Up to and including World War I, humans fought and killed each other - hurling armies, usually made up of young men, at each other.

World War I was significant because of the industrial scale of death involved. Soldiers in their millions ceased to be warriors and became simple cannon fodder fed into the sausage machine of war.

Historians still argue about what caused the war but agree that inbred, precocious aristocrats carry a lot of the blame.

For civilians war was something that didn’t necessarily involve them. Watching armies fighting each other was often a spectator sport, a bit like football is today.

It was only during World War II that technology, especially airborne technology, enabled combatant nations to inflict heavy casualties on each other’s largely innocent civilian populations.

That now seems to have become the modus operandi of modern warfare.

We now have, for instance, nation states like Ukraine and Russia and Israel and Iran indiscriminately hurling missiles and drones at each other, hell bent on murdering as many as possible of each other’s innocent civilians, especially women and children it seems.

Where that ends - and what the objective is - defies logic. Presumably whichever side inflicts the most death, destruction and misery becomes the victor.

No other creature on the planet is this crude, capricious, greedy and bloodthirsty.