"Nothing like dead youths to light a fire under their collective arses," he snorted. "You know, back then, everyone thought it was going to be this massive, glorious thing, and those of us who didn't make it back were going to have heroic deaths in service. But it was brutal. Down in the mud and the dirt and the cold, waiting for the order to capture another inch of terrain..."

And here he thought his classes got the lot of this out of his system.