IF YOU WANT AN INKLING OF THEcarnage happening right now on the steppes of Ukraine, you could do worse than watch the new German film of All Quiet on the Western Front on Netflix.

It opens with a blood-curdling evocation of the industrial scale of modern warfare. We see countless corpses collected from the battlefield, like carcasses in a meat factory. Their uniforms are removed, washed and repaired by rows of seamstresses. Then they are sent home freshly laundered, to be issued to the next cohort of raw recruits — who have no idea that they are wearing the uniforms of the dead.

Strategy, tactics and technology have moved on hugely in the century since the First World War, but the human reality of conflict remains as visceral as ever. War is still the same muddy, bloody and barbaric business.

Even though the death toll in Ukraine does not yet compare with the millions lost from 1914 to 1918, in both