[Miamipuck]

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I can see what you're saying. I just think the stark crazed horror of the WW1 trenches, and its utter pointlessness, is hard to top as a sort of peak human experience -- of a negative kind. Heck, the french shelled their own troops when they didn't want to go soak up machine gun bullets just to wear out the enemy's ammunition stores. How insane is that?

Plus, there was the coming of the tank, which must have been mind-boggling and fearful, and those daring young men in their flying machines. And zeppelins! And this at a time when even the leading nations of the world had only a fraction of their roads paved, and some soldiers and many citizens still used horses, and most people lived on farms. What an odd dissonance, what a crazy coming of age the early part of this century was.

By contrast, so much of WW2 seemed to make sense.

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I can see the fascination with WWI. However much of what you describe happened in the Civil War as well. Sans Flying Machines and Machine guns (which was invented a little late for this war) and different participants obviously. Heck some of the so called "charges" were freakin retarded. I have gone to some of the battle fields (Fredricksberg for instance) and thought "WTF?" . Not being a war strategist even I can see the futility of that one.

I have a fascination with the kind of person that says, "Yes sir" as much as the General that orders such a futile charge and the general dynamics of it.

I hope the WWII documentary is half as good as the Civil War . To this day, I still love watching Shelby Foote describe the battlefields and the participants as if he were there.