[Ibrîniðilpathânezel]

Tolkien may not have gone on at length describing mutilation and the human atrocities of war, but he certainly did not utterly ignore them. To me, one of the most horrific passages of LotR is in "The Siege of Gondor":

Then among the greater casts there fell another hail, less ruinous but more horrible. All about the streets and lanes behind the Gate it tumbled down, small round shot that did not burn. But when men ran to learn what it might be, they cried aloud or wept. For the enemy was flinging into the City all the heads of those who had fallen fighting at Osgiliath, or on the Rammas, or in the fields. They were grim to look on; for though some were crushed and shapeless, and some had been cruelly hewn, yet many had features that could be told, and it seemed that they had died in pain, and all were branded with the foul token of the Lidless Eye. But marred and dishonoured as they were, it often chanced that a man would see again the face of someone that he had known, who had walked proudly once in arms, or tilled the fields, or ridden in upon a holiday from the green vales in the hills.

There are in Tolkien's letters many references to his feelings about war. In #73, written to his son in June of 1944, four days after the Normandy Invasion, Christopher had apparently asked him about his own experiences of writing while serving in the military, and he replied:

As for what to try and write: I don't know. I tried a diary with portraits (some scathing some comic some commendatory) of persons and events seen; but I found it was not my line. So I took to 'escapism': or really transforming experience into another form and symbol with Morgoth and Orcs and the Eldalie (representing beauty and grace of life and artefact) and so on; and it has stood me in good stead in many hard years since and still I draw on the conceptions then hammered out.

So it would seem that rather than write a tale depicting war in realistic, grisly detail, Tolkien preferred to write about the war in a more metaphysical sense, the ongoing War between Good and Evil, in which the battles are more symbolic than representational. In fact in letter 93, written on Christmas Eve of the same year (during which Tolkien was still working on LotR), he told Christopher:

C. Williams who is reading it all says the great thing is that its centre is not strife and war and heroism (though they are understood and depicted) but in freedom, peace, ordinary life and good liking. Yet he agrees that these very things require the existence of a great world outside the Shire -- lest they should grow stale by custom and turn into the humdrum....

Another interesting comment on his attitude toward war in general came in June of the following year in letter 101:

There is a stand-down parade of Civil Defence in the Parks in the afternoon, to which I shall prob. have to drag myself. But I am afraid it all seems rather a mockery to me, for the War is not over (and the one that is, or the part of it, has largely been lost). But it is of course wrong to fall into such a mood, for Wars are always lost, and The War always goes on; and it is no good growing faint!

He does not specify, but I cannot help but think "The War" means the eternal struggle between Good and Evil, which is at the core of much of the mythology he loved. He made another intriguing remark in his next letter (102, August 1945):

The news today about 'Atomic bombs' is so horrifying one is stunned. The utter folly of these lunatic physicists to consent to do such work for war-purposes: calmly plotting the destruction of the world! Such explosives in men's hands, while their moral and intellectual status is declining, is about as useful as giving out firearms to all inmates of a gaol and then saying that you hope 'this will ensure peace.'

In January of 1945 (letter 96), he wrote:

The appalling destruction and misery of this war mount hourly: destruction of what should be (and indeed is) the common wealth of Europe, and the world, if mankind were not so besotted, wealth the loss of which will affect us all, victors or not. Yet people gloat to hear of the endless lines, 40 miles long, of miserable refugees, women and children pouring West, dying on the way. There seem no bowels of mercy or compassion, no imagination, left in this dark diabolical hour. By which I do not mean that it may not all, in the present situation. . . be necessary and inevitable. But why to gloat! We were supposed to have reached a state of civilization in which it might still be necessary to execute a criminal, but not to gloat, or to hang his wife and child by him while the orc-crowd hooted. The destruction of Germany, be it 100 times merited, is one of the most appalling world-catastrophes. Well, well, you and I can do nothing about it. And that shd. be a measure of the amount of guilt that can justly be assumed to attach to any member of a country who is not a member of its actual Government. Well the first War of the Machines seems to be drawing to its final inconclusive chapter -- leaving, alas, everyone the poorer, many bereaved or maimed and millions dead, and only one thing triumphant: the Machines. As the servants of the Machines are becoming a privileged class, the Machines are going to be enormously more powerful. What's their next move?

I think that these remarks almost more than any other reflect why Tolkien wrote LotR as he did. Machines are not human in any sense of the word, though they may be used by humans, and the greatest destruction they wreak are not on the bodies of the slain, but in how they wreak despair upon the human heart and soul, leaching it of hope, creating a world in which morals and ethics have no place, because they are not a part of the inhuman Machine. The ruination of entire countries -- such as Mordor -- is destruction painted on an even larger canvas than those of the slain on a battlefield; its scale is mythical, rather than "realistic," and Tolkien was creating a myth. He knew the horrors of war; that he chose to write of its "real" aspects as subtext makes perfect sense given the times through which he had already lived, and the horror he had already witnessed. Sometimes, "reality" can be understood best when it is presented in a different way and in a different light that frees one from the obvious horrors to see the even greater horrors that lie beneath. Moreover, it was his authorial choice to depict the story however he wished, and whether or not a reader approves of his choice is up to the individual. There really is no right or wrong.