The narrative voice, representative of a WWII military officer’s of some kind, resembles the voice of a reading teacher who instructs his officers/students how to "read" the surrounding landscape according to time and place; this teacher demonstrates how to "carry away" appropriate meaning from the text, in this case, from the landscape.  According to this lesson, taught not only by the officer but by the bloody pedagogy courtesy of WWII, one must read efferently one's surroundings, foregoing to note such trivialities as what kinds of animals mights be grazing a particular "sector".

This reading stance, this way to judge distances, outranks in importance the actual distance between the reader and the text. In fact, the efferent interpretation of the text alone might serve to widen the gap between the seer and what is seen, abstracting sheep, lovers, and elm trees into apparent animals, apparent humans, and one of three kinds of trees in existence. Why the abstraction? In WWII combat (or any war’s combat, for that matter), abstracting potential victims of one’s gunfire, "friendly" or not, is desirable. Adding the qualifier "apparent" can only help in this abstracting process because it absolves the reader of certainty, and therefore responsibility. "You must never be over-sure," says the teacher, of what you see, lest you grow aesthetically attatched to that which lies before you.

The poem’s "lesson" may ring clear, but the speaker’s attitude toward his subject appears to waver ambiguously. Implicitly in his discussion of judging distances the speaker acknowledges a genuine struggle between viewing the landscape efferently versus aesthetically. One may "never get the knack of judging a distance," admits the instructor, but "at least" one should "know how to report on a landscape" so as to ensure a clear, "just theapparent  facts ma’am" report. Using modals such as "must" twice in a line (15) emphasizes the importance of the lesson "so far as the army happens to be concerned," thereby separating the speaker from the army in general somewhat. Perhaps the speaker himself would rather look at his world aesthetically ("I may not have got the knack of judging a distance," he admits). Still, looking at the lanscape the army’s way is evidently very important for suvival and victory.

A quick glance at Part (i) of Lessons of the War, "Naming of Parts," confirms this struggle between how one naturally views the landscape (aesthetically) and how one "must" view it (efferently) during wartime. Each stanza juxtaposes the naming of rifle parts to parts of trees, causing the tone to swing back and forth throughout the poem like a pendulum to a clockwork universe gone awry.

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