Tolkien the ex-soldier could not glamorize combat. His letters to his sons during the Second World War, for example, are filled with great foreboding. “The utter stupid waste of war, not only material but moral and spiritual, is so staggering to those who have to endure it,” he wrote. “But so short is human memory and so evanescent are its generations that in only about 30 years there will be few or no people with that direct experience which alone goes really to the heart. The burnt hand teaches most about fire.”63
