In Making Sense of Suicide Missions, Diego Gambetta writes of he "Iranian ‘human waves’ of young martyrs employed in the war with Iraq in the 1980s," which are the "grand example of mass suicidal attacks knowingly and intentionally carried out." Gambetta observes that "thousands of young lives were wasted fro next to nothing.

This description of the Iranian-Iraq war precisely describes the First World War, although we need to substitute "millions of young men" for "thousands of young men." 

Richard Koenigsberg