[Blarg]

I think part of the essence of war is its crazyness and frequent futility, and if anything was ever more futile than simply running into machine gun fire over a war people felt more obligated than inspired to fight, I don't know what it is. An entire generation in Britain was hit first by WW1 and then by the killer flu in quick succession and virtually wiped out. A punitive treaty was established that served to do nothing so much as guarantee the next war. WW1's complex politics, futile striving, and pitiless butchery might even have had the effect of turning heads enough that the Soviet and eventually Chinese revolutions seemed like worthwhile escapes from the ideas of a viciously bungled, socially stultified, incompetent past. It was pretty huge. Much of the drama of WW2 comes from the fact that it was a war worth fighting. Equally dramatic, to me, is how monstruous it is to fight a massive mechanized war that was not worth fighting, and then to learn so little from that as to make the next war inevitable. The moral drama, to me, seems much greater in the latter kind of war and is a big part of its fascination.