We'll spare you the clichés. We bet you've heard 'em all before (war is Hell, dulce et decorum est… you know the drill).
Okay, toss all those out the window. Some are true, some are sort of true, and some are just ridiculous. At the end of the day, if you want to say anything real about war, you need to get personal. Because above everything else, war is personal.
That's just what Hardy's after here. By zeroing in on one soldier's story, he forces us to confront the fact that in war, one man has to look another man in the face and kill that man. That's what's at stake here, and for Hardy that's what really matters.
To be fair, that may sound very obvious to you. But it's an easy fact to forget this day in age, when we don't always have to look each other in the face. Wars are often fought in far off places, and with new technology like drones, satellites, and whatever else they've got cooking, it's often hard to remember that war always has and always will have a human cost. Men and women die at the hands of other men and women. Somewhere, someone made a choice that made that happen.