Sassoon's ironic articulation of the enormity of war and its capacity to reach beyond understanding or individual control captures something that has been echoed in the thoughts and writings of many participants, observers, and theorists of warfare. Indeed, the impotence and blankness that Sassoon describes is one of the perceptions that lies behind a famous dictum propounded by the philosopher Thomas Hobbes in the seventeenth century. Always a foe of euphemism and evasion, Hobbes succinctly posed a central issue with which much of this book will be concerned: “Where there is no common power, there is no law: where no law, no injustice. Force and fraud, are in war the two cardinal virtues.” Amongst other things, we shall examine whether this bleak view is true and what would follow if it were. Initially, the existence of laws of war, just war theories, and codes of military ethics would seem to give the lie to Hobbes, and it is interesting that he makes virtually no reference to the extensive body of writing on such matters that existed at the time he wrote, though he must have been familiar with it.