As the name of the project suggests, Tardi is not a fan of war. This isn't a "cool" comic book about war. It is a gruesome, painful, often horrifying depiction of real human history. The lyrical prose of Tardi's writing is another indication of this. He doesn't appreciate war, but rather, he stands firmly in his conviction that human warfare is essentially meaninglessness and unnecessary, tragic in nature, and horrifying.
Tardi shows this both visually and through narrative, depicting the Ally forces in their battle against a ruthless German army. The battle begins with color in the panels, but as the soldiers slowly realize that the nature of trench warfare is different, the color drains. This represents their hope fading. See, before WWI, it wasn't unlikely to survive a war. Before WWI, people were shooting muskets that missed all the time, and war casualties weren't that high. But during the trench battles, entire armies could be destroyed instantly with machine guns and artillery.
Because these changes were brought so quickly, the generals didn't have time to try and understand what the technology might mean for their strategies and assumptions about warfare, and often they made horrible decisions, wasting innocent human lives by sending men into No Man's Land, the breach between the two enemy trench lines.
The story is appalling and brutal, and Tardi's depictions are painful, but all of that is by design. If the war was completely unwarranted, then this violence and horror happened for nothing. That's exactly what Tardi hopes to pass along to his readers, it seems: A sense of the absolute evil of unnecessary human warfare.
