How we cite our quotes: (Part.Chapter.Paragraph) or (Part.Paragraph)
Quote #1
There were horrors enough, but it was the unexpected detail that threw him and afterward would not let him go. (2.1)
Robbie's saying that the parts of war that are memorable or disturbing are the surprises. Another way to look at this is that the things you haven't imagined or don't expect—the bits that you haven't dreamed or planned for, are the ones that knock you on your butt. (Check out the "Dreams, Hopes, and Plans" theme for more discussion of Robbie being knocked on his butt.)
Quote #2
He was thinking about the French boy asleep in his bed, about the indifference with which men could lob shells into a landscape. Or empty their bomb bays over a sleeping cottage by a railway, without knowing or caring who was there. It was an industrial process. He had seen their own RA units at work, tightly knit groups, working all hours […] They need never see the end result—a vanished boy. (2.77)
RA is the Royal Artillery—the British units that fire the big artillery guns. Robbie's thinking that when you're shooting at someone from way far away you don't need to think about them as people. You erase them as thinking, conscious people, and then, once you've erased them in your imagination, it's easy to erase them altogether.
Quote #3
But there was one external development, one shadow that he had to refer to. After Munich last year, he was certain, like everyone else, that there would be a war. Their training was being streamlined and accelerated, a new camp was being enlarged to take more recruits. His anxiety was not for the fighting he might have to do, but the threat to their Wiltshire dream. […] But for both of them there was also something fantastical about it all, remote even though likely. Surely not again, was what many people were saying. And so they continued to cling to their hopes. (2. 88)
The Munich Agreement in 1938 allowed the Nazis to annex Czechoslovakia. Again, war here is a large, ugly critter that squats right exactly where you planned to hold the wedding. It gets in the way, catastrophically. The Wiltshire dream is a plan Cecilia and Robbie have to go to a cottage after his leave and finally spend some time together. It never happens though. See our analysis of "Dreams, Hopes and Plans" elsewhere in the "Themes" section to see what happens to you when you make a plan in this novel.