[Morthoron]

Hmmm...But from Tolkien's conservative point of view, perhaps there was such a thing as a righteous war, even if the savagery of battle presented 'animal horrors' to the combatants. Certainly, both the wars against the Kaiser and later Hitler were presented as conflicts against aggression, and were considered to be necessary to rid the world of evil (as Churchill's harangues during both World Wars made abundantly clear, at least from a propaganda standpoint). The lines of good and evil were clearly delineated during both conflicts (at least until the cynical manuevers of Stalin muddied the waters).

It would seem then that Tolkien did subscribe to the 'just war' concept, at least from a storytelling standpoint (fighting the long defeat, perseverance in the face of certain destruction, the malnourished and puny London clerks and Oxford undergraduates transformed into Hobbits trundling off for king and country, etc.). One doesn't get the same gloomy prospects and disillusionment espoused by writers of the 'Lost Generation' (like Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Siegfried Sassoon, T.S. Eliot or D.H. Lawrence). Rather than confronting the ghosts of Flanders in a modern method, Tolkien's therapy seemed to be to subsume himself in a chivalric or medieval world where virtue and truth still made sense and were applicable to war (along the lines, but not necessarily as reverentially as Froissart, who glorified chivalry even when noting that the Black Prince was slaughtering whole towns of innocent civilians). Perhaps the hope attendant in Tolkien's religion precluded him from falling prey to the cynicism of many of his literary peers who survived WWI.

I am not sure. Perhaps your take that Tolkien needed an honorable war to expunge the horror of his own experience is correct. *shrugs*