Why Is It Important To Be Callous And Unforgiving?

As a civilian, my understanding of war comes second or third hand from outside sources. Most such sources are probably inaccurate and unrealistic. This story is another addition to my understanding of war. It holds war itself to be callous and unforgiving, and that in turn the soldiers in war are turned callous and unforgiving as well. It does not make war its subject, it makes the war its main character.
That view conflicts with my own, in that war is not callous and unforgiving, it is the soldiers and commanders that are. The transformation that takes place is from the top down, commanders removed from the battlefield issue orders that do not account for emotions of victim or perpetrator, in order to most efficiently achieve a particular end result. This is how modern war is waged,
Accounting for the soldiers is only done on a minimal fatigue based resting period that has yet to account for trauma. War is the aggregate of those that fight it. The novel does a good job at depicting this as the reality of the situation, despite its best effort. The only real mistake made was in giving war a factor beyond that. It is very understandable for someone in the point of view of the soldier to believe that war was an entity in and of itself, however in that case there are further problems with the story that are unrelated to the portrayal of war. There are many parts which show this fallacy, starting at the start with the lines, “the war tried to kill us in the spring.” If anything the commanders, the generals, were the ones that were intent on killing the soldiers. The depiction of the soldiers was fairly realistic from my understanding, however their own understanding of themselves was improperly done. Taking a historical point of view when telling the story is one thing, when that point of view colors