No catalogue of horrors ever kept men from war. Before the war you always think that it’s not you that dies. But you will die, brother, if you go to it long enough.
Hemingway argues that descriptions of war’s horrors are not always enough to prevent people from supporting or entering conflict. Before experiencing war directly, individuals may understand its dangers in the abstract while still imagining that death will happen to someone else. The passage identifies a gap between knowing that war is deadly and recognising one’s own vulnerability to it.
The second part of the quotation removes that psychological distance. Prolonged exposure to combat increases the likelihood that chance, injury or violence will eventually reach the individual. In Notes on the Next War, Hemingway uses this direct warning to challenge romantic or detached ideas about warfare. His point is not that every combatant will inevitably die, but that sustained participation makes personal danger impossible to treat as merely theoretical. The passage therefore combines a criticism of optimism about personal survival with a broader warning about the cumulative human cost of modern war.