It may not be a comforting thought, and it violates many ideas of what we would like to believe about ourselves, but Hynes' conclusions are the result of careful reading and thought, and readers will find this a convincing book. Hynes begins with a chapter offering some thoughts on the characteristics of war memoirs as a literary genre. He observes that war memoirs have elements of narrative history, travel writing and autobiography, but at the same time they do not fit comfortably into any of those genres. War memoirs are written in isolation by veterans seemingly unaware of the fact that they are writing as part of a long-standing literary tradition. Above all, war memoirs are personal narratives with certain constants.
War is a strange, disorienting experience filled with death and suffering.
War memoirs neither glorify nor preach against war. They bear witness'. Hynes notes that it was Graves who brought Richards' book to publication. But locally, and intermittently. Nobody lived at that pitch continuously'.