Yup, sums up the problem nicely.
I especially liked the bit with the heroic soldier fighting his way through the antire German army, almost, only to get plugged by the MG. Very true. Definately the kind of action that wins you a VC (since these are usually handed out posthumusly).
But the thing is, for a single combat, the situation in WWI and prior wars, and later wars, wasn't THAT dissimilar. If you go and try to do something heroic like that, odds are very good it will get you killed.
Only, previously the armies marched off to war, found the enemy, fought a pretty bloody but decisive battle (Solferino, Königgrätz or whatever), buried the fallen heroes, handed out the medals, and saw the end of that war, in which most of the soldiers got to live.
WWI started exactly like the previous wars, but when the enemy was found, after the first battle had been fought, it was found that the armies had now grown so huge, and the entire societies were on a wartime footing, so forcing a decision in battle had become impossible. So these murderous battles just went on and on and on, meaning is became a statistic certanity that if only the war lasted, every single soldier would end up dead. They knew it themselves too.
After all, there weren't many survivors of the British BEF of 1914 by 1918, or of the Army of Sambre and Meuse, which got to do most of the French fighting and dying at the Battle of the Frontiers in 1914. And the Germans mourned the 1914 class of teenage schoolboys, the "Gymnasisten" intended to for the next gen. intellectual elite, but who in 1914 marched of straight from school to war, and died virtually to a man.
In game terms it means there should be no problem to make an exciting, not overly accurate perhaps, WWI FSP game. To simulate the situation for the soldiers in WWI, it's more a matter of having an insane amount of missions, which must all be survived with no cheating or reloads.
) (all hail the mighty warhammer). I think there is a mod out there for napeonic warfare.
