Eek, now that you mention it, Oliver mentioning that his horse was needing a drink after that hack does seem ominous! At Endurance rides, I don't really expect that my horse will be interested in a drink much before having gone about 3h at speed, unless it's a really warm day...
As to the DDay storyline, speaking as a German who moved into Anglosphere countries as a child and then lived in the UK for a long time, I find the focus on Home Front nostalgia to be quite realistic, in terms of my experiences of how commemorations go in these countries. Having played for numerous Remembrance Day services, I still feel quite queasy at the particular brand of nostalgia, that seems to paint a vaguely golden-brown aura around the whole time, which feels really unexamined and uncritical. I'm sure it's not universal, but the storyline does ring true in terms of my own experiences of WWI and WWII commemorations.
As a small child, my grandmother taught me to place my clothes carefully in order on the chair: presumably really in order to avoid a "floordrobe" forming, but the explanation was that one did this to be able to put them on in the dark during an air raid. And her anecdotes, which I found amusing because I was too small to understand them, were really about avoiding being raped by Russian soldiers billeted in her house, as a young widow with three very small children.
Soldiers, especially the victims of conscription, were never sold as "heroes" in post-war Germany (for obvious reasons). I find it interesting that someone earlier (sorry, forgot who, and can't be arsed to look back) commented that one is "supposed" to call them "Nazis" instead of "Germans", and that a German of her acquaintance thought this annoying. I too would find this annoying: plenty of Germans weren't party members, and plenty had little to no choice in terms of taking part in the war, my grandfathers included. Some were naïve, and some believed lies...the big lesson, I think, should be that if it could happen in Germany at that time, it really could happen anywhere, at any time. Including in anglosphere countries that like to pat themselves on their backs about how virtuous they were.
Bertold Brecht wrote in 1928, in the Three-Penny Opera:
"Der Mensch ist gar nicht gut,
Drum hau ihn auf den Hut.
Hast du ihn auf den Hut gehaun,
So wird er vielleicht gut."
"Man is really not good,/so hit him on the hat [head]./When you've hit him on the hat,/maybe he'll become good." (engage irony filter!)
Sums it all up, really...