Hello and welcome back. This is WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. And today we’re going to do what polite history often avoids. We’re going to go down into the slaughter field and stay there long enough that it stops being “strategy” and becomes what it really was for the people who lived it: noise, mud, waiting, terror, and the steady realization that the state had turned the human body into raw material.

Abstraction is how empires get away with it. Abstraction is how millions die while speeches remain elegant.

So let’s say it plainly: by 1916, the empires knew. They knew what modern industrial war was doing to soldiers. They knew what artillery did. They knew what machine guns did. They knew what “going over the top” meant. They had casualty reports. They had medical stations overflowing. They had lists that grew so long the ...