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he First World War was a horrendous, chaotic, brutal, and often surrealistically absurd war. Yet it is portrayed by historians as a more-or-less natural or normal event, despite the fact that something very unnatural and abnormal was occurring.

Historians conceive their  task as describing or documenting what occurred. Although the events depicted may appear from a human perspective to be irrational or bizarre, rarely do historians describe events as irrational or bizarre.

However grotesque an event may have been, historical documentation “normalizes” it, confers dignity upon the event. Soon, given the weighty accounts that appear books, one comes to assume that there was a reason for what occurred; that we understand what was going on.

The assumption that we know what was going on is unfounded. Reconceptualization of the historical process begins when we acknowledge that we don't really know what was going on.

The destruction of life and property that occurred on such a vast scale during the Twentieth Century cannot be explained in conventional economic and political terms. To understand these events, we begin by acknowledging that the historical process is governed by profoundly irrational forces.

In war, actual human bodies are sacrificed in the name of perpetuating a magical entity, the body politic. Sacrificial acts function to affirm the reality or existence of this sacred object, the nation. Entering into battle may be characterized as a devotional act, with death in war constituting the supreme act of devotion.

A French soldier of the First World War asserted that he wished to be remembered as one who had “given their blood that France might live.” This metaphor contained the fundamental dynamic of the First World War and perhaps many other wars; evoking the image of a blood transfusion where the life-sustaining substance of an individual body passes into the collective body, functioning to keep it alive.