[1] Fussell's criticism crosses genre boundaries, attempting to describe how the experience of the war overwhelmed its participants and forced them to share a common atmosphere in their essays, letters home, novels, humor, and poetry.

Fussell later (1996) described what he had found to an interviewer from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Also, I was very interested in the Great War, as it was called then, because it was the initial twentieth-century shock to European culture.

[4] Historian Jay Winter critiqued The Great War and Modern Memory in 1995 for what he saw as deliberately passing over the experiences of other soldier-writers who found conventional and traditional motifs adequate to describe their states of mind: "This vigorous mining of eighteenth and nineteenth century images and metaphors to accommodate expressions of mourning is one reason why it is unacceptable to see the Great War as the moment when ‘modern memory’ replaced something else, something timeworn and discredited".

Ordinary soldiers were more likely, asserts Todman, to read authors like Rudyard Kipling who responded to the Great War in ways that held harmless the heritage of men at arms.

[6] In History Today, Daniel Swift in 2014 drew attention to "the odd paradox of this book: it is a superb study of the literature and language of the Great War and specifically the metaphors and myths by which it was waged.