During the Civil war:

Sometimes the pressure of burials at [Richmond’s] Hollywood [hospital] became so great that as many as two hundred bodies would be awaiting internment. Chaplain Joseph Walker explained how he worked to be at once respectful and efficient in his treatment of the dead. “It was our habit to have one service for several bodies that were uncovered in adjacent graves varying the service to suit the numbers, or have a general service over the coffins while still above ground.” Strangers visiting the cemetary often joined these observances, providing mourners for those who had died far from home and claiming their lives and sacrifice for the broader community of Virginia and the South.

The emergence of this impersonal connection with the dead, one independent of any direct ties of kin or friendship, was a critical evolution in the understanding of war’s carnage. The soldiers being interred did not belong just to their friends and relatives; their loss was more than just a diminution of their own families; these men were more than simply individual selves. In rituals like those at Hollywood, the fallen were being transformed into an imagined community for the Confederacy, becoming a collective in which a name or identity was no longer necessary. These men were now part of the Confederate Dead, a shadow nation of sacrificed lives to be honored and invoked less for themselves than for the purposes of the nation and the society struggling to survive them. These soldiers could no longer contribute to the South’s military effort, but they would serve other important political and cultural purposes in providing meaning for the war and its costs.

Now:

There are few contemporary conflicts for which a definitive death-toll is available, far less a comprehensive account of all the social, psychological, and structural effects of the conflict. Yet the “need to know” is keenly felt within any society that has had catastrophic loss - by relatives, by local communities, and by the society at large. For example, establishing the exact death-toll at “ground zero” in New York after the attacks of 11 September 2001 was about far more than deciding how culpable the bombers were: it was about honouring and humanising the dead, coming to terms with loss, and constructing a lasting memorial. In working meticulously towards establishing these kind of truths, investigators spoke of a “communal desire for a number whose exactness might bring some comprehension to the incomprehensible”

The former is a selection from This Republic of Suffering (page 82-83, paperback edition), a book by Drew Gilpin Faust covering the role that death played in the Civil War. She notes that “of all living things, only humans consciously anticipate death; the consequent need to choose how to behave in its face — to worry about how to die — distinguishes us from other animals. The need to manage death is the particular lot of humanity.”

The latter, from a recent proposal to account for every life taken in the course of war or conflict, is this latest iteration of the dead as a entity unto themselves. They were once put to use strengthening the resolve to wage war, but are now called upon to warn against its dangers.