Who are the soldiers in the photo below? Who are the winners? Who the losers?

Paul Kahn suggests it doesn't matter. Soldiers on each side died a terrible death in order to "make present sovereign power."

Dead soldiers testify to the reality of that "thing" for which they died.

You can call this thing a sovereign, the nation or "the people."

The history of the human race is constituted by dead soldiers who die for a cause--bearing witness to the idea that there is "something else" beyond mere human existence.

Richard Koenigsberg

First World War Battlefield

From Paul H. Kahn, Sacred Violence

“The battlefield is strewn with the disemboweled and beheaded, with severed limbs and broken bodies. All have died a terrible death in a display of sovereign power. Viewing the battlefield from a certain distance, it is not even clear who is the object of sacrifice: the enemy and the conscript suffer the same threat and burden of physical destruction for the sake of making present sovereign power.”