Douglas Haig was the British General who planned and executed the Battle of the Somme, July 1, 1916-March 21, 1917. Reflecting on hundreds of thousands of British casualties, he wrote (De Groot, 1989):

Credit must be paid to the splendid young officers who were able time and time again to attack these tremendous positions. To many it meant certain death, and all must have known that before they started.

Asking men to get out of trenches and to run into machine-gun fire and artillery shells…certain death. The suicide missions of contemporary terrorists are trivial compared with the missions undertaken by the soldiers of the First World War. Yet the First World War is "written up" in the "history books" as if a form of normality.

The First World War was extraordinary psychopathology. "Normality" as radical psychopathology. The historians don't say it--don't tell the truth--they are hiding in their trenches