A Satire of Circumstance Summary and Analysis

"By mid-December, 1914, British troops had been fighting on the Continent for over five months. Casualties had been shocking, positions had settled into self-destructive stalemate, and sensitive people now perceived that the war, far from promising to be 'over by Christmas,' was going to extend itself to hitherto unimagined reaches of suffering and irony" (Chap. 1, p. 3).

Fussell begins by quoting a Thomas Hardy poem and says that it offers the mechanism for viewing the war because of its use of irony. He goes on to mention other poems and their use of irony, such as a dog digging at its owner's grave. Fussell refers to Hardy as the master of spiritual irony and uses Hardy's works as examples of why war itself is ironic. He claims that the reason is that every war is worse...