The victims during the First World War were chiefly but not exclusively men obliged to fight and die for what turned out, very soon after the peace treaty, to have been a bad affair. What people remembered was straightforward and very sad: five years spent on the front line had marked the end of the civilized values for which soldiers, in all countries, had mobilized to defend. In their memoirs, in their poems, novels, drawings, or paintings, the survivors did not indulge in moral or patriotic reflections, they attempted to convey the rebarbative reality of the trenches and to produce stories likely to make everybody understand that they went through an ordeal that was like hell.

Things were not as clear cut in the Second World War, so that the memory of the conflict was much more ambivalent. To begin with, the unprecedented extent of casualties and destruction was seen as typical of a modernization process which was ruthlessly sweeping away the systems and societies of the past. By turning armed forces into machines for slaughter, modern warfare tended to annihilate, even in the societies which had successfully waged it, any sense that the combat had been fought, or should have been fought, for the defence of a community. Not surprisingly, emphasis was put on the killing of harmless people, especially of children – that is to say, of their own future – whom societies should have tried to protect.