WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall-Why Soldiers Went

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 brainwashed, or uniquely gullible. That’s comforting, because it lets us separate ourselves from them. It lets us say, we would never. We’re smarter now.But the people who marched in 1914 were not cartoons. They were human beings with the same emotional needs we have: belonging, meaning, dignity, adventure, respect, a chance to be part of something larger than their private lives. They lived in a world of intense nationalism and ritual, a world that had trained them to imagine the nation as sacred, and trained them to imagine war as a test of worth.And most of them had no sensory understanding of what industrial war would do to a human body.