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There is Norah Jones, however, to heal all wounds. Burns has the Starbucks chanteuse mumble-warbling a melancholy tune called “American Anthem” a couple of times over his carefully spliced war footage (slowed down, of course), and it grates like the Hallmark ad you’d expect it to be. This maudlin instinct of Burns’ is regrettable considering the lengths he goes to to stress the disturbing carnage levels of World War II and the sheer terror of being an infantryman, plus his proven effectiveness at moving us without the plaintive music cues. His evocation of the long-awaited storming of Normandy, for example, is in its way as unique as Spielberg’s hyperviolent staccato dramatization in Saving Private Ryan because he can also convey the national hush that accompanied news of the invasion back home, as if the American body had chosen to take a collective breath so it could spiritually exhale all its hopes and prayers toward its fighting extremities on the shores of France. (Implicitly, too, in detailing the huge effort at home to give, give, give, it damns the inability of our current leaders to connect us to a sense of shared sacrifice in our present state of war.) And surprisingly, or perhaps not, given the previous 13 hours of death reporting and the colossal impact of all the battle footage (a good deal of it in its original color exposure, which was changed to black-and-white for newsreels), Burns lays out an argument for the use of the atomic bomb that brings everything back to the most elemental question of any war: What will stop the loss of life for your side and end the damn thing?

Perhaps the best thing about The War — the one that most blunts the greatest-generation flag-waving we’ve so often been subjected to when it comes to this period — is that when it isn’t trying to tug at your heartstrings, it’s psychologically grinding. The cumulative effect wears on you to the point where hearing that there’s one more mission to fly, hill to take or island to invade is its own kind of heart-stopping dread. That could be seen as a risky endeavor when you’re asking viewers to keep coming back for seven nights, but this is General Burns, after all, conqueror of yesteryear. And you probably will return.

THE WAR| PBS | begins Sunday, September 23, 8 p.m.-10:30 p.m. and continues Mon. through Wed., Sept. 24-26, 8 p.m.-10 p.m., Sun., Sept. 30, 8 p.m.-10:30 p.m., Mon., Oct. 1 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. and Tues., Oct. 2, 8 p.m.-10:30 p.m.