Hello and welcome back. This is WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. And before we step into the July Crisis and the opening months of 1914 and something that deserves to be said plainly, without flinching: the ordinary human being—young men especially, but also the families, the workers, the civilians—became cannon fodder in the millions and millions for imperial calculations and nationalist stories.

And at the beginning, many went willingly. Not because they loved death, but because they didn’t understand what modern war had become. Because they were naïve about the scale. Because they trusted the stories they’d been given. Because the world around them made it feel normal, even noble.

So today is about that naïveté. And about the machine that fed on it.

It’s easy, from a distance, to think people in 1914 were stupid, or ...