Why don't remember soldiers pre-WWI(and pre-Civil War in America)?

[Louis VI the Fat]

The concept of a nation state is young, end 18th / beginning 19th century. Hence, before that, the idea of soldiers as brave patriots shedding blood for the fatherland didn't exist. No need to remember them in a modern fashion.

Should we commemorate the Swiss mercenaries who fought for Louis XIV? Or for his enemies, depending on whose coffers were deepest? The noblemen who bled the countryside dry during the 100 years war, for their own particularistic dynastic gain? Should we honour the men from all those centuries during which armies were bands of uprooted young men, plundering, pillaging and raping their way to and from the battlefields?

We don't commemorate them. We only started to remember the fallen with the advent of modern armies. Alas we did! They are worse than the plundering hordes of old. Conscription armies, the holy fatherland, dying for God, country or king - it's a very modern notion. And so is the idea of remembrance of soldiers as those who performed a patriotic duty, or who made a sacrifice.

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They are remebered, the fallen from about 1800. After each war, their blood shed became sacred. 'From my grave, take this torch, continue my holy cause, that my blood was not spilled in vain', as was the usual message from old monuments, poems, statues. And off to the next war, to reconquer the territory lost in the one before. The low point for this sort of sacred military remembrance resulted in WWI.
Walking the sacred road to the battlefield, were one would have the honour of making the holiest sacrifice of all - getting shot to pieces for the abstract notion of a fatherland. We should've taken lessons from the Aztecs. WWI would've been a lot more efficient if we had just build a pyramid in each capital - altars to the fatherland - and sacrificed teenagers on it by the hundreds of thousands.

Still, Europe didn't wake up. Again, the fallen were not granted peace and rest. Monuments served to hold their souls hostage to the cause of mass patriotic bloodshed. Resulting in the even larger tragedy of WWII. Only after this war did the tide slowly start to turn, and did the nature of remembrance start to change.

If it was up to me, all war memorials and statues would be toppled. The mass graves can remain, but there should be no flags, no military signs, no anthems played, no dedications to a cause. And the straight rows of identical graves - so dehumanising - should be changed to crooked paths, with individual graves, each one different from the next. And they should be multi-national. No French soldier should ever be officially remembered without mention of his German counterpart. Or whatever other nationality is appropriate.