“The war machine,” concludes [Gil] Elliott, “rooted in law, organisation, production, movement, science, technical ingenuity, with its product of 6000 deaths a day over a period of 1500 days, was the permanent and realistic factor, impervious to fantasy, only slightly altered by human variation . . ..No human institution was sufficiently strong to resist the death machine.” But the death machine had only sampled a vast new source of raw material: the civilians behind the lines. It had not yet evolved equipment efficient to process them, only big planes and clumsy biplane bombers. It had not yet evolved the necessary rationale that old people and women and children are combatants equally with armed and uniformed young men. That is why, despite its sickening squalor and brutality, the Great War looks so innocent to modern eyes.
Footnotes
Richard Rhodes in The making of the atomic bomb (1986), including a quote from Gil Elliot in Twentieth century book of the dead (1972)