“Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges…”
From Melville’s Billy Budd:
…war contractors, whose gains, honest or otherwise, are in every land an anticipated portion of the harvest of death….
And he is the inventor of “fog of war” too:
Forty years after a battle it is easy for a noncombatant to reason about how it ought to have been fought. It is another thing personally and under fire to have to direct the fighting while involved in the obscuring smoke of it. Much so with respect to other emergencies involving considerations both practical and moral, and when it is imperative promptly to act. The greater the fog the more it imperils the steamer, and speed is put on though at the hazard of running somebody down.