It's a lot funnier if they fulfilled their duty piling up their corpses to for a ramp up to a fortress's walls for the actual elite troops to walk up. (I do realise there is actually an example of that, but I think the setting would work better if more of the stories were like that and less about your brother impugning your honour by killing more demons than you)

Yeah, pretty much. I opted to make it more generic for anyone not familiar with the setting, while at the same time describing something that I'm just going to guess has been written at least several dozen times across the novels, sourcebooks, and splatbooks. Like Gaunt's Ghosts is weirdly one of the less fashy series (Dan Abnett in general seems to portray the Imperium much more like a federation of widely varied systems* ranging from feudal aristocracies to liberal democracies to things that are bizarre and completely alien like cryogenic necrarchies, along with making space marines genuinely alien and inhuman instead of the power armored crusader fratbros that other authors write them as) and every book is just one long string of named, long-standing characters dying heroically or pathetically with little rhyme or reason to most of it.

*That's another thing that's shifted how the setting is portrayed: authors sitting down and trying to make the Imperium into something that while still dysfunctional actually sort of works and is coherent with the scale of the setting, and that pretty much requires stripping out the sort of uniform extremity of it and instead making the Imperium something distant and concerned with little more than taxes in the form of resources and conscripts, with the vast bulk of its worlds being left alone even if they fall into bloody civil wars or revolution, so long as they keep up with their taxes. And that's almost more dangerous, because it further removes the setting from the satire and builds further justifications into the vague "Thermian Propaganda" quality that it already has.