When you see a dead body in full color, you grieve it all the more. Peter Jackson’s World War I documentary They Shall Not Grow Old is currently available to stream after making a successful run in theaters earlier this year, and it’s worth seeing even though you will likely be horrified by what you see. Jackson used all the toys in his effects chest to restore preserved footage of World War I and audio testimony from British veterans of that conflict. The resulting celluloid is breathtaking not only for its quality but also for its carnage. Again and again, you see photographs of young soldiers, weary but still excited for adventure, and then you watch Jackson smash cut to bodies. There are bodies in trenches. There are bodies piled into mass graves. There are detached limbs with no host body to them visible on screen. There are bodies left in vast battlefields strewn with barbed wire, and only swarms of flies and packs of rats willing to come tend to them.

Many of these soldiers were children. Jackson’s movie includes testimony from veterans who volunteered to enlist before they had turned 18, lying about their age to qualify for service either of their own accord or because recruiters instructed them to do so. Virtually all of these veterans recount going into battle with starry eyes, eager to aid in the cause of war. Then they arrived at the front. Nearly three-quarters of a million British servicemen died in that war: shot, stabbed, diseased, drowning in mud, you name it. Here is what some of the surviving veterans said of that conflict once they returned home.

“It was horrible.”

“I got the impression that most of the German soldiers couldn’t care less who won as long as the war was finished.”

"Everything was mud and water and continuous shelling. Hell with the lid off."

Watching the footage from They Shall Not Grow Old is jarring because even though I live in an age of total media saturation, I rarely seek out, nor am I routinely subjected to, the catastrophic physical consequences of war. You will not see bloodied and mangled bodies on CNN. You likely also won’t see them on Twitter, as that would violate their “sensitive media policy.” There’s a good reason for blacking this shit out, obviously. Those who have lost loved ones in armed conflict aren’t exactly eager to see those same loved ones’ corpses all over national television and the Internet, nor are many viewers hungry for broadcast images of human wreckage. As a result, those corpses go through an unofficial post-production embalming process. You’ll see flag-draped coffins. You’ll see 21-gun salutes. You’ll see a stylized version of mass death, but you won’t have to lay eyes on death itself. You're more likely to see troops at an NFL game than to see them actively doing their duty. All of the pageantry, none of the bloodshed.

Again, there are compassionate reasons for this, but that bit of good taste has the nasty side effect of providing an added benefit to warmongers who profit off romanticizing the CAUSE of war—the same aggressive froth that hyped up so many of those British soldiers—but do not want you to see the very real and grim effects of it. If you did, you wouldn’t cheer for war, and that would be bad for business. Every war is a product launch now, and those launches are meticulously planned. In that extensive planning, war is framed as charity, and Americans are encouraged to thank the troops for their service to that charity without seeing, in full detail, what is often the endgame of that service.