NEXT TO LOVE finishes with Babe asking Claude, "Would you have married me if there were no war?" He repeats, "If there were no war? "Imagine." What thoughts does this ending evoke?

I think it is something everyone wonders-no war. It cannot be imagined and yet we pause at the wonder of it. If it could ever have been, or ever could be, how different the world would be. How different we all would be without all the loss and suffering. I do not know if there is anyway to encapsulate how the world would be without the taint of war.

EileenL, I think you sum this up perfectly. It's hard to imagine a world in which there's no violent conflict, where people solve their differences with words and not violence. The percentage of times this happens is infinitesimally small, compared to the number of armed conflicts.

As I argued somewhere else in the discussion, though, I think violence is inherent in the human condition. It's all but impossible to imagine the world any other way. We'd have to be living in some sort of Utopia.

So we have to rely on mutually assured destruction to keep the sane world powers from blowing up the world, sadly enough. And the crazy rogue nations are a threat to that precarious "peace." What a world we live in.

That this may have been a tongue-in-cheek reply.

Does he too think how their life would have been different. We really see her feelings and his despair. What made him change?

PeggyH, great question. Part of this may have been Babe's constancy, that she stuck beside him throughout it all, letting him know he couldn't do anything to make her not love him. She, in some sense, was his therapist, before the time therapy was an accepted means of treating PTSD.

I think Claude and Babe epitomize what the world is like - brief moments of peace interspersed with periods of war. Claus 's "imagine" seems to voice a hope for the dream and for their future together.