The “potlatch” was a festive, ceremonial distribution of gifts practiced by the American Indians of the Northwest Pacific Coast—studied extensively by anthropologists. The ceremony reached its most elaborate development among the southern Kwakiutl from 1849 to 1925.

The word potlatch means “to give away” or “a gift.” The potlatch was a ritual allowing nobles to validated their status positions by giving away gifts to both friends and enemies through lavish distribution and ostentation destruction of resources and property.

Status was achieved by the ability and willingness to give things away. The purpose of acts of ostentatious destruction was to intimidate the rival and give prestige to the destroyer. The potlatch ceremony often took the form of a “war;” the “winner” was the chief who gave away the most.

One anthropologist crystallizes the dynamic:

In the potlatch, the host challenged a guest chieftain to exceed him in his ‘power’ to give away or destroy goods. If the guest did not return one-hundred percent of the gifts received and destroy even more wealth in a bigger and better bonfire, he and his people lost face and so his ‘power’ was diminished.

The psychoanalyst Franco Fornari compares warfare to the institution of potlatch—"a voluntary destruction of previously accumulated reserves of human capital” performed with the intention to “sacrifice a certain number of lives.”

Infantryman Coningsby Dawson fought in the First World War and authored two books—available on the Internet: Carry On: Letters in Wartime (1917) and The Glory of the Trenches —also published in 1917. He wrote:

In the noble indignation of a great ideal, British soldiers face a worse hell than even the most ingenious of fanatics ever planned or plotted. Men die scorched like moths in a furnace, blown to atoms, gassed, tortured. And again other men step forward to take their place—well-knowing what will be their fate.

Dawson concludes: “Bodies may die, but the spirit of England grows greater as each soldier speeds along its way.”

880,000 British men died in the First World War, 12.5% of those who served, 6% of the adult male population. The Battle of the Somme, July 1, 1916, was the bloodiest in the history of the British Army. British forces suffered 57,000 casualties. More than 19,000 soldiers were killed on the first day of the battle alone.

We may rephrase Dawson’s conclusion slightly: “Bodies may die but the spirit of England grows greater as each soldier speeds along the way” to read: “Bodies may die, therefore the spirit of England grows greater as each soldier speeds along the way.”

The First World War was a gigantic episode of potlatch or ostentatious destruction. Soldiers sacrificed their lives; provided their bodies as “gifts” to the British nation-state. The “greatness” of the British nation was proportional to the number of bodies offered as sacrifices to itself.