In need of opinions on a new writing style

I’m working on a story currently that I would hope to be my best work. I love getting deep in descriptive detail but I wonder if I’m bogging it down by going off on small tangents that aren’t necessarily important but to me feel like good world building.
I took heavy inspiration from Dagon’s Mirror and I had a Lord of The Rings setting in mind while writing.
Please feel free to critique anything in the small snippet from chapter 1, although it would warm my heart if I captured the right words.

Before the smoke came, the world was green.

That is the part men forget when they speak of war. They remember the iron, the banners, the black bread hardening in their packs, the mud packed into boot leather, the stink of horse sweat, the wet red shine of opened men. They remember the screams because screams are loyal. Screams return in dreams long after the face that made them has gone gray in memory. But they forget the green. They forget how faithfully the grass grew beneath the marching feet of murderers. They forget how the wheat bent in the morning wind as though bowing to the sun and not to the army that had come to trample it. They forget the bees moving tenderly from flower to flower along the roadside, ignorant of kings, ignorant of borders, ignorant of the holy lies men sew into flags so they may carry slaughter beneath a prettier name.

The world had been beautiful that morning. Cruelly beautiful, as if beauty itself had no conscience.

Sir Caldus Veyne rode near the rear of the host, where the dust gathered thickest and the songs arrived already broken by distance. He was not a great knight, though his mother had once believed he might become one, and he was not a coward, though fear had lived quietly inside him since boyhood and had never found reason to leave. He was a soldier of the western crown, sworn beneath the golden stag of King Odran III, and like most sworn men he owned very little that had not first belonged to someone else. His mail shirt had been patched at the shoulder by a smith with poor eyesight. His sword had belonged to his father, and before his father to an uncle whose name nobody spoke because he had died owing money to priests. His horse, a mild brown gelding called Mallow, had one white sock, a mournful disposition, and a habit of sighing whenever Caldus asked anything difficult of him.

Caldus loved that horse more than he admitted.

The army advanced through the valley of Ilm, a long and generous country of vineyards, rye fields, plum orchards, and streams so clear that stones at the bottom shone like coins beneath glass. The valley belonged, by ink and blood and old insult, to the neighboring realm of Yrrenvale, though everyone in King Odran’s court insisted that it had once belonged to the west. This was how wars began in those days. A king’s grandfather had owned a hill. Another king’s great grandmother had married the wrong cousin. A treaty had been signed in winter, when all men were hungry and poor at judgment. A river changed course. A nobleman died without sons. A border moved the width of a field. Then, a century later, thirty thousand men marched beneath bright cloth to correct the error with fire.