Some Thoughts on the Epic

Nevertheless, the soul that is enslaved to war cries out for deliverance, but deliverance itself appears to it
in an extreme and tragic aspect, the aspect of destruction. Any other solution, more moderate, more
reasonable in character, would expose the mind to suffering so naked, so violent that it could not be borne,
even as memory. Terror, grief, exhaustion, slaughter, the annihilation of comrades - is it credible that these
things should not continually tear at the soul, if the intoxication of force had not intervened to drown
them? The idea that an unlimited effort should bring in only a limited profit or no profit at all is terribly
painful.