Why did everyone one day decide to have rules for war?
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Horror at the trends they were seeing. It wasn’t really a sudden thing, but a process over time with multiple treaties involved.
Before the Industrial Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars set the benchmark for size and brutality. Nonetheless, the weapons of the time were limited, and armies were constrained by how much food they could store (before good food storage) or steal from farmers. The biggest battles of the time involved a couple hundred thousand soldiers, with tens of thousands of casualties on both sides. Muskets and cannons fired slowly and inaccurately. Traditional norms of battle still applied.
Industrialization meant weapons that could fire rapidly and cause serious destruction, as well as the ability to transport and feed millions of men. Chemical weapons could disfigure and harm in new and unpredictable ways. Aggressive nationalism also meant new reasons to regard your enemy as below contempt. In short, it was becoming possible for both countries in a war to take hideous damage in new ways.
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