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I wonder if he would feel the same had he lived to see Gallipoli,the Somme, Verdun,and Passchendaele..... A fair point and well taken here. Wilfred Owen, who was a British officer wrote some very telling poems about the actual war in the trenches. The previous war which Great Britain defeated the South African Boers 1898-1901, cost lives. The music hall song "Goodbye Dolly, I must leave you" epitomised the public acclaim for this war.

The recruiting centres in WW1 were overwhelmed in 1914. Excitement was in the air and the music halls did their job. By 1916 however, the news filtered through. Horrific casualties, the lice, the cold, the trenches. Men slaughtered by the tens of thousands. Sent against machine gun fire regardless.

The recruiting offices were deserted and the War Office threatened dire action if a million men did not volunteer forthwith. There were over one million, six hundred thousand applications for deferral. Then conscription took place.

Excuse the ramble, but Brooke had not got a clue. Nor had the initial excited young men who lined up in 1914. Stories abounded when I was a child in England about the dodges used by men to escape the horror of the trenches.

I am increasingly convinced that if I were offered the chance to live in an alternate world in which the Schlieffen plan had succeeded, I would take it without hesitation.

So much of what is wrong in today's world can be traced to the Great War that it seems to me that having Wilhelm II (neurotic, bigoted twit that he was) parade in triumph through Paris would be a small price to pay.

One of the most moving pieces about that war came from, of all people Lemmy of Motorhead.

1916

16 years old when I went to the war
To fight for a land fit for heroes
God on my side and a gun in my hand
Chasing my days down to zero

And I marched and I fought and I bled and I died
And I never did get any older
But I knew at the time that a year in the line
Was a long enough life for a soldier

We all volunteered and we wrote down our names
And we added two years to our ages
Eager for life and ahead of the game
Ready for history’s pages

And we brawled and we fought and we whored till we stood
Ten thousand shoulder to shoulder
A thirst for the hun, we were food for the gun
And that’s what you are when you’re soldiers

I heard my friend cry and he sank to his knees
Coughing blood as he screamed for his mother
And I fell by his side and that’s how we died
Clinging like kids to each other

And I lay in the mud and the guts and the blood
And I wept as his body grew colder
And I called for my mother and she never came
Though it wasn’t my fault and I wasn’t to blame

The day not half over and ten thousand slain
And now there’s nobody remembers our names
And that’s how it is for a soldier