The First World War may have been a uniquely horrific war, but it was also plainly a just war.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The First World War was a horror of gas, industrialised slaughter, fear, and appalling human suffering.
Culturally, the First World War is the war that stands in for other wars.
Our vision of war is probably too influenced by the biggest one of all, World War II, where the forces of evil were so unambiguous and so relentless that there was no choice but to commit to total war and to demand unconditional surrender. Seldom, though, is it quite that clear cut.
A war is a horrible thing, but it's also a unifier of countries.
As the First World War made painfully clear, when politicians and generals lead nations into war, they almost invariably assume swift victory, and have a remarkably enduring tendency not to foresee problems that, in hindsight, seem obvious.
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.
We're living through a time where we are fighting wars fostered by politics, admittedly not on the same scale as the First World War, but with equally tragic realities for our soldiers and their families.
The first World War in so many ways shaped the 20th century and really remade our world for the worse.
No campaign of the First World War better justifies the poets' view of the conflict as futile and pitiless than Gallipoli.
World War II was the last 'pure' war. It was purely heroic. There was someone who tried to conquer the world, who tried to exterminate people.