Certainly war was never pretty or fun in the past, but with the creation of weapons capable of killing thousands of individual men and women in a matter of hours or weapons of mass destruction capable of wiping out whole cities at once, battlefields went from merely looking like places where people fought and died to ruined wastelands littered with corpses. While not required, this theme is more common in wars set in recent history with the advent of the modern industrial age. If not, then merely surviving physically, and with most of their humanity and sanity intact. Heroes in these stories will typically struggle to Prevent the War, or end it as bloodlessly and quickly as possible. War Is Hell works often show the cumulative long-term effect of exposure to pain, deprivation, violence, and military culture: the horror goes on and on, dehumanizing everybody a little more each night. There is some correlation between being on the losing side of a war and making a work following this trope. Sometimes, the war is shown to be unwinnable regardless of the sacrifices made and moral codes abandoned. ![]() The idea in that case is that war is not pretty, but in some unfortunate cases it may be necessary.) (More moderate examples may portray one side of the conflict as having noble goals, while still emphasizing the pain and sacrifice involved. ![]() The brutal and callous force of wartime authority overrides all individual thought. The motivations for war are depicted as harking back to humanity's basest and most savage instincts: pride, greed, important resources, dogma, fear, disgust, hatred, retribution, power, insanity, megalomania, or even all of the above. Sherman, "War is all Hell, and I have every intent of making it so." Most people quoting it shorten it to the trope name (as Sherman himself did in the page quote). This trope gained its name by the famous quote from General William T. Those who take pleasure in it are Ax-Crazy Blood Knights or worse. When this theme is in play, war is an infernal, nasty, traumatizing nightmare, and anyone who comes out of it alive will end up a Shell-Shocked Veteran. ![]() War! Hunh! Good God, y'all! What is it good for? Absolutely nuthin'! Truth in Television, obviously. note Sherman wrote about this at greater length when he told the residents of Atlanta why he was going to burn their city in 1864. William Tecumseh Sherman speaking to the graduating class of the Michigan Military Academy on June 19, 1879.
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