We need more wars like the First World War

By Lethbridge Herald on November 13, 2025.

By Trevor Harrison
For the Herald

Every year on Nov. 11 we remember those who died during the First World War and by extension those who have died in numerous wars since. By most estimates, that early conflict resulted in 11 million military and perhaps 13 million civilian deaths. Many millions more were injured. 

Photos, news reels, paintings, and the haunting words of soldier poets pronounced the horrors of war. If these were not enough, the living presence of former soldiers in every small town and city – limbs and faces missing, lungs scarred, minds vacant – reminded the uninitiated of war’s reality. For a brief time, war’s memories seared their way into the world’s collective conscience. Surely, it was thought, the world would not again so casually march unto war. 

It was a faint hope. Nationalism and the state, combined with the development of new industrial weapons, were already at work distancing the reality of war from its human cost.

Many of our images of the First World War are of soldiers fighting at close quarters, bayonets at the ready. In fact, the chief cause of death and injury was artillery fire, followed by machine guns and poison gas. Still, war’s bloody impact was immediately seen by soldiers looking out on the butchered fields where the bodies of both friend and foe lay strewn.

Contrary to Hollywood movies, it is not easy to kill another human being. Looking into someone’s eyes and ending their life is not something we are hardwired to do. Only psychopaths or those socialized from early on to see the “other” as less than human can turn this switch.

In consequence, many soldiers who returned from that war suffered what we now recognize as post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. Crawling scared under barbed wire, surrounded by the stench of decomposing bodies; wiping blood, brain matter, and other tissue off one’s clothes; hearing screams, or having one’s ears bleed from the sound of pummeling shells – these dubious experiences brought home what war was really like.

Today, as then, many soldiers return from war zones having similarly experienced actual war. Urban fighting, in particular, is still a hazardous, brutal, and close-up affair. If physically intact, many soldiers still return with invisible injuries. PTSD remains a real thing.

Beyond the hazardous work of “grunts,” however, a larger military machine exists whose purpose is to transform war into a largely technological and technocratic exercise. States today spend billions of dollars making killing an efficient and almost banal act.

If killing another human being once required hatred or fear as a motivator – entirely human emotions – the conduct of war today has been largely excised of emotion. For missile operations officers – that is the technical term – deployed in the United States, Russia, Israel, and other wealthy countries, the sending missiles to destroy “targets” somewhere is akin to a video game.

But it is not only those who serve in today’s high-tech military who are increasingly distanced from the reality of war. Many citizens in belligerent countries are today rendered mere casual observers, acquiescing if not applauding the sanitized scenes of war appearing on screens.

Perhaps we would be more aware of the brutal reality of war if it were still fought today as it was during the First World War. Perhaps then we might want to put an end to war.

Trevor W. Harrison is a retired political sociologist at the University of Lethbridge.