The subject of the article is an attempt to reconstruct the picture of war contained in the seventeenth century textbook for teaching Polish as a foreign language Viertzig Dialogi by Nicolaus Volckmar. The author presented two different ways of talking about war — from the point of view of its participant soldier and from the point of view of its observer a civilian. For this purpose, he used a standard vocabulary, which allowed him to talk about war subjects names of war participants, types of weapons and personal equipment of the soldier, names of military operations, military facilities and places of fight. Regardless of the method of building the narrative, the war in N. Volckmar’s dialogues is perceived as a direct threat to its participants — the recruited soldiers, and as a source of disasters for the civilian population.