The romanticisation of war is a lie

This has been known for a very long time. The ancient Greek poet Pindar said around 500 BC - ‘war is sweet to those who have no experience of it’. 

Petya’s death feels like Tolstoy personally slapping every “war is glorious” montage off the screen. If you haven’t already, the old BBC “Testament of Youth” hits similar notes.

I love the several adaptations of "All Quiet on the Western Front" for this reason. It's brutal. Life is c****. It's all unfair and you'll be forgotten for your service. Nothing you do will change anything in this war. It is lost or won regardless. You are just a number

Yes and no. Bear in mind that most people who go off to war are young people going through a time in their life when they romanticize everything. While it may not seem that going off to war is comparable to going off to college, the type of "back in the day" storytelling that results i remarkably similar. There's also the questions of "who are we talking about?" and "what kind of war?". For most of history, the sort of people who wrote novels were also the sort of people who would be taken for random/exchange rather than dumped into a pit. Similarly, civilians weren't sacrosanct out of some sort of morality but due to the reality that peasants didn't care all that much who was sitting in the castle on the hill as long as their lives went on as normal. It was a game they simply weren't part of. You also have to recall that war novels are primarily written by people who have three key traits: - They were likely on the winning side. - They survived the experience. - They were mentally/emotionally suited to surviving in that environment. This latter is important. What you view as "hell" is, for some people, simply "Tuesday". People - you, me, everyone - naturally assume that others think and feel like we do without considering that the way they view the world is very, very different. A person's emotions are never a lie to *them*, although they may appear to be a lie to others. If you want to read a book that will open your eyes to the radically different experiences people can have of these sorts of events, I'd recommend Junger's Storm of Steel. He wasn't trying to sell a narrative, simply telling his experiences in World War I as he saw and felt them. Yet the way he experienced the war was very different from the way someone like Remarque did.

You mean war is not fun and pretty? What a revelation.

When’s the last time you saw anyone romanticize war?