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However, since the reasons for ''that'' war were obvious to everyone fighting—making the horrors of war just a bit more bearable—the trope only really caught on with [[World War I]], which was long, bloody, and seemingly pointless. Thanks to near-universal conscription in all the major countries of Europe, a large number of writers and poets of the early 20th century had experience on the front lines, and they did not like what they saw. The [[Adolf Hitler|identity of one recorded World War I soldier]] who ''did'' enjoy his wartime experience probably entrenched the trope in Western culture furthermore afterward, [[World War Two|especially when said soldier started the most devastating war in human history]].
There are several reasons for this. One is that we aren't born as [[Sociopathic Soldier|sociopathic soldiers]] and most modern societies frown on killing for any reason. Most military basic training spends [[Training
Second, being in constant fear for your life and limb is obviously stressful. Especially in the era of modern combat, which is more dehumanizing than ancient combat. If you were a genuine badass who is strong and skilled with weapons, you felt like you were in control of your destiny. Furthermore, war often took the form of [[Rape, Pillage and Burn|raiding and rustling]] and might have actually been fun; exceptions include those who were [[Made a Slave|conquered]] and thus [[Written by the Winners|couldn't write poems]]. Modern combat, with [[Weapon of Mass Destruction|artillery, IEDs, bombers, nukes and other horrors created by technological evolution,]] means that [[Death From Above|death can strike from above killing us all without knowledge, warning or defense]], instilling a mindset of paranoia, insignificance, helplessness and nihilistic despair similar to that portrayed by [[Lovecraftian Fiction]]. WWI machine guns and a slow blinding death (or [[And I Must Scream|worse]]) by chemical weapons meant that you could die without ever seeing the enemy, thus rendering your skill level practically moot.
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* In ''[[Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind]]'', most if not all the war scenes are drawn in explicit and gritty detail, often squeezed into tiny panels making them look as claustrophobic and uncomfortable as possible. Well, this IS a [[Hayao Miyazaki|Miyazaki]] work...
* ''[[Vinland Saga]]'' delivers this message with surprising subtlety.
* ''[[Now and Then, Here and There]]'' dumps an innocent young protagonist into a world made hell by war. In this world children are the targets of atrocities committed by other children. Neighbouring villages are raided for vital supplies and young boys to be conscripted into the insane king Hamdo's army. Women and young girls are captured to be passed around to and raped by Hellywood soldiers as a reward for good performance in the hope that they will become pregnant and provide future soldiers and breeders.
* ''Jinroh Wolf Brigade'' paints a rather vivid image of a post World War Two Japan where the Nazis were victorious, with rioting in the streets, child terrorists and the realpolitica power plays with the CAPO and Public Security backstabbing each other. Bonus points for the main character {{spoiler|shooting his girlfriend rebel before a sniper killed both of them}}.
* ''[[Voices of a Distant Star]]'' and ''[[The Place Promised in Our Early Days]]'', though they are less about the war and more about the people living in a war state. The former is about futuristic war, and the latter is about the [[Cold War]] [[It Got Worse|gone bad]].
* ''[[Future War 198X]]'' shows the effects of [[World War III]] on the soldiers, civilians, and the powers behind each country fighting, shattering Japan's [[Nuclear Weapons Taboo]] and getting [[Space Battleship Yamato]]'s director's message across loud and clear: [[Anvilicious|nuclear weapons and war are bad.]]
* ''[[Front Mission]]'' Manga "Dog Life and Dog Style" are very much in the War Is Hell territory, showing the brutality of war in general as a Japanese Journalist winds up in the wrong place at the right time and witnesses some of the worst atrocities in the midst of a war and those who are affected by it as he brings out the truth of war to the world admist censorship and the people who he "interview" who suffers through it. The manga goes from a violent form of war is hell to a psychological form. In the first opening pages, the photographer was casually taking pictures about every single atrocity of war from open battlefield rape of some random girl to the amount of skulls hauled by a Wanzer pilot to mark his kills.
* ''[[
* ''[[Barefoot Gen]]'', anyone? This one portrays the bombing of Hiroshima and its aftermath, as experienced by a six-year-old boy and his family.
* The core tenet of the Third Squad of Shinigami in ''[[Bleach]]'' is that battles are something to be dreaded. They are a horrible, terrifying experience that should not be glorified. This is key to ensure that those who participate become so fearful of battle that they would rather find peace than seek war.
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* ''[[Tiberium Wars]]'' is pretty much wall-to-wall examples of this, with graphic, savage, and brutal descriptions of soldiers being shot, stabbed, burned, and vaporized. And that's before we get to how completely nasty the battlefields are; one chapter has a group of Nod soldiers slogging through raw sewage, with one soldier getting it ''in a fresh bullet wound.'' In one of the latest chapters, we get to see the effects of a full armored assault with {{spoiler|Mammoth Tanks}} from the perspective of the receiving end. Its about as brutally terrifying as one can imagine. In Chapter Seventeen, a Nod officer {{spoiler|executes his own wounded}} to keep them from falling into enemy hands, because he believes they will be tortured and killed. Three weeks into the war, GDI has managed to fill ''a stadium'' with ''three hundred thousand body bags.''
* ''[[Dumbledore's Army and the Year of Darkness|Dumbledores Army and The Year of Darkness]]'' is another prime example, depicting the horrific ordeal the members of the eponymous insurgency go through to keep the darkness at bay as best they could, culminating in a final battle (the Battle of Hogwarts from [[Harry Potter/Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows|the book]], retold from their perspective) in which {{spoiler|[[Kill'Em All|almost everyone dies.]]}}
* ''[[Warhammer 40000 Trouble]]'' brought it to the [[Refuge in Audacity]] level with random nuclear strike killed people 8 times larger than the [[Alien Invasion]] themselves, only reason that keep [[La Résistance]] still able to fight is because of [[The Power of Trust]], [[With Great Power Comes Great Insanity|the rest is insane]] or [[Dying Like Animals|die]]
* [[Poke Wars|The Poké Wars]] is also packed with examples of this trope. The effects of the supercharged Pokemon attacks are described in graphic detail, as well as the feelings of the victim if it's still alive after the hit. The characters' reactions to the more trauma-inducing happenings are just as vividly written.
{{quote|Skitty screamed both from the pain of the impact and the indescribable agony that arose from the corrupted blood that coursed through her veins, destroying everything they touched. She fought through the pain, struggling to get up before anything could take advantage of her vulnerable state. She tried to get up only to have her legs buckle. Her strength left her as the Ariados venom in her blood began to slowly digest her organs.
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* [[Master and Commander]]: Zig-zagged. The film doesn't glorify war; it glorifies heroism. There is little of the stereotypical cynicism of an "antiwar" movie because it is not-as such. Furthermore the special effects are grand and almost look like paintings at times. But real tragedy is shown. A boy has his arm blown off, people we like are killed, one man is driven to suicide, [[Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking| and sailor food looks just awful.]]
* ''Gallipoli'': exuberant and naive boys from outback Australia go to war. Their illusions are shattered in the botched assault landings at Gallipoli.
* ''[[Paths of Glory]]''. Set in [[World War
* The Russian film ''[[Come and See]]'' is about a little boy turned partisan during [[World War Two]]. It ends in insanity and shows incredible cruelty on both sides. The title itself is a reference to the biblical Apocalypse.
* Another good example: ''Purgatory'' (''Chistilishe'' in Russian). Is about first Chechen war. Takes violence to a whole new level.
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* ''How I Won the War'' seems very comical and satirical, but it has a particularly brutal underbelly. It's viewed and monologued by the [[Colonel Kilgore|Kilgore]], however, and manages to at first glance come off as [[War Is Glorious]], at least until you remember he got the rest of his men killed with poorly planned actions, and generally bad training. Mostly a shot at careerist military men who would do anything for a promotion or a medal, as well as being generally incompetent on all fronts, and how costly such a thing is to everyone but them. Without selling or stealing a single physical tangible thing it is still easy to classify Lieutenant Goodbody as a 'war profiteer,' as there is no doubt from the conversations he has with his German counterpart he will no doubt go on to write a best-seller about his 'heroism under fire' and being the sole survivor of his squad.
* ''[[The Patriot]]'': Benjamin Martin helps win the war but his home is destroyed, two of his sons are dead and the other two are forced to kill at a young age, irreversibly changing them both (one is scarred for life, the other likes it too much).
* In ''[[A Very Long Engagement]]'' a young, cheerful man is conscripted from his simple and happy country life to fight in [[World War
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* The [[Trope Codifier]] is ''[[The Red Badge of Courage]]''.<ref>Not the [[Trope Maker]], though</ref>
* [[Harry Turtledove]]'s book ''A World of Difference'': after American and Soviet spacecraft land in opposite Minervan (Martian) nations and the Medieval Minervans later go to war. Each with a human advisor, the Soviet with an AK-74 and the American with a pistol. Then an American ultralight drops a jumbo-sized molotov cocktail on the Soviet causing the American-friendly King to shudder in terror at the thought of what human battlefields must be like with Noiseweapons everywhere and fire falling from the sky.
* ''[[The Lord of the Rings]]'' doesn't go on and on about descriptions of wartime brutality (the gore, dismemberment, trauma, etc.) but at the end of the battle of Pelennor Fields, a battle everyone knew was morally okay to fight, there is a running list of good people who were cut down with little fanfare, and several who did get fanfare but were still dead and mourned. Further, there is Helms Deep, where Hama's body was "hewn even as he lay dead before the gates," and the fear for the lives of friends and loved ones when a small contingent was hemmed into the caverns by the Uruk-Hai the vast desolations of the landscape to fuel the war machines of Isengard and Mordor, and of course Samwise musing on the fact that most of the people killed in war, even on "the wrong side," probably aren't themselves evil at heart. Then after that, there is the scouring of the Shire, where Saruman, so twisted by the loss of the war, tries to simply maim as much as he can. There have even been essays written about the orcs and the Ringwraiths and how they relate to this. Tolkien was, of course, a veteran of [[World War
** Even when the Free People’s (Elves, dwarves, hobbits, ents and good men) have [[We ARE Struggling Together!]] and the Orks, nazgul, trolls and evil men have an [[Enemy Civil War]], both sides knew that [[Not So Different|any of their other band enemies will destroy them ruthlessly]], Orc Gorbag tell this to Shagrat in the second book and hobbits Frodo tells this to Sam in the third book (see [[Meaningful Echo]]).
* ''[[A Song of Ice and Fire]]''. Every side has thousands of soldiers being maimed or massacred, and the soldiers that do survive in one piece spend most of the time when they're not actively fighting rampaging through the villages, stealing, murdering, and raping as they go. The nobility try to hold onto a [[War Is Glorious]] mindset at first, but lose it rapidly as they start to suffer consequences too, and it's gone entirely by the time the Tully family takes Jaime Lannister as a hostage.
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* The [[Vorkosigan Saga]] plays with this trope a lot. For a Military SF series, there's not a whole lot of actual warfare going on; instead there's tons of low-level skulduggery and spy versus spy shenanigans to ''prevent'' full-scale wars from breaking out. The very few times some real mayhem occurs, we always get to see the [[Tear Jerker|consequences]].
* This is one of the main themes in [[Andrey Livadny]]'s ''[[The History of the Galaxy]]'' books, especially the books that take place during the First Galactic War, a 30-year bloodbath started when the dictator-ruled [[The Empire|Earth Alliance]] destroys the Dabog colony as a lesson to the other Free Colonies, sparking [[The War Of Earthy Aggression]] that eventually resulted in the total defeat of Earth and the establishment of the [[The Federation|Confederacy of Suns]]. Since the novels are focused on characters, we get to experience the full extent of the horrors of war, especially, as the author calls it, the "technogenic" war, in which rapid technological progress has resulted in more ways to wipe out your fellow man than one can count. The full extent can be seen in novels featuring [[Humongous Mecha]] fights (of the [[Real Robot Genre|Real Robot]] kind). The novel ''Serv-batallion'' as it shows a group of teens from Earth being conscripted to fight a war they don't support and, essentially, sacrified by their commanding officer in order to get a Colonial [[Wave Motion Gun]]. Other novels involve war vets trying to adjust to living in a post-war galaxy.
* Almost any ''[[
* In [[Honor Harrington]] the main characters are intensely burdened by the death they have weighing on them which is up to the millions by the end of the war and much of it is brought on by mistakes or corruptions in high power. The descriptions of even the more-or-less [[Let's Fight Like Gentlemen|honorable]] fighting between the Royal Manticoran Navy and the Havenite Navy(when it is not being overruled by political ideologues) are just less horrific then the descriptions of the non-millitary doings of villains like Masada, or Mesa or StateSec. The theme seems to be War is Hell but Tyranny is worse hell.
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* ''[[Band of Brothers (TV series)|Band of Brothers]]'': you will cry the day you lose your friends. This one is contrasted with its main theme of [[True Companions|a circle of unbreakable friendships]].
* ''[[The Pacific]]'',<ref>[[Spiritual Successor]] to ''[[Band of Brothers (TV series)|Band of Brothers]]''</ref> is [[It Got Worse|worse]]. Made brutally clear by Eugune Sledge's father, who tries one last attempt to persuade his son from enlisting:
{{quote|"The worst thing about treating those combat boys from [[World War
* Murdock gives a nice little "war is hell" speech in ''[[The A-Team]]'' episode ''The Island''.
{{quote|"War is hell, Wally Gator, isn't it? We know about hell and we know about war, right?"}}
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== Tabletop Games ==
* ''[[Warhammer Fantasy Battle]]'' might just as well be this trope in tabletop game form. Especially its [[Darker and Edgier]]/[[Up to Eleven]]/[[Recycled in Space]] form, ''[[Warhammer
* Personified by Szuriel, Horseman of War, in ''[[Pathfinder]]''. Gorum represents the [[War Is Glorious|glory of war]], Torag [[The Strategist|strategy]], Iomedae [[The Paladin|just causes]], and Moloch [[Lawful Evil|discipline]]. Szuriel, on the other hand, is war at its worst. Essentially a [[Psycho for Hire]] with divine powers, she represents genocide, societal collapse, and war crimes on a grand scale, using war to traumatise mortals, harvest souls, and [[Omnicidal Maniac|hasten the apocalypse]].
* The beginning of the [[Traveller]] volume ''Sword Worlds'' shows a weary Sword Worlder soldier coming home from campaign to find his wife desperately trying to put together their ruined estate. The family orchard is blown to bits and it is all they can do to get the water running.
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* The ''[[Brothers in Arms]]'' series started with a fairly strong anti-war message and has been gaining in intensity since then. Hell's Highway is particularly noteworthy for not only killing off or maiming established characters, but for depicting [[There Are No Therapists|PTSD]] (sometimes in shit-your-pants-frightening ways.)
{{quote|{{spoiler|Leggett}}: Well, this looks familiar.}}
* ''[[Halo]]'' - While they were serious from the start, it wasn't until the third game it became clear that this is the main [[Aesop]]. Yes lovable main characters were killed in the first game, and the second game became more uglier about the situation, but that was out-shadowed by [[Do Not Do This Cool Thing|awesome playstyle, story, weapons and a badass player character]]. But by the time of third game, all of that were thrown right out of the window. ''Halo3'' was not afraid to show how shitty a [[Melee a Trois|three-sided war between Humanity, a galactic empire made of genocidal, fanatical aliens and a parasitic species of undead monsters]] [[Deconstruction|would be]]; [[Anyone Can Die|Anyone can (and will) die]], even main characters as {{spoiler|Sgt. Johnson, Miranda Keyes, 343 Guilty Spark, Prophet of Truth, etc}}, cities are burned to the ground, billions are killed, even the most [[Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain|Ineffectual Sympathetic]] [[Mooks]] become [[Took a Level
** And that goes without mentioning Halo Reach, all the other main games had the knowledge of the Halo rings as hope, or at the very least a game changer, not the same old stalling against an unstoppable more technologically advanced horde of intergalactic aliens who deem your entire people heretical. Halo Reach is that, each subsequent mission just makes it more and more clear that despite Reach being the most advanced colony and the one with the greatest military presence it will still repeat the same fate of its bretheren, and all you are doing is trying to save the most people you can/and or kill the most Covenant. The last two missions you do in a way find out about the rings, and you give it your all and sacrifice almost of Noble Team (meaningful name) to take it on the last transport leaving Reach. Yay you did it, all those missions, all those kills, all the obstacles passed by a hairline, now you get your long deserved reward right? Except somebody needs to fire the gun. You are left on Reach, with scattered unorganized resistance as its being glassed. And no matter how hard you fight, you will die. Halo Reach is game that shows that even if you give your all and be a good soldier hope is not guarranteed... Well for you :)
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* ''[[Final Fantasy Type-0]]'' pulls no punches in showing how horrific and brutal war can be right from the start.
** Its opening cinematic features the graphic death of Izana Kunagiri and his war chocobo from injuries as Ace, Queen and Jack stand helplessly (and all Ace can do is [[Manly Tears|weep for him]]). There isn't much that could make war seem less glorious than showing [[The Hero|Machina's]] older brother reduced to the level of complete freakout from his pain and fear of dying.
** Then it goes downhill from there... on all four sides of the war. {{spoiler|In Rubrum thousands died, and the ending hints that the entire nation was left ravaged (and recovery had to take at least fifty years with Machina and Rem's guidance). On Milites thousands of soldiers and mechs were ''reduced to mere Phantoma'' by [[Summon Magic|Alexander]], the summoning of which [[Cast
* War is always the main theme of the [[Suikoden]] series. Many characters get involved in different wars, and more often than not they end up traumatized in a way or another.
** [[Suikoden II]] has a character named [[Broken Bird|Pilika]], a sweet and joyful little girl, who, in rapid succession, lost her hometown, her whole family, and nearly her own life at the hands of Luca Blight, an [[Ax Crazy]] prince who [[For the Evulz|enjoys butchering men and women like pigs]]. All Riou and Jowy could do was nuisance him a bit, get swept away with his sword, and watch helplessly as he was about to kill her, while Jowy could do nothing but yell helplessly at him to stop. They were saved at the last second by an explosion caused by your allies, and escaped during the confusion. However, this last event finally break the mind of Pilika, making her [[Cute Mute|mute]] for nearly the entire game.
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[[Category:World War I]]
[[Category:Stock Aesops]]
[[Category:War Is Hell]]▼
[[Category:No Real Life Examples, Please]]
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