In industrialized trench warfare, death arrives by shell, gas, or distant machine gun rather than through individual skill or courage, so survival and death become statistically arbitrary rather than a reflection of a soldier's merit or valor. The combatant is a passive target more than an agent, which strips the death of the meaning that martial narratives promise.
The book depicts soldiers executed by firing squads of their own army for refusing to advance, failing nerve, or being scapegoated, dying at the hands of their own command rather than the enemy. This concretely shows that the institution a man served could kill him for its own disciplinary and morale purposes.
Rendering war as fragmented individual vignettes, each following one ordinary man's sensations, fear, and death rather than battles, generals, or strategy, reveals the experience as disconnected suffering with no visible larger logic. Removing the map-level view makes the usual justifications (objectives, victories, fronts) disappear from the frame entirely.
Ground is taken and lost at enormous cost with no proportionate gain, so the governing feature of the fighting is pointlessness rather than progress toward any end. The men are consumed by a machine whose motion produces mud, corpses, and repetition rather than resolution.