Historians are able to trace the “events” that led up to the war, and that allowed it to continue: how one thing led to another. However, do we actually understand the First World War? Do we really know why the massive killing and dying continued for four years (1914-1918)? What was at stake? What would justify such carnage?

Jean Elshtain (1987) says that the First World War was the “nadir of nationalism,” mounds of bodies sacrificed in a “prolonged, dreadful orgy of destruction.” She observes that we still have trouble “accounting for modern state worship,” the mounds of combatants and non-combatants alike “sacrificed to the conflicts of nation-states.”

Ronald Aronson (1984), contemplating history as a slaughter-bench at which the “happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of the individual have been sacrificed,” poses the question: “To what principle, what purpose have these monstrous sacrifices been made?”

After all is said and done, everything comes down to the idea of “the nation.” Killing and dying in the First World War was undertaken and perpetuated for the sake of entities given names like “France” and “Germany” and “Great Britain”.

To understand the First World War, we need to interrogate the psychology of nationalism, that is, the meaning of these entities—nations—to which people were so passionately attached and in the name of which they were willing to perform such radical acts of destruction and self-destruction.

For historians, nations constitute their “world taken for granted.” If one begins with the assumption that nations are real entities that must be preserved at any cost, and that one nation exists in opposition to other nations, then one can trace the logic of the First World War—follow the history of events, step-by-step.

Still, why the passion? Why—for each side—the hysterical attachment to one’s own nation and paranoid opposition to the other nation? What motivated willingness to expend prodigious amounts of resources and energy in what amounted to a collective episode of carnage?

We may say that political leaders were willing to “sacrifice” millions of human beings—for the sake of their nations. Political leaders and citizens died and killed in the name of France, Germany and Great Britain. But what, precisely, does it mean to be willing to sacrifice one’s life for a country? What is the nature of the relationship between, on the one hand, dying and killing, and on the other, the idea of one’s nation?

Maurice Barrès was a prominent French nationalist who published several books on the First World War containing letters written by French soldiers—to parents, relatives and friends—before entering battle. Many of the soldiers whose letters were preserved and cited by Barrès subsequently were killed.

The following is a typical excerpt (in Barrès, The Undying Spirit of France, 1918) written by French soldier George Morillot—who died on December 11, 1914—to his parents:

If this letter comes into your hands it will be because I am no more and because I shall have died the most glorious of deaths. Do not bewail me too much; my end is the most to be desired. Speak of me from time to time as of one of those men who have given their blood that France may live and who has died gladly.

We often hear the phrase, “The individual must die so that the nation might live.” What is it that “lives” when a nation lives? What do we imagine will live? What is the relationship between an individual and his nation? If wars are waged in order to “rescue” one’s nation, what precisely does one seek to rescue—in seeking to rescue one’s nation?

We tend to think of nations as real entities. In actuality, they are mental representations. For each individual, one’s nation or country exists as an idea within one’s mind. One may describe one’s nation as a particular kind of cognitive structure.

Human beings wage war in the name of preserving one’s nation, that is, rescuing the idea of one’s nation. Hitler declared, “We may be inhumane, but if we rescue Germany we have performed the greatest deed in the world.” Reflecting on this statement, it’s evident that most wars are generated according to an identical logic.

Warfare consists of the performance of horrible, inhumane activities. However, those who wage war conceive of these horrible, inhumane activities as worthwhile and moral—because they are undertaken with the intent of rescuing one’s nation.  What is it that one seeks to rescue when one seeks to rescue one’s nation? What is the relationship between a human body and the body politic?

Warfare may be described or conceived as an activity in which human bodies are sacrificed in the name of preserving a body politic. This is what it means to say that “the individual must die so that the nation might live,” or when one suggests that one is willing to “die for one’s country” (in order to rescue it). To say that one is willing to die for one’s country is to say that one is willing to give up one’s own life or body in the name of preserving the life of one’s nation—the body politic.

It’s clear in this conceptualization that the individual and nation are two separate entities. On the one hand, there is a body politic. On the other hand, there is a human body. Warfare is constituted by a relationship between the human body and the body politic. What is the nature of the relationship between the human body and the body politic in warfare?

The French soldier asks that people speak of him as one who has given his blood “that France may live.” This metaphor evokes a blood transfusion—one in which the blood of a human body passes into the bloodstream of a body politic, thus keeping the body politic alive.

Warfare constitutes a devotional activity—in which the object of devotion is one’s own nation. In war, the life-sustaining substance of an individual body passes over into the collective body—sustaining its life. This is why we may say (with Carolyn Marvin) that “blood sacrifice preserves the nation.”

This metaphor points to the fantasy that sustains the ideology of nationalism, and warfare. This fantasy is that of feeding the body politic with the body and blood of the soldier. As the soldier dies (or is mutilated), so the nation comes alive.