While the common soldier had to live with the Bible, folk songs and old wives tales, the officers and Generals had access to poetry, plays and the accounts of previous and ancient wars. The military of all ranks had access to surviving veterans who told their stories of horror or glory from their own viewpoints, but there was almost no collation of memories unless you wished to dig through the after-action reports that clutter up national archives after a battle or war. Most of those are self-serving lies. The few that are objective accounts designed to better inform the powers that were about equipment, tactics and body counts have usually gotten lost because they do not entertain.

In recent decades, the majority of western soldiers have been capable of reading, if only by virtue or vice of their time served in free government-sponsored education systems for at least six years. They spent a lot of down time during the wars of the last century reading whatever they could get their hands on. Some of them even wrote their own poetry and stories about the experience. There were reporters in the front and back lines. There were generals who were writers and philosophers. The Great War of 1914 to 1918 was the first great literary war. The Crimean War was the first war to be extensively reported back home. The American Civil War was the first to be extensively read about by the whole world. The Spanish American War was the first one to be started by a newspaper to increase circulation.

The Great War inspired reading and writing on a grander scale than ever possible before. More troops were committed on an international scale than had ever been since possibly Alexander or one of the Ceasars. More people who could read were in the trenchs and the upper ranks and more was and is being written about the Great War than any other conflict in the known history of the planet. Poets and musicians and novelists and painters served in the Great War. Their artistic efforts course through the streams of our consciousness to this day. Dorothy L. Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey suffered often from his service. Walt Disney drove an ambulance during the war.

Thus, during World War II it was possible for a literate man to spend his entire time in the service reading about the previous war. Novels, poetry, plays, historical non-fiction, and collections of short stories. He could listen to the music from the war or inspired by it. In some cases, he could actually serve with a veteran of that war. And what he would read would have made him sick. Because all the reasons for not having another war ever again were laid out in black and white for anyone who cared to read. All the politicians and diploliars and industrialist rapists and preachers and teachers had had twenty-odd years to learn just why you don't goof around with war. If you are going to do it, do it right and fast and with intent.
Some big wars can only be stopped by a little war. But little wars are unpopular, except amongst our enemies. That was the mistake the Western powers and later the League of Nations and it's bastad step-child, the UN, made. They thought themselves above anything but a grand gesture. The little wars were perpetrated only in response to economic terrorism, with as few troops, few ships and few resources as possible. Guerilla wars, banana republic conflicts, 'police actions', and suppressions of local unrest... Not really war to the eyes and ears of the deaf and blind to the reality of conflict.

To the man and woman under fire, the entire war is right there in front of them. It is the entire world, the whole universe, the noise, the flash of mortars bombs, the tiny wounds that end promising lives.
The immediacy of kill or be killed eludes the diploliar and the polibootlicker.

All they had to do was read the poetry of Sassoon, who did not survive his war.

That a boy could be sitting in the hedge rows of Normandy reading Ambrose Bierce, that a man could be sitting in a shot-up house in Korea reading a copy of the 'Red Badge of Courage' that he got in a Christmas package, that a 2nd Lieutenant could have been sitting in an armoured personnel carrier during the Tet Offensive in Hue reading Churchill's dispatches from the Boer War, all of them marveling at how the lessons had been there all along, only to be ignore, is a heart-rendering concept.