Hello and welcome back. This is WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. Lets keep the larger format, keep the bigger-picture engine running, but deepen the personal enough that the disgrace and terror can’t be politely ignored. Not “war is hell” as a slogan. The lived thing. The human nervous system inside the machine.

Lets do this in one continuous flow, with the war’s voices pressed closer to the ear. Not a list. Not a collage. Just the sense of a few ordinary people moving through the same system that politicians called “necessary.”

Imagine a young infantryman in the summer of 1916, not yet twenty, his uniform new enough that it still feels like costume. He’s been trained, marched, shouted at, made to feel that fear is shameful and obedience is virtue. He is told, with a calm confidence that sounds like authority, that the guns h ...