Please just research a little about the Europeans aversion to using chemicals and gas, that is the only point. I was not inferring that in Belgium the gas was used against the civilian population, but rather that during WWI there is a town at the front lines that is famous, near the famous Flanders fields. In France there is an area where the Germans gassed the French trenches, and they literally just pushed the earth over the dead, in some places their bayonets still poke upward in testament to the soldiers who were ready to go over the top but did not survive the chorine, which still haunts over the grounds in small clouds, which visitors are cautioned to avoid so as not to be burned - been there and got the t-shirt. That effort you allude, the War to End All Wars, was a noble gesture, however I fear that as long as Old Men send Young Men to Fight there will always be war. It is really too bad that conflict is central to mankind's existence and the history of nations is always a history of war.
On a brighter note, Happy Thanksgiving!
Happy Thanksgiving to you too. What still makes large areas of France and Belgium unsafe isn’t ‘’small clouds’’ of gas but unexploded artillery shells. WW1 was a war where artillery dominated the battlefield. Indeed, the machine gun and artillery fire accounted for more casualties than gas in WW1. War is many things, all of them horrible but it remains a dynamic of the human condition. Consider what Heraclitus said”War is the father of all things’’. Or British historian J.F.C. Fuller: “Either war is obsolete or men are’’ pax.
It is really too bad that conflict is central to mankind's existence and the history of nations is always a history of war.Actually, not necessarily. I was reading the history of india by Kaye and pre-Islamic India didn't seem to have much of these conflicts
From what I understand their concept of warfare was a lot more ritual