For Tolkien and other Englishmen of his generation, the romanticism of war died on the fields of Flanders, on the Somme and at Verdun. There is little glory in a rat-infested trench, and no honor in picking off the enemy hundreds of yards away.
That being said, if you page through
The Hobbit to the section where Tolkien describes Orcs, he says basically that they were the future inventors of weapons of mass-destruction. Also, when Gandalf strikes several Orcs dead in the goblin cave, Tolkien describes the smell of gunpowder. I would quote the passages, but the football game is starting, and I do have my priorities.
