This is my kind of war movie. Young aimless men in search of purpose sign up for war. They are never given a purpose, they are just sent out to die in the patched up uniforms of the already dead. There's no sense of anything being accomplished, no heroes, just the constant churn of bodies in service of nothing heyond the egos of decision makers who never have to face the results of their decisions, who send more boys to die because there's still 15 minutes left before the armistice goes into effect.
At one point, we hear that Germany lost 40,000 men in the previous month, which may be enough to convince the man in charge to agree to end the war. I thought of the Low song "Breaker", written in response to the pointless American invasion of Iraq. "Our bodies break, and the blood just spills and spills, but here we sit debating math.