...
What, you mean you didn't know?
C'mon, let's take a trip down memory lane. Let's go to World War One, on the border between France and the German Empire.
"Over the top!", came the order! The half-mile of machinegun nests and barbed wire was to be broken with.. wait for it... a
massed infantry charge! Surely these had to be superhumans, able to dodge bullets and withstand artillery fire, for their commanders to send them directly into the killing zone! Well.. no. The order, more often than not,
was suicidal, and some died quickly, some screaming for water.
That's not even counting the ones who bought their plot without even taking an enemy bullet. Where do you think the word "trenchfoot" comes from? Mmm, gangrene! Ooh, don't forget the chemical weapons! I'll have my masses of dead meat with a side of mustard gas, please. Blistered skin, internal bleeding, excruciating pain.. delicious! (The Geneva Conventions ban chemical weapons. Now you know why.)
And the people who survived this ordeal, shrapnel in their ass and enemy blood up to their elbows, emerged totally fine in the end and everything ended up peachy keen for them.. hahahaha, of course not. They actually had permanent physical damage, horrible nightmares, psychosomatic symptoms like trembling hands, and an inability to forget (<-- lol irony) the horrors they've seen, wondering how the fuck they got involved in any of this, the world going on without them as they were in many ways permanently trapped in the blood-soaked trenches of 1916. Of course, they didn't call it "Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder" back then, they just called it "shell shock". And so horrifically
many of them, just as they do today, ended up unable to hold a job, destitute, and on the streets.
You know, the same people you asked your school
not to think about on Remembrance Day.