I wouldn't call No Man's Land 'cynical'. Rather, its main emotion seems to be sadness. The cynicism - I'd rather call it bitterness - isn't (I think) directed at the soldiers but at those who use them to fight their wars for them.

Found this snippet of information from Hamish Imlach, when he introduced the song at our venue in Kiel, Germany, in 1993:

"[Eric] actually started to write this song when he was in this country. He'd done the Osnabruck Festival and had some time off. He was fascinated by the First World War so he went and looked at military cemeteries. He looked at thousands of crosses and couldn't find one man who was more than twenty-three years old - Eric was nearly thirty. He came back to Muenster, and in the military cemetery there he saw a name he remembered. So he started to write this song ..."

(If anyone should doubt my ability to remember this verbatim after 12 years - I taped the gig :-))