On Sunday, the world will stand in silence to remember the 100th anniversary of World War I’s conclusion.

While that war cost 116,000 American lives compared to the more than 400,000 who gave their lives in World War II, it was defined by far greater human losses among our European allies. Losing more than 1.1 million young men, the British military suffered losses nearly three times higher in World War I than in World War II. French comparative losses were six times higher in World War I. Yet the great misery of the 1914-1918 war, which America joined in 1917, was not simply its losses. It was that those losses came without sustained battlefield gains, and in conditions of immense hardship.