Walk into any major European art gallery and you are likely to see soldiers, cavalry and cannon spread across huge canvases. In some, the troops line out across the plain under the watchful gaze of a general. Others show the battle up close, often in a moment of conspicuous hero-ism-the capturing of a standard, say, or a cavalry charge. This genre dates from the period between the French revolution and the end of the Victorian era, but after that time it suddenly disappears, killed off by new, more scientific ways of writing history and by fundamental changes in how warfare was imagined. The battles that Tolstoy describes in "War and Peace", which was published in the late 1860s, were neither tidy nor heroic. Even less so were the muddied struggles of the first world war. Treating them as if they were suddenly seemed naive.
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