History WarIsHell / Literature

* ''SlaughterhouseFive'' by Kurt Vonnegut: the [[WorldWarII WWII]] firebombing of Dresden haunts the book. You could see all of Vonnegut's work as an extended CreatorBreakdown in the face of his hellish wartime experiences.

* ''Literature/TheLordOfTheRings'' 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 desolation of the landscape to fuel the war machines of Isengard and Mordor, and 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 a veteran of WorldWarOne, the war most likely to inspire a tragic view of war, as shown in many examples on this page.

* This is brought up in ''Literature/TheBookThief'', as a young German girl and her adopted family living in Germany during WorldWar2 and aren't living [[PerpetualPoverty in the best conditions.]] What was particularly [[TearJerker heartbreaking]] was when [[spoiler: the street they were living in was accidentally bombed and everyone except the little girl died.]] It's quite harsh when you realize that it was the Allies who did that.

* Timothy Findley's ''The Wars'', set in WorldWarOne.

* The TortallUniverse's portrayals of war are never pleasant. Even the most justified wars, such as the ones fighting against the personification of chaos or overthrowing a highly corrupt government, are shown to be gory and brutal, killing far too many innocents.
** Though less prominent, at least at first, still present in the Literature/CircleOfMagic. For example, Briar comes back from Yanjing suffering from extreme PTSD from the war he fought through there. All the reader knows about it comes from horrible nightmares he experiences, but the upcoming''Battle Mages'' promising to go through it in all its bloody terror.

* The Shaara AmericanCivilWar trilogy (''Literature/GodsAndGenerals'', ''Literature/TheKillerAngels'', and ''Literature/TheLastFullMeasure'') take pains to depict the brutality, disease, WorstAid, boredom, and general horror of the war. Of note are the slaughter of surrendering black troops in the Battle of the Crater, Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg, and the ''literal'' hell of The Wilderness when many of the wounded die in brush fires.

* This is one of the main themes in AndreyLivadny's ''Literature/TheHistoryOfTheGalaxy'' books, especially the books that take place during the First Galactic War, a 30-year bloodbath started when the dictator-ruled [[TheEmpire Earth Alliance]] destroys the Dabog colony as a lesson to the other Free Colonies, sparking TheWarOfEarthyAggression that eventually resulted in the total defeat of Earth and the establishment of the [[TheFederation 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 HumongousMecha fights (of the [[RealRobotGenre 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, sacrificed by their commanding officer in order to get a Colonial WaveMotionGun. Other novels involve war vets trying to adjust to living in a post-war galaxy.

** Though less prominent, at least at first, still present in the CircleOfMagic. For example, Briar comes back from Yanjing suffering from extreme PTSD from the war he fought through there. All the reader knows about it comes from horrible nightmares he experiences, but the upcoming''Battle Mages'' promising to go through it in all its bloody terror.

* WilfredOwen's poems. The most famous example is probably ''Dulce et Decorum Est'', which happens to be loaded with enough horror and powerful messages to completely convince someone that war is an awful thing.
* ''TheForeverWar'': We're fighting them because they are fighting us because we are fighting them because ... a war without any sensible objective that no-one can stop. Soldiers that return home find it utterly alien: who are they fighting for?

* Post WWI, Septimus in Virginia Woolf's ''Mrs. Dalloway'' suffers from shellshock-induced hallucinations and might have full-blown schizophrenia. He also has survivor guilt over the fact he saw his friend Evans get blown up and believes Evans's ghost haunts him.

* John Marsden's ''Tomorrow, When The War Began'' series featuring a group of teenagers who become guerrilla fighters when Australia is invaded by an unspecified foreign power.
* Creator/MadeleineLEngle's ''Literature/ASwiftlyTiltingPlanet'' features a shellshocked veteran of the Civil War, Union side. It takes him months to open up even to his twin brother, and he never gets over the experience fully. (Includes a more literal AndIMustScream than usual: "I saw a man with his face blown off and no mouth to scream with, and yet he screamed and screamed and could not die.") The entire book is spent averting a worldwide nuclear war, so this trope is kind of necessary.
* The ''{{Flashman}}'' series tends to lean this way, which is unsurprising given the setting. Flashy lives through some of the most terrible campaigns of his era including the retreat from Kabul and the Sepoy Mutiny, and in most cases he only survives because he is a lucky, cowardly, lucky, conniving, lucky, bastard.
* A brief, haunting moment in Lois Lowry's ''TheGiver'' is when Jonas is given the memory of a young man dying in combat - and when we say young, we mean no older than [[ChildSoldiers thirteen]]. UtopiaJustifiesTheMeans, indeed...

* ''GoneWithTheWind'' has quite a bit of this trope, and the book really focuses on how difficult life was in the South for the civilians towards the end of the war.
* Hemingway wrote often on this trope. ''A Farewell to Arms'' and ''For Whom The Bell Tolls'' brutally depict the horrors of war, the former set in the muddy trenches of WWI, and the latter depicting the unique barbarism that is found only in civil wars, in this case the Spanish Civil War.

* HarryTurtledove'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.
* TheUnknownSoldier, and very much so.
* ''TheLordOfTheRings'' 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 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 a veteran of WorldWarOne, the war most likely to inspire a tragic view of war, as shown in many examples on this page.

* ''RomanceOfTheThreeKingdoms'' while it had its epic war moments, was ultimately a tale of tragedy as three kingdoms vied for the control of [[VestigialEmpire China]] and ultimately none were victorious. In terms of the fates of the characters, Shu fell as WideEyedIdealist Liu Bei soon became jaded, learning virtue is not enough to bring the people together. For Wu, the Sun dynasty's fall heralded a new tyrant who was so hated that the people did not resist and for Wei, Cao Pi realized that ambition worked both ways.
* ''JohnnyGotHisGun''. About a soldier who is [[AndIMustScream left deaf, blind, mute and without any limbs]] as a result of a war that he didn't even volunteer for. He learns to communicate by moving ever so slightly, and repeatedly asks to be killed.

* ''FateZero'', ''VisualNovel/FateStayNight's'' LightNovel prequel, shows just how brutal and unforgiving the fourth Holy Grail War was, with mass murder, deception, betrayal, and all the terrible things the Masters do just to get a chance to win the coveted Holy Grail.

* The ''HoratioHornblower'' books do not make any attempts to conceal the awfulness of British Navy life in the Napoleonic Wars. What with the gory descriptions of battle, hideous injury, worse medical care, brutal discipline, and foul food and water (this last is not [[ArsonMurderAndJaywalking inconsequential]]), the lead at one point thinks that the prison volunteers on his crew would have done better to stay in jail.

* ''TheUnderlandChronicles'' and ''Literature/TheHungerGames'' series, both by Suzanne Collins.

* This is one of the main themes in AndreyLivadny's ''TheHistoryOfTheGalaxy'' books, especially the books that take place during the First Galactic War, a 30-year bloodbath started when the dictator-ruled [[TheEmpire Earth Alliance]] destroys the Dabog colony as a lesson to the other Free Colonies, sparking TheWarOfEarthyAggression that eventually resulted in the total defeat of Earth and the establishment of the [[TheFederation 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 HumongousMecha fights (of the [[RealRobotGenre 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, sacrificed by their commanding officer in order to get a Colonial WaveMotionGun. Other novels involve war vets trying to adjust to living in a post-war galaxy.
* Almost any ''{{Starcraft}}'' novel where the main characters are soldiers will have this as one of its themes. The notable examples are ''Speed of Darkness'' (in which a forcibly-conscripted Confederate marine takes part in one of the first engagements with the Zerg) and ''Heaven's Devils'', featuring Jim Raynor as a fresh Confederate recruit who bought into the WarIsGlorious propaganda before finding out for himself that it's far from it. The latter case actually takes place ''before'' the game's storyline and features the war between the Confederacy of Man and the Kel-Morian Combine, with both governments being full of corruption and greed. There is plenty of both heroic and senseless deaths (such as one of the main characters' LoveInterest being suddenly shot [[EyeScream through the eye]] by a sniper).
* ''Mockingjay'', the third ''[[Literature/TheHungerGames Hunger Games]]'' book, is very very antiwar. The book is mainly about the PTSD-stricken heroine being used as a pawn by both sides of a war between the rebels and the Capitol. And at the end, [[spoiler: she finds out that President Coin, the leader of the resistance movement, hijacked a Capitol airship and bombed a group of children to make it look like the Capitol did it, purposefully sending in Katniss's little sister so that she would be slaughtered too, so as to emotionally damage Katniss since she had [[YouHaveOutlivedYourUsefulness outlived her usefulness]].]] In other words, the theme of the book is that [[spoiler: no matter what there will be horrible people on either side of a war and innocents and pawns will always have to die in their crossfire]].

* Timothy Findley's The Wars, set in WorldWarOne.

* The TortallUniverse's portrayals of war are never pleasant. Even the most justified wars, such as the ones fighting against the personification of chaos or over throwing a highly corrupt government are shown to be gory and brutal, killing far too many innocents.
** Though less prominent, at least at first, still present in the CircleOfMagic. For example, Briar comes back from Yanjing suffering from extreme PTSD from the war he fought through there. All the reader knows about it comes from horrible nightmares he experiences, but the upcoming "Battle Mages" promising to go through it in all its bloody terror.

* TheDresdenFiles and CodexAlera books (both by JimButcher) employ this trope in UrbanFantasy and HighFantasy settings. While the combat provides many opportunities for the protagonists to do no end of [[Awesome/TheDresdenFiles ridiculously]] [[Awesome/CodexAlera awesome]] things, neither do the books shy away from showing how much mental and physical damage conflict does both to the combatants and the civilians. While various candidates for BigBad may use war for their own ambition, they never believe WarIsGlorious (and anyone who does espouse that mindset is either seen as an idiot or is deliberately using it to manipulate others) and however cool the battles may be, the books do not for a moment suggest that the awesomeness outweighs the suffering and brutality.

* Patrick Ness' ''Chaos Walking'' trilogy seems to be going this way, although the theme seems to be more 'war can be a necessary evil' than 'war is always bad'.\\
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Current themes explored in the series so far include slavery, and later genocide, a dictator and how he manipulates the population into not fighting against him (this includes full-out brainwashing), GreyAndGreyMorality with the resistance [[UtopiaJustifiesTheMeans overstepping the mark to achieve their end]] almost as much as the Dictator does, torture of prisoners, the nature of terrorism, religious fundamentalism, and discrimination resulting in dehumanisation. There is also an AuthorTract dropped against the idea that a real man is capable of murder. Yeah, it's a pretty heavy series. And all set within a small human colony in space, too.

* This is one of the main themes in AndreyLivadny's ''TheHistoryOfTheGalaxy'' books, especially the books that take place during the First Galactic War, a 30-year bloodbath started when the dictator-ruled [[TheEmpire Earth Alliance]] destroys the Dabog colony as a lesson to the other Free Colonies, sparking TheWarOfEarthyAggression that eventually resulted in the total defeat of Earth and the establishment of the [[TheFederation 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 HumongousMecha fights (of the [[RealRobotGenre 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 WaveMotionGun. Other novels involve war vets trying to adjust to living in a post-war galaxy.

* ''Literature/{{Animorphs}}'' does this with teenagers fighting an AlienInvasion. You'd ''think'' something that was basically just WakeUpGoToSchoolSaveTheWorld with animal powers would just be fun, but the series really rams this message in as the main characters lose their innocence, their families, and in some cases, their lives.

* In LarryNiven's ''KnownSpace'' stories, advances in weapons technology over the next thousand years makes combat so horrible that most people simply cannot bear it. The government intentionally keeps a "stable" of sociopaths and psychopaths (either natural or created) just to do the fighting, because performing an act of violence with a modern weapon is so horrible the very thought sickens the average citizen of earth to the point of catatonia.

** Even when the Free People’s (Elves, dwarves, hobbits, ents and good men) have WeAREStrugglingTogether and the Orks, nazgul, trolls and evil men have an EnemyCivilWar, both sides knew that [[NotSoDifferent 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 MeaningfulEcho).

* The Shaara AmericanCivilWar trilogy (''Literature/GodsAndGenerals'', ''Literature/TheKillerAngels'', and ''Literature/TheLastFullMeasure'') take pains to depict the brutality, disease, WorstAid, boredom, and general horror of the war. Of note are the slaughter of surrendering black troops in the Battle of the Crater, the Battle of Antietam[[note]]23,000 casualties in less than 24 hours for a tactical draw[[/note]], and the ''literal'' hell of The Wilderness when many of the wounded die in brush fires.

* WilfredOwen's poems. The most famous example is probably ''Dulce et Decorum Est'', which happens to be loaded with enough NightmareFuel and powerful messages to completely convince someone that war is an awful thing.

* ''Literature/{{Animorphs}}'' does this with teenagers fighting an AlienInvasion.

* KatherineKerr's ''[[Literature/Deverry Deverry Cycle]]'' books are mostly set in a recurring cycle of bloodshed and violence. The events of 835-843 are especially stark in being this. The main timeline is nicer, but the peasantry still doesn't fare well when the Lords go to war.

* KatherineKerr's [[Literature/Deverry Deverry Cycle]] books are mostly set in a recurring cycle of bloodshed and violence. The events of 835-843 are especially stark in being this. The main timeline is nicer, but the peasantry still doesn't fare well when the Lords go to war.

* ''Literature/AllQuietOnTheWesternFront'': The enemy that a soldier kills and maims are not faceless targets but people very much like himself.