ABSTRACT
Few facts in history seem to elude an explanation more than warfare violence. In the face of the horrors of battles in trenches, open fields and cities, as well as the dismemberment and killing of combatants and civilians, reason falls silent. Equally important was mythologizing the violence suffered by one’s own combatants and civilians. The visceral animosity caused by the atrocities and horrors of the Great War, the Russian Revolution, the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, and finally by the sense of loss in the face of the Holocaust, made it difficult to consider the violence of war in a dispassionate way – except in the case of a few enlightened pacifists. The difficulty of making sense of the violence witnessed was also related to the impossibility of the combatant’s ‘seeing’ the battle he was fighting. Equally important was mythologizing the violence suffered by one’s own combatants and civilians.
