Machines+compact+of+men

This metaphor is easy to understand for me, but I still appreciate it's brilliance nevertheless. It clearly represents an army as a machine at the hands a ruler bent on domination. The beauty of it, in my opinion, is that an army really is a machine that functions to kill at the whim of a leader. The irony of it is that eventually, armies will literally become machines: technological warfare is getting more and more prominent. Eventually, we will be fighting with robots like some sort of videogame. What the poet is pointing out, in my opinion, is that if a leader rules a certain way, it won't make a difference. Joseph Stalin once said, the loss of one man is a tragedy, the loss of millions, a statistic. In a messed up way, he was right.

So matter how we're fighting, there is loss, but you're exploring the notion that the machines will one day actually be machines, and the loss won't be as emotional? One wonders - would those who advocate war believe the fighting is worth it then? Isn't the potential loss of human life what we hope will propel people to negotiate?