4 ideas
Seen this way, the war stops being a sequence of battles with meaning attached afterward. It becomes a fragmented, confusing present in which people act on rumor, habit, and immediate need rather than on any grasp of the larger picture.
For most participants, the dominant texture of the war was not combat but monotony, hunger, lice, illness, bureaucracy, and long stretches of idleness far from any fighting. Nurses, sailors, civilians, and rear-area soldiers make up much of the war's human experience, yet the combat-centered picture of war leaves them out. Taking them seriously relocates the war's real cost into chronic erosion rather than dramatic moments.
Participants repeatedly recorded aesthetic wonder in the midst of slaughter: shellfire at night that looked like fireworks, striking landscapes, the thrill of danger. Some, like the British officer Alfred Pollard, openly enjoyed the war. This attraction was not a denial of the sorrow but existed alongside it, and it helps explain why people kept participating in something they also found appalling.
Richard Stumpf, a patriotic German seaman on the battleship SMS Helgoland, kept a diary through years in which the High Seas Fleet mostly sat in harbor. Enforced idleness, poor food, and the widening gulf between privileged officers and the men turned his early enthusiasm into bitter class resentment.