The Ultimate Experience: Battlefield Revelations and the Making of Modern War Culture, 1450-2000

The experience of war is often viewed today as an experience of revelation. War disillusions or enlightens people, transforms their personality, and changes their understanding of the world. Ten minutes of combat are often enough to teach people what decades of peacetime cannot. Those who did not undergo the extreme experiences of war can never understand its lessons. This view of war may seem ancient and universal. Yet, it emerged in the West only between 1740 and 1865, due to the Enlightenment and Romanticism and their novel ideas about knowledge, experience, and the relations between body and mind. The emergence of this view was one of the key components in an unprecedented military revolution. The new perception of war as revelation transformed not only the experience and culture of war, but also war politics, the status of the common soldiers, and the tenets of military theory.