"Human kind cannot bear very much reality".
Think of the all the times we spend on diversions such as TV, the Internet, video-games, the bar, the match etc. TV news you may reply gives us more than enough reality but TV news only gives representations of reality, heavily edited and mediated. All reality, it could be argued, is diluted or second-hand in this sense. Anyway, I'll leave such a debate for the "reality" of the tap-room or snug at the The Sun Inn.
By the way, the book is a great read and re-dresses the myths and misconceptions of the "Blackadder" view of the First World War. It was a secondary school teacher setting the following question, based on Wilfred Owen's "Dulce Et Decorum Est" which prompted him to write the book. The question she set was, "How does Wilfred Owen show the futility of war?" Yes "war" in general, not just the First World War. If all wars are futile, including therefore, the Second World War, then perhaps this blog would now be written in German and not by me.
As for the First World War, this is the same Wilfred Owen who could have been invalided out of the war but chose to return to active service in France. Indeed, in his final letter to his mother he describes himself as "serene" and having "a great life". Therefore the Urtext of his death and poetry has become that all war is futility.
Websites such as http://www.rjgeib.com/heroes/owen/owen.html
perpetuate this myth with the nonsense of describing him as a "pacifist"! Owen was far from a pacifist, neither was Sassoon, who won the Military Cross in 1916 and wrote of voluntarily going out into no-mans-land and attacking German patrols with bombs (grenades) and cudgels. To see these men through the prism of twenty-first century sensibilities is to denigrate their reputations.
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