes to glean all that the sword had left unreap’d. A banquet, yet alive, for ravening vultures.

Thomas Moore: No trophies but of Love

Hannah More: War

Thomas More: Battles result from lust for fame and glory

Lewis Morris: Selections on war and peace

Lewis Morris: The blight of war surges in waves of blood

Lewis Morris: The evil blight of war torments the race from age to age

Lewis Morris: Filled with love of peace

Lewis Morris: Put off the curse of war

Lewis Morris: Red war, the dungeon, and the stake

Lewis Morris: When the cannons roar and the trumpets blare no longer

Lewis Morris: White-winged Peace triumphs over War’s red rapine

Lewis Morris: Who will free us from the dreadful past of war and hatred?

Lewis Morris: The world rang with the fierce shouts of war and cries of pain

William Morris: No man knew the sight of blood

William Morris: Protecting the strong from the weak, selling each other weapons to kill their own countrymen

William Morris: The role of soldiers and how they will disappear

William Morris: War abroad but no peace at home

John Middleton Murry: Selections on peace and war

John Middleton Murry: The choice, democracy or modern warfare

John Middleton Murry: For England, peace or destruction

John Middleton Murry: The machine of war

John Middleton Murry: Modern warfare is the deliberate massacre of the innocents

John Middleton Murry: The morality of bombing civilians is not arithmetic

John Middleton Murry: Non-intervention versus the universal peace of universal destruction

John Middleton Murry: The pacifism of luxury and the pacifism of sacrifice

John Middleton Murry: Pacifist movement to bear witness against total dehumanization of humanity necessitated by modern war

John Middleton Murry: Weapons of modern war involve bestialization of humanity

Thomas Nashe: Swords may not fight with fate

Adela Florence Nicolson: Doubtless feasted the jackal and the kite

Alfred Noyes: Selections on war

Alfred Noyes: And the cost of war, they reckoned it In little disks of gold

Alfred Noyes: The Dawn of Peace

Alfred Noyes: Mars and Urania

Alfred Noyes: Medicine driven back in defeat by the nightmare chaos of war

Alfred Noyes: The men he must kill for a little pay. And once he had sickened to watch them slaughter an ox.

Alfred Noyes: Out of the obscene seas of slaughter

Alfred Noyes: Scarecrows that once were men

Alfred Noyes: A shuddering lump of tattered wounds lifted up a mangled head and whined

Alfred Noyes: Slaughter! Slaughter! Slaughter!

Alfred Noyes: They say that war’s a noble thing!

Alfred Noyes: Turning wasteful strength of war to accomplish large and fruitful tasks of peace

Alfred Noyes: The Victory Ball

Alfred Noyes: War, hypocritical word for universal murder

Alfred Noyes: War they tell me is a noble thing

Alfred Noyes: When they talked of war, they thought of sawdust, not of blood

Alfred Noyes: The Wine Press

Sean O’Casey: Battles of war changed for battles of peace

Sean O’Casey: The dead of wars past clasp their colder arms around the newer dead

Sean O’Casey: The Prince of Peace transformed into the god of war

Liam O’Flaherty: The foul horror of war

Liam O’Flaherty: Sounds from a dead world. Nothing but worms and rats feeding on death.

John Oldham: The cup and the sword

E. Philips Oppenheim: Black tragedy leaned over the land

Amelia Opie: Grant, Heaven, those tears may be the last that war, detested war, shall cause!

Wildred Owen: Selections on war

Wilfred Owen: Arms and the Boy and Disabled

Wilfred Owen: For torture of lying machinally shelled at the pleasure of this world’s Powers who’d run amok

Wilfred Owen: From gloom’s last dregs these long-strung creatures crept

Wilfred Owen: Multitudinous murders they once witnessed

Wilfred Owen: 1914

Wilfred Owen: The Parable of the Old Man and the Young

Wilfred Owen: Pawing us who dealt them war and madness

Wildred Owen: Rushed in the body to enter hell and there out-fiending all its fiends and flames

Wilfred Owen: Soldier’s Dream

Wilfred Owen: The sons we offered might regret they died if we got nothing lasting in their stead

Wildred Owen: Strange meeting: I am the enemy you killed, my friend

John Oxenham: The Stars’ Accusal

John Oxenham: Thank God For Peace!

Thomas Parnell: Lovely, lasting peace, appear!

Walter Pater: What are they all now, and the dust of their battles? Deity of Slaughter.

Coventry Patmore: Peace in life and art

Thomas Love Peacock: Selections on war and peace

Thomas Love Peacock: Frenzied war’s ensanguined reign

Thomas Love Peacock: The god of battle, the last deep groan of agony

Thomas Love Peacock: I’ll make my verses rattle with the din of war and battle

Thomas Love Peacock: Ne’er thy sweet echoes swell again with war’s demoniac yell!

Thomas Love Peacock: We spilt blood enough to swim in, we orphaned many children and widowed many women

Stephen Phillips: Appalled at bloody trophies

Harold Pinter: Art, Truth and Politics

Max Plowman: The dead soldiers. Killing men is always killing God.

Max Plowman: The God of War

Max Plowman: The Goddess of War

Joseph Mary Plunkett: Till blooms the bud on olive branch, borne by the bird of peace

Alexander Pope: Peace o’er the world her olive wand extend

Alexander Pope: War, horrid war, your thoughtful walks invades

Alexander Pope: Where Peace scatters blessings from her dovelike wing

Jessie Pope: Black, solemn peace is brooding low; peace, still unbroken

John Cowper Powys: To Eugene Debs, in prison for opposing war

Winthrop Mackworth Praed: Take the sword away

George Preedy: One gigantic symbol of war, a cloudy impersonal cohort of Mars

J.B. Priestley: Insane regress of ultimate weapons leads to radioactive cemetery

Thomas Pringle: After the slaughter, the feast

Thomas Pringle: Resistless swept the ranks of war, the murder-glutted scythe of death

Matthew Prior: A new golden age free from fierce Bellona’s rage

Adelaide A. Procter: Let carnage cease and give us peace!

Arthur Quiller-Couch: Man shall outlast his battles

Herbert Read: Bombing Casualties

Herbert Read: The Happy Warrior

Charles Reade: To God? Rather to war and his sister and to the god of lies

Charles Reade: War is sweet to those who have never experienced it

Thomas Reid: State of nature versus state of war

Ernest Rhys: Enough of war, enough of death

Charlotte Richardson: Once more let war and discord cease

Mary Robinson: Selections on war

Mary Robinson: Anticipate the day when ruthless war shall cease to desolate

Mary Robinson: Dread-destructive power of war

Mary Robinson: Impetuous War, the lord of slaughter

Mary Robinson: The soldier sheds, for gold, a brother’s blood

Mary Robinson: Spread once more the fostering rays of Peace

Mary Robinson: The wise shall bid, too late, the sacred olive rise

Samuel Rogers: War and the Great in War let others sing

Samuel Rogers: What tho’ the iron school of War erase each milder virtue…

Isaac Rosenberg: Poems on war

Isaac Rosenberg: Break of Day in the Trenches

Isaac Rosenberg: Dead Man’s Dump

Isaac Rosenberg: In War

Isaac Rosenberg: O! ancient crimson curse! On receiving news of the war

Isaac Rosenberg: Soldier: Twentieth Century

Christina Rossetti: They reap a red crop from the field. O Man, put up thy sword.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Shall Peace be still a sunk stream long unmet?

John Ruskin: Peace Song

George William Russell: Gods of War

Margaret Sackville: Selections on peace and war

Margaret Sackville: How is it that men slaughter men even here upon the earth?

Margaret Sackville: Nostra Culpa

Margaret Sackville: The Pageant of War

Margaret Sackville: The Peacemakers

Margaret Sackville: Quo Vaditis?

Margaret Sackville: Reconciliation over our mutual dead

Margaret Sackville: Sacrament

Margaret Sackville: So quietly and evenly they walked these million gentle dead

Margaret Sackville: To One Who Denies the Possibility of a Permanent Peace

Margaret Sackville: We are the mothers, and each has lost a son

Margaret Sackville: Who shall deliver us from the memory of these dead?

Vita Sackville-West: Man’s war on his fellow creatures

George Saintsbury: The odious profession

Edgar Saltus: Soldiers and no farmers; imperial sterility…and demise

Siegfried Sassoon: Selections on war

Siegfried Sassoon: Aftermath

Siegfried Sassoon: Arms and the Man

Siegfried Sassoon: At the Cenotaph

Siegfried Sassoon: Atrocities

Siegfried Sassoon: Enemies

Siegfried Sassoon: The foul beast of war that bludgeons life

Siegfried Sassoon: Murdering the livid hours that grope for peace

Siegfried Sassoon: No doubt he loathed the war and longed for peace

Siegfried Sassoon: Our deeds with lies were lauded, our bones with wrongs rewarded

Siegfried Sassoon: Repression of War Experience

Siegfried Sassoon: Their dreams that drip with murder, of glorious war that shatter’d all their pride

Siegfried Sassoon: To Any Dead Officer

Siegfried Sassoon: The Tombstone-Maker

Siegfried Sassoon: The unheroic dead who fed the guns, those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones

Siegfried Sassoon: War, remorse and reconciliation

Siegfried Sassoon: We left our holes and looked above the wreckage of the earth

Ethel Talbot Scheffauer: The sun shall rise upon a newer world that has forgot to kill

John Scott: I hate that drum’s discordant sound

Walter Scott: The diffusion of knowledge, not the effusion of blood

Walter Scott: Fighting

Walter Scott: War’s cannibal priest, druid red from his human sacrifice

Walter Scott: The worst sort of frenzy, military frenzy, hath possessed man, woman and child

Anna Seward: Fierce War has wing’d the arrow that wounds my soul’s repose

Shaftesbury: Improvement of arts and scholarship requires rest from war

William Shakespeare: Selections on war and peace

William Shakespeare: Blessed is the peacemaker

William Shakespeare: Contumelious, beastly, mad-brained war

William Shakespeare: Death of twenty thousand men for fantasy and fame

William Shakespeare: Enrich the time to come with smooth-faced peace

William Shakespeare: Naked, poor, mangled peace, dear nurse of arts, plenties, joyful births

William Shakespeare: Never a war did cease…with such a peace

William Shakespeare: Nor more shall trenching war channel her fields, bruise her flowerets

William Shakespeare: O bloody times. When lions war, sons kill fathers, fathers sons

William Shakespeare: O war, thou son of hell

Shakespeare: On driving a husband to none-sparing war

William Shakespeare: Out of speech of peace into harsh tongue of war

Shakespeare: So inured to war that mothers smile as their children are slain

William Shakespeare: Soldier, a creature that I teach to fight

William Shakespeare: Take heed how you awake our sleeping sword of war

William Shakespeare: Tame the savage spirit of wild war

William Shakespeare: War’s exactions

William Shakespeare: Works of poetry outlast the works of war

George Bernard Shaw: Selections on war

George Bernard Shaw: The earth is still bursting with the dead bodies of the victors

George Bernard Shaw: Gadarene swine running violently into a hell of high explosives

George Bernard Shaw: Little Minds and Big Battles

George Bernard Shaw: The Long Arm of War

Militarist myopia: George Bernard Shaw’s Common Sense About the War

George Bernard Shaw: Rabid war maniacs reversed the order of nature

George Bernard Shaw: Religion as antidote to war

George Bernard Shaw: Religion of ruthless competition inevitably leads to war

George Bernard Shaw: The shallowness of the ideals of men ignorant of history is their destruction

George Bernard Shaw: Soldiering is the coward’s art of attacking mercilessly when you are strong, and keeping out of harm’s way when you are weak

George Bernard Shaw: War and frivolous exultation in death for its own sake

George Bernard Shaw: War and the sufferings of the sane

George Bernard Shaw: War Delirium

George Bernard Shaw: War, governments and munitions manufacturers

George Bernard Shaw: War, the Yahoo and the angry ape

George Bernard Shaw: The way of the soldier is the way of death

Mary Shelley: On peace and war

Mary Shelley: The fate of the world bound up with the death of a single man

Mary Shelley: I do not sympathize in their dreams of massacre and glory

Mary Shelley: I turned to the corpse-strewn earth and felt ashamed of my species

Mary Shelley: If my first introduction to humanity had been a young soldier, burning for glory and slaughter

Mary Shelley: Men have slain each other by thousands, now man is a creature of price

Percy Bysshe Shelley: Selections on war

Juvenilia: Percy Bysshe Shelley on war

Percy Bysshe Shelley: Earth cleansed of quivers, spears and gorgon-headed shields

Percy Bysshe Shelley: The fatal trump of useless war to swell

Percy Bysshe Shelley: Man fabricates the sword which stabs his peace

Percy Bysshe Shelley: Peace, love and concord once shall rule again

Percy Bysshe Shelley: The soldiers dreamed that they were blacksmiths

Percy Bysshe Shelley: Titled idiot kindles flames of war

Percy Bysshe Shelley: The unholy song of war

Percy Bysshe Shelley: War and the decline of poetry

Percy Bysshe Shelley: War with its million horrors shall live but in the memory of time

William Shenstone: Ah, hapless realms! that war’s oppression feel.

William Shenstone: Let the gull’d fool the toils of war pursue

William Shenstone: War, where bleed the many to enrich the few

James Shirley: Some men with swords may reap the field and plant fresh laurels where they kill

Edith Sitwell: Dirge for the New Sunrise

Osbert Sitwell: Totally out of place in a war-mad world

Osbert Sitwell: Wilfred Owen, poetry and war

Christopher Smart: Rejoice with the dove. Pray that all guns be nailed up.

M. B. Smedley: Where is the ministry of peace?

Charlotte Turner Smith: The lawless soldiers’ victims

Charlotte Turner Smith: Statesmen! ne’er dreading a scar, let loose the demons of war

Charlotte Turner Smith: Thus man spoils Heaven’s glorious works with blood!

Charlotte Turner Smith: To bathe his savage hands in human blood

Horace Smith: Selections on peace and war

Horace Smith: The hero-butchers of the sword

Horace Smith: Manufactured to machines for killing human creatures

Horace Smith: The trade of man-butchery. The soldier and the sailor.

Horace Smith: Weapon gathering dust

Horace Smith: When War’s ensanguined banner shall be furl’d

Sydney Smith: War, hailing official murderers as the greatest and most glorious of human creatures

Tobias Smollett: War contractors fattened on the blood of the nation

Tobias Smollett: The war glories of a demagogue

C.P. Snow: Selections on war

C.P. Snow: As final product of scientific civilization, nuclear bomb is its ultimate indictment

C.P. Snow: Even if moral judgments are left out, it’s unthinkable to drop the bomb

C.P. Snow: Hiroshima, the most horrible single act so far performed

C.P. Snow: Hope it’s never possible to develop superbomb

C. P. Snow: Their day is done

C.P. Snow: Worse than Genghiz Khan. Has there ever been a weapon that someone did not want to let off?

Charles Hamilton Sorley: The blind fight the blind 

Charles Hamilton Sorley: When you see millions of the mouthless dead

Robert Southey: Selections on peace and war

Robert Southey: The Battle of Blenheim

Robert Southey: Preparing the way for peace; militarism versus Christianity

Robert Southey: The Soldier’s Wife

Robert Southey: Wade to glory through a sea of blood

Robert Southey: Year follows year, and still we madly prosecute the war

Herbert Spencer: No patriotism when it comes to wars of aggression

Stephen Spender: Selections on war

Stephen Spender: Automata controlled by the mechanism of war, meaningless struggle between potential ashes to gain a world of ashes

Stephen Spender: Lecture on Hell: battle against totalitarian war

Stephen Spender: Two Armies

Stephen Spender: Ultima Ratio Regum

Stephen Spender: The War God

Stephen Spender: The Woolfs in the 1930s: War the inevitable result of an arms race.

Edmund Spenser: The first to attack the world with sword and fire

Edmund Spenser: Wars can nought but sorrows yield

Marguerite Steen: The sheer destructiveness of war made him angry

Marguerite Steen: The wreckage of the wars

Stendhal and Byron: Military leprosy; fronts of brass and feet of clay

G. B. Stern: Conventions of war? War itself is the outrage.

Laurence Sterne: Follow Peace

Robert Louis Stevenson: Peace we found where fire and war had been

William Stokes: Selections on peace and war

William Stokes: The Angel of Peace

William Stokes: Can fields of blood redeem mankind from error?

William Stokes: Invocation to the Spirit of Peace

William Stokes: The peace of nations to destroy

William Stokes: The Soldier

Lytton Strachey: After the battle, who shall say that the corpses were the most unfortunate?

Jonathan Swift: Selections on war

Jonathan Swift: Brutes more modest than men in perpetuating war against their own species

Jonathan Swift: Few of this generation can remember anything but war and taxes

Jonathan Swift: How to select commanders, end wars

Jonathan Swift: Lemuel Gulliver on War

Jonathan Swift: We must have peace, let it be a bad or a good one

Algernon Charles Swinburne: Death made drunk with war

Algernon Charles Swinburne : A gospel of war and damnation for the bestial by birth

Algernon Charles Swinburne: There shall be no more wars nor kingdoms won

Frank Swinnerton: Aerial bombardment, the most stupid and futile aspect of war

John Addington Symonds: Nation with nation, land with land unarmed shall live as comrades free

Arthur Symons: A great reaction: people will be tired of wars

Charles Tennant: Nor shall they learn war

William Tennant: Ode to Peace

William Tennant: While some sing of Mars’s bloody game…

Alfred Lord Tennyson: Selections on war and peace

Alfred Lord Tennyson: The brazen bridge of war

Alfred Lord Tennyson: I would the old God of war himself were dead

Alfred Tennyson: Ring out the thousand wars of old, ring in the thousand years of peace

Tennyson: Till the war-drum throbb’d no longer, and the battle-flags were furl’d

Alfred Lord Tennyson: When shall universal peace lie like light across the land?

William Makepeace Thackeray: Selections on war

William Makepeace Thackeray: Millions of innocent hearts wounded horribly

William Makepeace Thackeray: “Pax in bello.” The death of a single soldier.

William Makepeace Thackeray: War taxes men and women alike

William Makepeace Thackeray: War’s slave dealers

William Makepeace Thackeray: What human crime, misery, slavery, go to form that sum-total of glory!

Dylan Thomas: The Hand That Signed the Paper

James Thomson: Despise the insensate barbarous trade of war

James Thomson: Peace is the natural state of man; war his corruption, his disgrace

James Thomson: Philosophy’s plans of policy and peace

Mabel Thomson: A child’s ideal of soldiering

Francis Thompson: Flattering the too-much-pampered Boy of War

Francis Thompson: Kingly crown and warrior’s crest not worth a blade of grass

Thomas Tickell: The Soldier’s late destroying Hand shall rear new Temples in his native Land

W. R. Titterton: The Silent People of No Man’s Land

H. M. Tomlinson: Great offensive. Curse such trite and sounding words

H. M. Tomlinson: Greatest evil is unconscious indifference to war’s obscene blasphemy against life

H. M. Tomlinson: The return of the soldier, of he who was once alive

Anthony Trollope: How wars are arranged

Anthony Trollope: Leader appointed to save the empire – with warships

Anthony Trollope: Sports, reading and war

Henry Vaughan: Let us ‘midst noise and war of peace and mirth discuss

Henry Vaughan: The Men of War

Henry Vaughan: What thunders shall those men arraign who cannot count those they have slain?

W. S. Walker: Furies learn’d to blush at human crimes

W. S. Walker: One last sanguinary conquest

Edgar Wallace: Or wars would be impossible

Edgar Wallace: War

Edmund Waller: Less pleasure take brave minds in battles won

Horace Walpole: Selections on war and peace

Horace Walpole: Deplorable success of destroying any of our species

Horace Walpole: The glory of war and soldiering

Horace Walpole: How end all our victories?

Horace Walpole: I prefer the old hen Peace

Horace Walpole: I wish there were an excuse for not growing military mad

Horace Walpole: Oh! where is the dove with the olive-branch!

Horace Walpole: Peace and propagation

Horace Walpole: Peace is the sole event of which I wish to hear

Horace Walpole: Stuffing hospitals with maimed soldiers, besides making thousands of widows!

Horace Walpole: We peaceable folks are now to govern the world

Horace Walpole: Who gives a nation peace, gives tranquility to all

Hugh Walpole: Selections on war

Hugh Walpole: Continual screaming, men without faces

Hugh Walpole: The dark, crippling advent of war

Hugh Walpole: Dream of horror: the false reality of war

Hugh Walpole: It would indeed be a disheartening sight….

Hugh Walpole: War both protracts and strangles youth

Hugh Walpole: War killed Henry James

Rex Warner: These guns were sent to save civilisation

Thomas Warton: Not seek in fields of blood his warrior bays

Gilbert Waterhouse: “This is the last of wars – this is the last!”

William Watson: Curse my country for its military victory

William Watson: Dream of perfect peace

Isaac Watts: Clamor, and wrath, and war, begone

Theodore Watts-Dunton: Seat above the conflict, power to call Peace like a Zephyr

Edwin Waugh: Who strives to make the world a home where peace and justice meet

H.G. Wells: Selections on war

H.G. Wells: The abolition of war will be a new phase in the history of life

H.G. Wells: Armaments: Vile and dangerous industry in the human blood trade

H.G. Wells: Either man will put an end to air war or air war will put an end to mankind

H.G. Wells: For the predetermined losing side, modern wars an unspeakable business

H.G. Wells: Mars will sit like a giant above all human affairs and his speech is blunt and plain

H.G. Wells: Massacres of boys! That indeed is the essence of modern war.

H.G. Wells: Nearly everybody wants peace but nobody thinks out the arrangements needed

H.G. Wells: No more talk of honour and annexations, hegemonies and trade routes, but only Europe lamenting for her dead

H.G. Wells: None so detestable as the god of war

H.G. Wells: A number of devoted men and women ready to give their whole lives to great task of peace

H.G. Wells: The progressive enslavement of the race to military tyranny

H.G. Wells: A time will come when a politician who has wilfully made war will be as sure of the dock and much surer of the noose than a private homicide

H.G. Wells: Universal collapse logically follows world-wide war

H.G. Wells: War is a triumph of the exhausted and dying over the dead

H.G. Wells: War, road to complete extinction or to degradation beyond our present understanding

H.G. Wells: War will leave the world a world of cripples and old men and children

H.G. Wells: When war comes home

H.G. Wells: Why did humanity gape at the guns and do nothing? War as business

H.G. Wells: The world is weary of this bloodshed, weary of all this weeping

H.G. Wells: The young are the food of war

John Werge: Battle in hell if war ye must

Rebecca West: The dreams of Englishwomen during war

John Whitehouse: Ode to War

G. J. Whyte-Melville: Death is gathering his harvest – and the iron voice tolls on

G. J. Whyte-Melville: A soldier who fattens a battlefield, encumbers a trench, has his name misspelled in a gazette

Jane Wilde: Peace with the Olive, and Mercy with the Palm

Oscar Wilde: Antidote to war

Oscar Wilde: Crimson seas of war, Great Game in Central and South Asia

Oscar Wilde: Who would dare to praise the barren pride of warring nations?

Helen Maria Williams: Heaven-born peace

Helen Maria Williams: Now burns the savage soul of war

Sarah Williams: Groaning for him they slew

John Wilmot: With war I’ve not to do

Margaret L. Woods: The forgotten slain

William Wordsworth: Selections on peace and war

William Wordsworth: All merit centered in the sword; battle’s hecatombs

William Wordsworth: Earth’s groaning field, where ruthless mortals wage incessant wars

William Wordsworth: If men with men in peace abide, all other strength the weakest may withstand

William Wordsworth: Peace in these feverish times is sovereign bliss

William Wordsworth: Proclaimed heroes for strewing meadows with carcasses

William Wordsworth: Prophetic harps were singing, “War shall cease”

William Wordsworth: Spreading peaceful ensigns over war’s favourite playground

Wordsworth: We felt as men should feel at vast carnage

Philip Stanhope Worsley: Not with iron steeped in slaughter

Henry Wotton: Pastorale. No wars are seen.

Thomas Wyatt: Children of the gun

Thomas Wyatt: Wax fat on innocent blood: I cannot leave the state to Caesar

Hedd Wynn: War

Ann Yearsley: The anarchy of war

William Butler Yeats: The Rose of Peace

Edward Young: Selections on peace and war

Edward Young: Draw the murd’ring sword to give mankind a single lord

Edward Young: End of war the herald of wisdom and poetry

Edward Young: No more the rising harvest whets the sword, now peace, though long repuls’d, arrives at last

Edward Young: Reason’s a bloodless conqueror, more glorious than the sword

Edward Young: Such a peace that follows war