People facing death are rarely passive victims; they prepare for it, imagine it, risk it, endure it and try to understand it. In war, death also needs agents who kill, bury and mourn, so handling death becomes a society's central labour, not a background event.
Mass death hits hardest not just through its numbers but because it breaks shared beliefs about who should die, when, where and how. Young, healthy men destroyed suddenly, far from home, upended a culture's picture of a proper end.
When bodies are stripped, blown apart, or dumped in trenches, no one can keep an accurate count of the fallen, and families cannot know what became of their own. That failure pushed the state to accept a duty to the families, the bodies and the memory of the dead.
Suffering on a scale that seemed to cover the whole country gave rise to lasting national structures and commitments. Within a generation, the war dead had become common property, honoured through a nationwide project of remembrance that tied the country together.
A deeply religious culture had to square huge, seemingly pointless carnage with belief in a loving God. Each death raised the question of what comes after this life, and so many deaths at once forced people to rethink their ideas of the afterlife.