Blueprint for Armageddon - Wow I'm glad that's over

I just finished this series of Hardcore History last night and... I am at a loss for words, frankly. This is the most disturbing thing I've listened to, hands down.

Foreshadowing my experience, I made a post Is there a go-to video series to accompany Blueprint for Armageddon on WW1?, while I was at the part where Germany has just entered France for the first time. I had a lot of compelling answers in there.

I now believe that every response completely missed the actual reason there is an absence of good map content on this war, compared to for example the Napoleonic Wars:

Every. Single. Battle. Was a positionless, Godless, meat grinder, into which an entire generation of European men were fed. There were no beautiful outflankings. There were no sudden, decisive, cavalry charges. The equivalent of Napoleon's entire Grande Armée will be repeatedly sacrificed for nothing more than a line moving a few miles back.

First Battle of the Marne: ~550,000 casualties total

---Trench Warfare begins around here---

First Battle of Ypres: ~250k casualties

Second Battle of Artois: Another 200k casualties
--I believe chemical warfare began around here-- There is a whole bunch of "smaller battles" with only 150kish casualties each, where the strategic and tactical outcome was so massively pointless, that essentially nothing happened other than enormous amounts of people dying.

--Germans decide that tactical victory is not even possible, decide that JUST KILLING AS MANY FRENCH SOLDIERS AS POSSIBLE IS THE ONLY GOAL.--

Battle of Verdun: 800k casualties, result basically indecisive, arguably not even a strategically relevant battlefield.

Battle of Jutland: Another stalemate, the last major naval battle in history with battleships.

--Around this time Germany decided to sink 30% of the entire world's merchant ships...--

Battle of the Somme: 1 million casualties, minor allied victory, german line pushed back 6 miles.

---Around here soldiers are both starving and drowning in holes left by artillery---

Passchendaele: Another 1 million casualties. Drowning in mud is such a common experience that soldiers are begging to be killed if they get deep enough in the mud.

I'll stop there. I do not have the adjectives to describe it. Gruesome is a wild understatement. Horrifying is in the right ballpark. "Hellish" becomes trite, as what these soldiers experienced is probably much worse than they imagined hell to be. It's an abomination, every aspect of it.

How they managed to maintain any morale at all in the midst of this, as Dan Carlin repeatedly emphasizes, is nothing short of a miracle.

It's no wonder that leaders were scared of the spread of bolshevism to the western front. I think the only reasonable conclusion, that any soldier involved could conclude, is that all the rulers on both sides of the conflict are evil, and they all need to be overthrown, ideally killed.

Every involved state is grinding the other's young men to dust. Everyone is using gas. Everyone is using millions of shrapnel shells. There are no good guys. This war is a battle of demonic empires vs demonic empires, and surely most of the innocent who got caught up in the middle, soon had their innocence, if not their sanity in general, destroyed by weeks of continuous shelling.

I have the utmost respect for the job Dan Carlin did in putting together this series, and yet I am not at all happy to have listened to it.

I don't know what lessons I can take away from an experience like this.

There is no limit to the barbarism of warring empires?

Most rulers genuinely consider their people's lives to be worthless?

I don't know. I'm shook.

Dan Carlin suggests that the reverse of those lessons are also found in The Great War. I think he's correct.

There are no limits to human heroism.

Humans are capable of unbelievable feats of perseverance.

In confidence, all I can do is echo the sentiment of the soldiers, who, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, 1918, were just glad that it was over.

Now I understand why, more than 100 years later, we still wear poppies in November.

Lest we forget.