You can't always know the nature of the war.
You can know that there is a war, and from time to time, you can know that there is something you should do in order to survive, or there is some advantage to be gained.
At the beginning, everyone enters the adversity and forms an idea of the nature of that adversity, and the nature of their own response to that adversity. After things go on for a while, and time passes, and things stay essentially as they have been, you begin to understand that it has become impossible to know the nature of the adversity, or your role within it.
But we ourselves are much more than the ideas that we might form of ourselves. There's the saving force.
The mistake would be to cling to the image that you formed of the adversity and your response to the adversity, even when the situation no longer seems to bear that out. Then the adversity takes on a confusing and random character.
None of us understands what this thing called human experience is. When it gets strange, use this as information.