Henry James: No more sacrifice on the altar of war

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

American writers on peace and against war

Henry James: Beguiled into thinking war, worst horror that attends the life of nations, could not recur

Henry James: War, the waste of life and time and money

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Henry James
From The Reverberator

His only brother had fallen, during the Terrible Year, in defence of their adopted country. Yet Gaston, though he had had an old Legitimist marquis for godfather, was not legally one of its children; his mother had, on her death-bed, extorted from him the promise that he wouldn’t take service in its armies; she considered, after the death of her elder son – Gaston, in 1870, had been a boy of ten – that the family had sacrificed enough on the altar of sympathy.