Nightmarish evocations of war were a staple of anti-war rhetoric in this period (in England, curiously, poetry was usually the medium, the visual arts hardly ever). All were statements of the essential inhumanity of war, of its brutality, destructiveness and wastefulness. All pointed to a social evil of enormous proportions, though the pitch of indignation against it also implied that it was combatable, mitigable, not something simply to be endured. This view of war did not originate in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. It was connected with a great revulsion against public and private violence and a new concern for affective relationships which characterised seventeenth-century European society. As regards war, the change would seem to have started during the Thirty Years War, notably with the ghastly scenes etched by Callot and described by Grimmelshausen. After this period the glorification of war was always strongly challenged by the attention paid to its miseries.