A Critical Review of Chris Hedges’ War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning
“Sarajevo in the summer of 1995 came close to Dante’s inner circle of hell.”
Thus begins Chris Hedges’ War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, his acclaimed work on the human experience in modern armed conflicts. War Is a Force is ostensibly an exploration as to why we wage war despite the nonsensical reasons we engage in it and the unavoidable damage it causes us. A theologian by education and an investigative reporter by training, Hedges is well-equipped for observation. “War exposes the capacity for evil that lurks not far below the surface within all of us,” he writes, having personally witnessed, and reported on, wars around the world. Hedges recognizes that societies and individual humans have been capable of heinous acts for our entire histories. He is specifically interested in the “why” we humans continuously return to war, and why we continue to expose that evil within us. His answer: “Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living”.
Here is the primary theme of War Is a Force: We humans not only regularly reengage in violence, often despicably so, but on some level, we enjoy it. Hedges does not directly write “war is fun,” but the implication is present. Armed conflict provides emotion and emotional bonds largely unattainable in other forms of human interaction; these emotions and emotional bonds then provide us “meaning” or purpose and thusly enjoyment; because we knowingly benefit from it, we are all liable.
The title notwithstanding, Hedges’ theory is that engaging directly or indirectly in mortal combat, or suffering the effects of those who do, provides an answer to the eternal question of “what does this all mean?” His theory, however, plays only a supporting role in War is a Force. Rather, Hedges’ thesis is most clearly outlined in the introduction:
“I learned early on that war forms its own culture. The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug, one I ingested for many years. It is peddled by mythmakers—historians, war correspondents, filmmakers, novelists, and the state—all of whom endow it with qualities it often does possess: excitement, exoticism, power, chances to rise above our small stations in life, and a bizarre and fantastic universe that has a grotesque and dark beauty.”
Comparing war to a lethal and addictive drug diminishes those qualities Hedges uses to make his greater point, that war provides opportunities for excitement, exoticism, and power. Hedges makes these points forcefully. But it’s that last phrase – that war’s “bizarre and fantastic universe,” grotesqueness, and dark beauty provide us opportunities to be greater than what we thought we could be – is where War Is a Force is lacking in logic. Hedges’ argument, essentially, is that we offer ourselves the opportunity to experience nearly divine moments of self-actualization when we are at the darkest, most vile, most evil versions of ourselves.
Though war certainly provides opportunity for excellence, for heightened emotions, for virtue and courage (discussed later in more depth), Hedges conflates these with “meaning.” It is difficult to square Hedges’ assertion that war provides us “a reason for living” through the experience of death and dying (physically, emotionally, and spiritually). His main point is further weakened by highlighting that these moments of “meaning” are fleeting, as if the long stretches of misery and suffering experienced in war are mitigated with short bursts of experiencing that essence of understanding, and relishing in, the human condition. Hedges also fails in providing us alternatives or meaningful comparisons. The bravery of not going to war, for example, or the shared experience of achievement through some joint endeavor. Protests movements, rebellions, non-violent uprisings, repealing of unjust laws – all have elements of oppression overcome through shared sacrifice. All are possible without experiencing the drug of war.
Hedges, an experienced war correspondent and a Harvard-educated divinity student, wrote War Is a Force as an ablution. “This book is not a call for inaction,” he writes. “It is a call for repentance”. Hedges distributes sin equitably throughout the book, but writes most caustically of politicians and the media. The repentance, however, is most palpably his own. Hedges is a keen observer of the drivers of war, leveraging his experience in conflicts in Central America, North Africa, the Middle East, and the Balkans. His experiences as an observer, a dispassionate reporter, and a voyeur are what has led Hedges to repent through this simultaneously deeply personal and transcendent book.
There is irony in this juxtaposition. Hedges’ “call for repentance,” whether his or ours, counters his own argument that war provides a forum to the essential human experience. If Hedges believes war provides us meaning, and if meaning provides us insight into what it means to experience ultimate humanness, then for what reason must we repent? In War Is a Force, Hedges does distinguish the everyday humans caught in conflict from those he calls “mythmakers.” It is the former, perhaps, who find meaning without seeking it out, as it is these “everyday” humans who most often exist in a paradigm contrary to their professed moral structure. We live our daily lives locally, without the specter of organized, state-sanctioned violence or mass destruction. When we are presented with the opportunity to find Hedges’ warfare-driven meaning, it is most likely as a result of the mythmaker’s efforts. These politicians, profiteers, and media magnates, Hedges argues, instigate, perpetuate, and profit from the death and destruction around them. The broad idea is this: Nations and power brokers – almost exclusively men – exploit fear for personal gain. Mythmakers, among whom Hedges lists historians, war correspondents, filmmakers, and novelists, play along with the power brokers’ fear-mongering, contributing to and then enflaming mass-hysteria based on the false divisions of race, ethnicity, or religion (though Hedges asserts most national myths are essentially racist, false divisions are evidenced not only on skin color, but on perceived territorial disputes, identity politics, or even, in a nod to Gary Shteyngart’s novel Absurdistan, the tilt direction of Christ’s footrest). We the mere human, powerless, become not victims but willing participants. We contribute to the destruction such that we forget that which made us functioning societies in the first place. “The employment of organized violence,” Hedges writes, “means one must, in fact, abandon fixed and established values”. Hedges later expands that “[t]he myth of war creates a new artificial reality. Moral precepts—ones we have spent a lifetime honoring—are jettisoned”.
Hedges is not alone in this assertion, nor in affixing blame to the “mythmakers” for fanning the flames. Mark Kurlanksy, in his book Nonviolence, cites government propaganda machines selectively glorifying war and dehumanizing an enemy. “Hatred of the enemy is a cornerstone of selling a war,” Kurlanksy writes. In the first world war, British and American power apparatus needed to build opposition to Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm and the high number of German soldiers. The collective British and American press collaborated with governments to portray the Kaiser “as monstrous, a lunatic,” while German soldiers were “said to rape nuns and mutilate children”. Yet, just two decades later, those nation’s war propaganda machines were relatively quiet despite the actual atrocities committed by Hitler and the Nazis. The reason, Kurlansky argues, is because fighting to save Jews and marginalized communities in Europe was not something the public was likely to support with enthusiasm.
Kurlansky, like Hedges, argues that the book and film industries are at fault as well. Through multiple passages, Nonviolence explores the American film industry’s glorification of war, contrasting World War II movies like Saving Private Ryan with Vietnam-era movies like Platoon and The Deer Hunter. A scene in Saving Private Ryan depicts German (they were actually Czech) soldiers attempting to surrender. Despite having dropped their weapons and raised their hands in surrender, the American soldiers shoot them, mocking their accents. A cutaway to the movie’s protagonist, Captain John Miller (played by Tom Hanks), shows disappointment on his face. These young men are under his charge, and Captain Miller has already revealed himself as an honorable warrior-citizen. The American soldiers, however, revel in the shooting. One soldier jokes that the enemy soldiers were saying, “Look! I washed for supper!” Kurlanksy writes of the scene that the director, Steven Spielberg, essentially “argues that ignoring the Geneva Conventions and murdering prisoners of war is a reasonable act since the enemy was so insidious”.
Kurlansky adds organized, institutional religion to the list of war profiteers, and in particular skewers the Catholic church. The early followers of Jesus were strict adherents to non-violence, and were actively recruiting converts. As they found increased success in persuading Roman soldiers to put down their arms, the Roman Emperor Constantine (AD 306 – 337) realized he had an opportunity: If he recognized and supported Christianity rather than fighting against it, he could subvert Christ’s powerful message. In October of 312, the evening before he was to lead his army in a fight against a rival, Constantine – perhaps the greatest example of Hedges’ “mythmakers” – was said to have had a dream where Christ commanded him to fight under the sign of the cross. The next day, at what would be known at the Battle of Milvian Bridge, Constantine’s army fought with the sign of the cross painted on their shields. Their subsequent victory emplaced Constantine “as a ruler of the western half of the Roman Empire, but also establish(ed) a new role for the Christian and for Christ, a God who now would not only sanction killing but would take sides to help one band of killers triumph over another”. Constantine’s timely conversion to Christianity gave tacit permission to conscript Jesus’s followers while simultaneously pushing the movement away from non-violence. War and the Christian church have rarely been separated since.
This conflation of religion, war, power, and politics implies that war itself is not a force that gives us meaning. Rather, it is the idea of being part of some amorphous “greater good” that creates this façade. Meaning is achievable through war, perhaps even exclusively – at least an elevated sense of meaning. One might go even further back in history to find examples of the political influence in creating this myth: In the Book of John, the New Testament tells us that “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). Evidence that the Gospel of John was written at a time of increased tensions between Jews and Christians provides insight and context. Creating an ideal of a “greater good” for which one was willing to sacrifice one’s own life is one way to create inseparable bonds. It is also an ideal way to build an army.
It is here, with this idea of being part of a greater good, where Hedges’ allusions to the elevated humanness that war provides comes into conflict with war as a force that gives us meaning. Hedges asserts that “[m]any of us, restless and unfulfilled, see no supreme worth in our lives. We want more out of life. And war, at least, gives us a sense that we can rise above our smallness and divisiveness”.
Hedges draws definitive lines in laying blame. Power brokers and mythmakers are on one side, on the other are those “restless and unfilled” who see no supreme self-worth until they find it in armed conflict. We are all at fault here, even as supporters or spectators. In Chapter 4, “The Seduction of Battle and the Perversion of War,” Hedges argues that the “successful anti-war novels and films are those…that eschew battle scenes and focus on the heartbreak of violence and slaughter”. As an example, Hedges cites Elsa Morante’s History: A Novel. Because she was writing as a woman, Hedges argues, Morante was “less able to identify with and be seduced by war and the allure of violence”. But then Hedges, well, hedges: “But in most wars women, if not engaged in the fighting, stand on the sidelines to cheer their men onward. Few are immune”. The image evokes the apocryphal directive of Gorgo, wife to Spartan King Leonidas, uttered during the movie 300. Gorgo calls out to Leonidas as he turns to leave his beloved wife and march his army of Spartan elites to face Xerxes and the Persian army at Thermopylae. “Spartan!” she says firmly and stoically. Leonidas turns to meet her gaze. “Come back with your shield,” she states, “or on it.” What man – cartoon, CGI, historical, or otherwise – could resist such testosterone-enabling drivel? Gorgo’s message is clear: Win or die trying.
In Sayings of Spartan Women (“Moralia”), Plutarch attributed the phrase not to Gorgo speaking to her husband, but rather a “fame unknown” mother speaking to her son: “Another (mother), as she handed her son his shield, exhorted him, saying, ‘Either this or upon this.’” Even this attribution could be propaganda. The Battle of Thermopylae was 480 BC, and Plutarch wrote Moralia nearly six hundred years later. The original source of the quote may be unclear, but this is Hedges’ point. War is false glory, and we are all complicit.
Hedge’s uniform assignment of blame is misleading and a bit undeveloped. We humans are complicit because we find an elevated sense of humanness in conflict, in fighting for our perception of “right,” our religion, our brothers and sisters in ethnicity, or even just trying to do something more exciting than our 9-to-5 job. If true, then surely those power brokers and mythmakers who relish war not for a sense of meaning but rather one of gaining or consolidating power are more complicit. These catalysts are motivated not by glory and meaning, but by greed, by arrogance, by narcissism.
Hedge’s condemnation of war’s power brokers isn’t new. Nick Turse, an investigative reporter, provides details sickening both in hideousness and gratuity in his seminal work on American indulgence, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam. Though Turse identifies brutalities from individual soldiers, it is American politicians, media, and the military industrial complex that are rightly excoriated. American servicemembers commit a long list of atrocities, but Turse leaves their individual motivations for some later analysis. It is the state and its politicians, with their interminable focus on “body count” in the Vietnam War (or for the Vietnamese, the Resistance War Against the United States) who are at fault for the despicable acts we humans do to one another.
Some of Hedge’s most salient points are made less emotionally by Sebastian Junger in Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging. Written as an expanded version of a magazine article titled “How PTSD Became a Problem Far Beyond the Battlefield,” the book is a distillation of Junger’s twenty-year experience with war. Junger spent significant time, some of it under fire, with young American soldiers in conflict during the war in Afghanistan. His experience birthed a prolific outpouring of both film and the written word, including three movies (Restrepo, Korengal, and The Last Patrol) and at least two books (Tribe and War). Though Junger’s writing feels more dispassionate than Hedges’, his experience was no less personal – Junger lost a good friend and collaborator, Tim Hetherington, to the 2011 conflict in Libya.
The two writers’ observations are consistent, though War Is a Force seems to focus on the despicability of powerful men and institutions in conflict, while Tribe actually speaks to the collective feelings of togetherness, patriotism, optimism, and meaning that Hedges professes to write about. In a chapter titled “War Makes You an Animal,” Junger poses the conflict of what the state does compared to what the human does, in the context of pre-World War II:
“No one knew how a civilian population would react (to the trauma of losing 35,000 civilians a day), but the Churchill government assumed the worst. So poor was their opinion of the populace—particularly the working-class people of East London—that emergency planners were reluctant to even build public bomb shelters because they worried people would move into them and simply never move out…[n]othing could have been further from the truth.”
Junger elaborates, using an interview from a woman who was there at the time. “We would have done anything—anything—to stop (the Germans)”. British civilian deaths in World War II not only “failed to produce mass hysteria,” but the ever-present danger of bombing may have contributed to a decline in psychiatric breakdowns. “Chronic neurotics of peacetime now drive ambulances,” reported one doctor who Junger cites.
Here is the real force that gives us meaning: belonging, purpose, self-preservation, and a meaningful contribution to the preservation of others. War, perhaps, need not be the catalyst. But we don’t choose our baggage, and the writer often focuses on what she knows. Hedges’ baggage and knowledge focus on conflict and meaning, the melding of his two backgrounds in religion and war reporting, so a lengthy philosophical discourse on gaining meaning from conflict is not unreasonable.
Hedges does dutifully and thoroughly dismantle the romanticism of war, but the impact is minimized by his focus on how conflict’s direness – the hidden engine of war’s romanticism – provides the very meaning we desire. His experience is limited to “modern” warfare, but my own experience provides an alternate explanation. Though I served in the American army in conflicts overseas, I did not experience war as a force that gave me meaning. Perhaps I didn’t suffer enough. Perhaps I didn’t witness, first-hand, the depravity of war, or retained some skepticism of the utility of the wars in which I served. Perhaps I lacked that transformative experience of fighting for my freedom on my own land. None of this denied me the opportunity to find joy and meaning in my chosen profession; none of it increased my desire to realize John the Apostle’s greatest love and lay down my life for my friends. Though I would die for my friends, I thought I could both express and realize my love for friends better while I was living.
There also exist countering examples of “meaning” in history. In 350 BC, Aristotle suggested, in Nicomachean Ethics, that meaning might not be found in the crucible of Hedges’ modern conflict. Hedges suggests that war’s unwitting and unwilling participants are subjected to acute trauma and violence. Aristotle writes, instead, that meaning in one’s life is a slow drip. “One swallow does not make a summer,” Aristotle wrote, “nor does one day; and so too one day, or in a short time, does not make a man blessed or happy”. Aristotle was writing of eduaimonia, something close to happiness but deeper and more expansive. It is not simply living a “good life” in the Epicurean mold, but rather living a good life through virtue and acting virtuously. In the context of warfare, the professor Charles McNamara suggests this would be exemplified by exhibiting an amount of courage “between the extremes of cowardice and rashness.” Hedges chalks this up as one path to meaning, but a path that risks devaluing the emotion. Meaning implies positivity, a will to not only live, but to live well. This is Aristotle’s eduaimonia. We might stretch it to include simple happiness, or pursuing “meaning” as a path to that happiness (or, contrarily, happiness as a path to meaning).
Aristotle’s claim that a swallow does not make a summer has been much dissected. The writer and philosopher Paul Farwell, in Aristotle and the Complete Life, contemplates that Aristotle is unclear as to whether he means quantity or quality. Does a high number of good events lead to happiness, to meaning? Or is it something that adheres more closely to Hedges’ implication that it is the quality of an event, the ability of a thing to evoke emotion in us, that leads to meaning? Aristotle, according to Farwell, might mean “a happy life possesses a complete number of things” (friends, family, meaningful endeavors, objects) or “a complete time span, perhaps an entire life or at least the better part of one”. This notion of “completeness” of a life expands upon both Aristotle’s ideas on meaning as well as Hedges’. “(C)omplete virtue needs a complete life,” Farwell writes, “because virtuous activities need time to develop and to express themselves fully”. We may take liberties in comparing Aristotle’s “virtue” and Hedges’ “meaning” to mean the same thing. War, or at least the traumatic experiences Hedges would assert give us meaning, is quick. It is the heightened emotion of the traumatic moment that provides a benchmark against which we can compare our drab, daily lives, and whether there is meaning to be found there. Farwell, via Aristotle, might argue that we can experience loss, sacrifice, trauma, etc., but that virtue – the true test of meaning – requires time, repetition, opportunity, and the test of how we might act when someone isn’t watching. Farwell also points out that virtue “takes practice” and that is unlikely to be achieved in a short period of time. “To become courageous or self-controlled we must experience a number of situations that inspire fear or pleasure until the proper disposition becomes second-nature”. To show courage in battle, Farwell adds, “is closely associated with putting on armor and rushing the enemy. Nevertheless, we should keep in mind that certain features of any virtuous activity are continuous throughout the activity – in particular, the agent’s disposition toward his feelings and his choosing the action for the sake of a noble end”.
We do find recent cultural examples that align more closely to Hedges’ theory, though his notion that the darkest days provide the most meaning remains absent. The Absaroka, a tribe of Plains Indians, trace their history to what is now modern-day Ohio. Pushed west by other tribes, the Absaroka – known to contemporary Europeans and modern-day Americans as the Crow – eventually settled in the Yellowstone Valley in Montana and Wyoming. The Crow lived for war. It defined their existence. In Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, author Jonathan Lear quotes Robert Lowie, an anthropologist, who wrote of the Crow that “War was not the concern of a class nor even of the male sex, but of the whole population, from cradle to grave”. Lear elaborates, citing the use of the “coup stick” as paradigmatic of Crow culture. A coup stick planted in the ground delineated territory – the trespass of which merited violent response – while a coup stick touched upon an enemy in battle was the height of Crow bravery, and thusly of Crow culture. Contrary to Hedges’ bands of power brokers and mythmakers, where the few shape the potential “meaning” (or misery) for the many, Lear argues that conflict is the Crow’s culture. The Crow raise the possibility that war might in fact provide meaning when the entire civilization agrees upon, and culturally enforces, war as the main force providing the meaning.
The muse for Lear’s fascinating book is Plenty Coups, a Crow leader who lived from 1848–1932, and was perhaps the only native chief to successfully navigate his tribe through the cultural and existential devastation white Americans imposed on North America’s native populations. The Crow aligned with US forces to increase their odds of survival in their wars with the Sioux, but eventually were relegated to reservations like all other native tribes. Lear examines Plenty Coups’ ability as a leader, using as his base one simple sentence uttered by Plenty Coups during an interview with a biographer, who was asking about the Crow’s move from freedom to restraint: After this, nothing happened.
Warfare was so ingrained into Plenty Coups and Crow culture that the move to a reservation meant, quite literally for the Crow, that once they were denied their ability to engage in armed conflict with the Sioux, to steal their horses, to count individual coups on Sioux warriors, nothing happened. “Humans are by nature cultural animals,” Lear writes, “we necessarily inhabit a way of life that is expressed in a culture…as participants, we inherit a vulnerability. Should that way of life break down, that is our problem”.
Lear doesn’t necessarily focus on Plenty Coups and the Crow experience, but rather uses it to keep us grounded in trying to understand our own experience. Radical Hope is, at its heart, a short but dense philosophical book on ethics, community, and resilience. Lear quotes the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins early in Radical Hope: “An event becomes such as it is interpreted. Only as it is appropriated in and through a cultural scheme does it acquire historical significance”. Lear pursues answers to the questions of not only how a culture collapses, but how we should live with that collapse, how we should live with even the possibility of collapse. His answer is what he calls “radical hope,” or a hope “directed toward a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is. Radical hope anticipates a good for which those who have the hope as yet lack the appropriate concepts with which to understand it”.
Hope for Plenty Coups, and for us, Lear argues, was and is “intimately bound to the question of how to live”. This radical hope is different than “mere optimism”; rather, it is a manifestation of courage, of human excellence. Courage, writes Lear, “is the capacity for living well with the risks that inevitably attend human existence” (emphasis added). This is Aristotle manifested in a warring culture, not Hedges’ modern warfare. The difference is that war for the Crow is the culture, while modern warfare is a means to reach a cultural ends – power, money, prestige, territory. When viewed through Plenty Coups’ lens, the contemporary reader might interpret war not as trauma, but as culture; not just as a way of life, but a way of living Aristotle’s “good life.” Taken to a logical conclusion, the absence of war for the Crow was itself trauma, and one without meaning.
This notion elaborated upon might emphasize Hedges’ central point. If our daily life in today’s world is boring and unfulfilling, then one marked by violence might provide us opportunities to experience meaning and relevance, whether it’s façade or foundation. But in Plenty Coups’ world, daily life is filled only with meaning – not only one of survival in ensuring food, clothing, and shelter, but one of existential and spiritual survival through combat, or the threat of combat, with an enemy. Further, that existential and spiritual survival, because the entire community is vested in it, becomes one with cultural implications as well.
In War Is a Force, Hedges rarely differentiates between the wartime experiences of hunted or prey; of intentional or unintended targets (what the American military used to refer to as “collateral damage”). We all experience trauma, therefore we all experience heightened emotions and humanness, therefore we all experience “meaning.” This is a gross oversight. The experiences of war, where they are different than the mundanity of a daily life, might provide context as to the type of heightened emotions one might experience to better understand there is more to life. But to suggest that being victimized might possibly give us “meaning” is shortsighted. Any such argument conveniently ignores war orphans, the weaponization of rape and sexual assault and the witnessing of such crimes, and post-traumatic stress in combatants, to name a few.
There is an alternative argument to Hedges, Plenty Coups, and Aristotle alike, and one equally supportable: It’s all bullshit. George Bernard Shaw, in his 1894 romcom Arms and the Man, says as much. Sergius, a Bulgarian aristocrat, is a hero in the Byron mold. He’s a swashbuckler, filled with notions of leading cavalry charges and soliciting saber duels to defend one’s honor. He’s ostensibly betrothed to Raina, daughter to Catherine and Petkoff, a buffoonish but kind and wealthy dilettante. All profess clear opinions on bravery, honor, and station: “Can’t you see it, Raina,” Catherine tells her daughter, “our gallant splendid Bulgarians with their swords and eyes flashing, thundering down like avalanche and scattering the wretched Servian dandies like chaff…oh, if you have a drop of Bulgarian blood in your veins, you will worship (Sergius) when he comes back”.
What none of them know – neither Catherine, Raina, nor Sergius, who conducted the cavalry charge – was that the wretched Servians had no ammunition. If they had, Sergius and his Bulgarians would have been slaughtered. The one character who does know is Blunthschli, who is introduced first as a ragged, dirty coward, fleeing from the pursuing Russians, but later revealed as a Swiss hotel magnate. Shaw ultimately develops Blunthschli as a professional soldier – a survivor – but he also appears as two extremes: The coward and the businessman. Neither, Hedges might argue, have experienced the force of war as one that provides meaning.
All are hypocrites. “I am no longer a soldier,” says Sergius. “Soldiering…is the coward’s art of attacking mercilessly when you are strong, and keeping out of harm’s way when you are weak.” Never, adds Sergius, fight your enemy on equal terms. Sergius, of course, is cheating on his fiancé with Louka, the maid, and doing so in broad daylight and under the noses of Raina and her parents.
Only Bluntschli, he with a dearth of honor and romantic notions of bravery but a surfeit of common sense, escapes Shaw’s satire. It is Bluntschli who provides us the anti-hero to Hedges. He carries chocolate into battle instead of rifle cartridges; tells Raina it is a soldier’s job to live as long as possible while killing as much of the enemy as one can; and when Sergius requests a saber duel, replies that if he goes, he’ll arrive with a machine gun.
It is a late exchange between Bluntschli and Sergius that provides the best antidote to Hedges’ notions of meaning. Sergius, learning that Raina had observed him in flagrante delicto with the maid Louka, declares “Our romance is shattered. Life’s a farce.” Bluntschli ridicules Sergius, telling him he’s an amateur who thinks “fighting’s an amusement”. The insult has restored Sergius – he’s quite dramatic – who then tells Bluntschli he now refuses to duel him because “it takes two men – real men – men of heart, blood and honor—to make genuine combat.” Bluntschli has the last word, perhaps for Shaw as well as in response to Hedges’: “Now that you’ve found that life isn’t a farce, but something quite sensible and serious, what further obstacle is there to your happiness?”.