.... the greatest of wars are religious wars, and .... the most incalculable wars are revolutions.

Gilbert K. Chesterton, 5April1919

.... there is really a great deal to be said against war, especially modern war, with its huge scientific engines and huge conscript armies.  It is merciless, it is mechanical; it uses or destroys man and nature for its own purpose. It is anti-domestic like a press-gang, and often secretive like a conspiracy. It makes things depend on small rings of statesmen and diplomatists, often corrupt and always cynical.

It has aspects nobody can be proud of, such as the institution of spies. It necessarily interferes with that fundamental carelessness which is akin to kindness and is the wisest of the customs of mankind. It gives the mere scientific expert a more dangerous power than he has in any other department even of the modern world. Also it kills people.

Every one of these objections is a real objection, great or small; but we, objecting to these things as much as older men born of women, repeat that in a certain clear case and just cause we think it right to endure them.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton, 17October1914

If it be awful that death be so deadly in the very house of youth, it is still in a sense, beautiful that youth should be so young in the house of death.... If our soldiers seem too young to die in battle, at least they are young enough to live in battle; and death does not find them dead. 

--G. K. Chesterton, 24Nov1917

God does not always spare the good from grief.

The Father spared not the Son, and the Son spared not the mother. With his passion, there must be her compassion.

An unsuffering Christ Who did not freely pay the debt of human guilt would be reduced to the level of an ethical guide; and a mother who did not share in His sufferings would be unworthy of her great role.

--Fulton J. Sheen, excerpt from The Life of Christ.