I disagree. For example, that is very much not a description of "All Quiet on the Western Front", even though the context in which that book is set does match the description. And indeed, it is referring to WWI - where the scale of things really caught most people by surprise by orders of magnitude, far far more so than WWII. But not all books set in WWI would be described that way - most of them are about something else, and this sentence is just an aspect of their setting, not a description of what the book is about. But if you think of *the* book that presents both what European militarism was like at that time, and just exactly how it flared up in this way and surprised everyone, that's the book.

As for "A Clash of Kings" - which I just recently finished BTW :) - writing a description like this for it would be much too metaphorical, as well as being a bit of an exaggeration, considering the warring happening in that book doesn't sound that much greater in scale than the warring that has happened on previous occasions in living memory of many of the characters.