What can I say about the First World War, a war in which I served as an infantryman, a war I hated at the start and to which I never warmed as it proceeded?
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Although a soldier by profession, I have never felt any sort of fondness for war, and I have never advocated it, except as a means of peace.
I was a soldier in WWII. The last couple of months of the war I was actually in combat.
The worst thing about war was the sitting around and wondering what you were doing morally.
I joined the army on my seventeenth birthday, full of the romance of war after having read a lot of World War I British poetry and having seen a lot of post-World War II films. I thought the romantic presentations of war influenced my joining and my presentation of war to my younger siblings.
European nations began World War I with a glamorous vision of war, only to be psychologically shattered by the realities of the trenches. The experience changed the way people referred to the glamour of battle; they treated it no longer as a positive quality but as a dangerous illusion.
The First World War may have been a uniquely horrific war, but it was also plainly a just war.
As a soldier, I survived World War I when most of my comrades did not.
The First World War was a horror of gas, industrialised slaughter, fear, and appalling human suffering.
In a war, you must hate somebody or love somebody; you must have a position or you cannot stand what goes on.
Culturally, the First World War is the war that stands in for other wars.
No opposing quotes found.