World War I

"On June 28, 1914 a tubercular nineteen-year-old Bosnian youth named Gavrilo Princip carried out one of the most successful terrorist acts in all history. The shots he fired that day not only severed fatally the jugular vein of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand, the Habsburg heir to the thrones of Austria and Hungary. They also precipitated a war that destroyed the Austro-Hungarian Empire and transformed Bosnia-Herzegovina from one of its colonies into a part of a new South Slav state. These were in fact more or less precisely the things Princip had hoped to achieve, even if he cannot have anticipated such far-reaching success. Yet these were only the intended consequences of his action. The war he triggered was not confined to the Balkans; it also drew broad and hideous scars across northern Europe and the Near East. Like gargantuan abattoirs, its battlefields sucked in and slaughtered young men from all the extremities of the globe, claiming in all nearly ten million lives. It brought forth new and terrible methods of destruction, hitherto the stuff of Wellsian science-fiction: cavalry charges by armed and armoured vehicles, lethal clouds of poison gas, invisible fleets of submarines. It rained down bombs from the air and cluttered the Atlantic seabed with sunken ships. It lasted longer than any major war in Europe in living memory, dragging on for four and a quarter years. And, besides the Habsburgs, it toppled three other imperial dynasties: the Romanovs, the Hohenzollerns and the Ottomans. Even when an armistice was proclaimed, the war refused to stop; it swept eastwards after 1918, as if eluding the grasp of the peacemakers."

"The First World War changed everything. In the summer of 1914 the world economy was thriving in ways that look distinctly familiar. The mobility of commodities, capital and labour reached levels comparable with those we know today; the sea lanes and telegraphs across the Atlantic were never busier, as capital and migrants went west and raw materials and manufactures went east. The war sank globalization - literally. Nearly thirteen million tons of shipping went to the bottom of the sea as a result of German naval action, most of it by U-boats. International trade, investment and emigration all collapsed. In the war's aftermath, revolutionary regimes arose that were fundamentally hostile to international economic integration. Plans replaced the market; autarky and protection took the place of free trade. Flows of goods diminished; flows of people and capital all but dried up. The European empires' grip on the world - which had been the political undergirding of globalization - was dealt a profound, if not quite fatal, blow. The reverberations of Princip's shots truly shook the world."

"We are not going to lose this war, but its prolongation will spell ruin for the civilised world, and an infinite addition to the load of human suffering which already weighs upon it...We do not desire the annihilation of Germany as a great power ... We do not seek to impose upon her people any form of government other than that of their own choice... We have no desire to deny Germany her place among the great commercial communities of the world."

"This is not a peace. It is an armistice for 20 years."

"No one will ever persuade me that the war could not have been ended long ago. The Emperor Charles offered peace. There is the only honest man who occupied an important position during the war, but he was not listened to. In my opinion his offer ought to have been accepted. The Emperor Charles had a sincere desire for peace, so everybody hates him. Ribot is an old scoundrel to have neglected such an occasion. A King of France, yes, a King would have taken pity on our poor people, bled white, attenuated, at the end of their strength. But democracy is without heart, without bowels. A slave of the powers of money, it is pitiless and inhuman."

"At eleven o’clock this morning came to an end the cruellest and most terrible War that has ever scourged mankind. I hope we may say that thus, this fateful morning, came to an end all wars."

"The First World War/It came and it went/The reason for fightin'/I never did get/But I learned to accept it/Accept it with pride/For you don’t count the dead/When God’s on your side"

"Come on, you sons of bitches, do you want to live forever?"

"In all countries, the First World War weakened old orthodoxies and authorities, and, when it was over, neither government nor church nor school nor family had the power to regulate the lives of human beings as it had once done. One result of this was a profound change in manners and morals that made a freer and less restrained society. Women benefited from this as much as anyone else. Time-worn prescriptions concerning what was or was not proper behavior for them no longer possessed much credibility, and taboos about unaccompanied appearances in public places, or the use of liquor or tobacco, or even pre-marital sexual relationships had lost their force. ... [W]omen were no longer as vulnerable to the tyranny of society as they had been [before]."

"The success with which we have met in all of these undertakings is a matter of universal knowledge. We are at peace with all the world. Those of this generation who passed through the World War have had an experience which will always cause them to realize what an infinite blessing peace is. We are in an era of unbounded prosperity. The financial condition of our National Government is beginning to be more easy to be borne. While many other nations and many localities within our own country are struggling with a burden of increased debts and rising taxes, which makes them seek for new sources from which by further taxation they can secure new revenues, we have made large progress toward paying off our national debt, have greatly reduced our national taxes, and been able to relieve the people by abandoning altogether many sources of national revenue. We are not required to look altogether to the future for our rewards and find in our lot nothing but sacrifices for the present. Now, here, to-day, we are all able to enjoy those benefits which come from universal peace and nation-wide prosperity."

"The Nation has need of all that can be contributed to it through the best efforts of all its citizens. The colored people have repeatedly proved their devotion to the high ideals of our country. They gave their services in the war with the same patriotism and readiness that other citizens did. The records of the selective draft show that somewhat more than 2,250,000 colored men were registered. The records further prove that, far from seeking to avoid participation in the national defense, they showed that they wished to enlist before the selective service act was put into operation, and they did not attempt to evade that act afterwards."

"The protagonists of 1914 were sleepwalkers, watchful but unseeing, haunted by dreams, yet blind to the reality of the horror they were about to bring into the world."

"If you hadn't entered the World War we would have made peace with Germany early in 1917. Had we made peace then there would have been no collapse in Russia followed by communism, no break-down in Italy followed by fascism, and Germany would not have signed the Versailles Treaty, which has enthroned nazi-ism in Germany. In other words, if America had stayed out of the war all of these "isms" wouldn't today be sweeping the Continent of Europe and breaking down parliamentary government, and if England had made peace early in 1917, it would have saved over 1,000,000 British, French, American, and other lives."

"After the end of the World War of 1914 there was a deep conviction and almost universal hope that peace would reign in the world. The heart's desire of all the peoples could have easily been gained by steadfastness in righteous convictions, and by reasonable common sense and prudence. The phrase "the war to end war" was on every lip, and measures had been taken to turn it into reality. President Wilson, wielding, as was thought, the authority of the United States, had made the conception of a League of Nations dominant in all minds. The British Delegation at Versailles moulded and shaped his idea into an Instrument which will for ever constitute a milestone in the hard march of man. The victorious Allies were at that time all-powerful, so far as their outside enemies were concerned. They had to face grave internal difficulties and many riddles to which they did not know the answer, but the Teutonic Powers in the great mass of Central Europe were prostrate before them, and Russia, already shattered by the German flail, was convulsed by civil war and falling into the grip of the Bolshevik or Communist Party."

"The Great War differed from all ancient wars in the immense power of the combatants and their fearful agencies of destruction, and from all modern wars in the utter ruthlessness with which it was fought. … Europe and large parts of Asia and Africa became one vast battlefield on which after years of struggle not armies but nations broke and ran. When all was over, Torture and Cannibalism were the only two expedients that the civilized, scientific, Christian States had been able to deny themselves: and they were of doubtful utility."

"No compromise on the main purpose; no peace till victory; no pact with unrepentant wrong -- that is the Declaration of July 4th, 1918."

"I think a curse should rest on me — because I love this war. I know it's smashing and shattering the lives of thousands every moment — and yet — I can't help it — I enjoy every second of it."

"Nothing will bring American sympathy along with us so much as American blood shed in the field."

"If, on the eve of the war, a fortune teller had pointed to all the Australian men between the ages of 20 and 30, and had predicted that a number equal to 60 per cent of that age group would be killed or permanently disabled in the coming war, she would have been ridiculed but she would have been correct."

"The First World War shook the scaffolding of progress because it was deadly and unexpectedly long: it showed that technology could be two-faced. The war delivered one other insidious attack on the idea of progress by raising a moral question which the believers in progress had taken for granted: had the morality of Europeans improved during the long era of 'progress'?"

"In retrospect, Jean Jaurès and Rosa Luxemburg seem to me the only delegates who, like Adler, realized fully the inevitability of the World War and the horrors it entailed."

"If I am asked what we are fighting for, I can reply in two sentences. In the first place, to fulfill a solemn international obligation … an obligation of honor which no self-respecting man could possibly have repudiated. I say, secondly, we are fighting to vindicate the principle that small nationalities are not to be crushed in defiance of international good faith at the arbitrary will of a strong and overmastering Power."

"It may be that it will be by his war poems that his name will last. He has gone far beyond them. His poems are diverse both in styles and subjects. As one critic has said: "There is no telling where a reader may fetch up when he goes out with this poet." But a poet is more than a man with metrical skill and an ability to make verbal music. (Sassoon is not high in this department.) He is a man apart from others. He has a way of looking at things that is not the ordinary man's. Sassoon has had his vigils and his visions. He has written Allow me now much musing-space To shape my secrecies alone. Happily his Collected Poems allow us to share some of them."

"Although his satirical poems hit some legitimate targets in shirkers, profiteers, hysterical women and home-front militarists, they are too sweeping, savage and self-centred to carry conviction. Indeed some now seem unnecessarily brutal, telling us more about the poet's troubled mind than about the war on the home or military fronts. Most seriously, at that time Sassoon shows no understanding of the meaning of the conflict in strategic or political terms. Although his protest had been well-intentioned and required great moral courage, it took another world war for him to admit that in 1917 there was no possibility for Britain or her allies to gain acceptable peace terms."

"As Sassoon's wartime diaries reveal, he was an extremely complex character, troubled by his homosexuality and anxious to prove his manliness in combat and so to earn the respect, perhaps even love, of his men. Also, as a poet first and foremost, he was never at ease with the majority of his fellow officers whom he found boorish, dull and snobbish, hence his delight in meeting other poets and literary men such as Graves, Owen and de Sola Pinto. Both on his own account, and for the reputation of poets, he wanted to prove himself a hero and did so in several gallant actions. But in seeking to protest against what he thought of as the excessive suffering of his men in an unduly prolonged war he allowed himself to be influenced by pacifists who had little respect for men in uniform and were disappointed that he did not provide publicity for their cause by going to prison."

"Freyberg inveighed against the Georgian Poets and reproached me for holding a brief for Siegfried Sassoon. I maintained that, having fully demonstrated his personal physical courage, he had earned the right to exhibit moral courage as a pacifist without laying himself open to the charge of cloaking physical cowardice under the claim of moral courage. Freyberg is very uncompromising in his condemnation and, with some justice, says it is offensive to come back and say, "I can't lead men to their death any more"—it implies a monopoly of virtue, as if other officers liked doing it because they acquiesced in their duty. He thought the poem called "The Hero" caddish, as it might destroy every mother's faith in the report of her son's death. Certainly Siegfried Sassoon breaks the conspiracy of silence, but sometimes I strongly feel that those at home should be made to realise the full horror, even to the incidental ugliness, as much as possible."

"Just after we came up from dinner, two young men came—one very shy, the other to all appearances very much at his ease. The former was Siegfried Sassoon. He was in khaki: at first I only noticed his sticking-out ears and obvious embarrassment, but a closer scrutiny revealed great charm and a certain sweetness and grave strength in his countenance. I felt much drawn towards him, but had no conversation with him. Nichols, on the other hand, was twice introduced to me by the zealous hostess and we spent the remainder of the evening side by side. He was a thin alert face and is quick and agreeable to talk to—he expressed great admiration for Siegfried, both as poet and soldier. They have both had shell-shock. For Siegfried, he claimed astonishing valour. They each read some of their own poems... Siegfried in a terse, laconic style... Siegfried's have a brilliant, grim irony."

"Deep in my morning time he made his mark And still he comes uncalled to be my guide In devastated regions When the brain has lost its bearings in the dark And broken in it’s body’s pride In the long campaign to which it had sworn allegiance."

"O fathering friend and scientist of good, Who in solitude, one bygone summer’s day, And in the throes of bodily anguish, passed away From dream and conflict and research-lit lands Of ethnological learning, — even as you stood Selfless and ardent, resolute and gay, So in this hour, in strange survival stands Your ghost, whom I am powerless to repay."

"What voice revisits me this night? What face To my heart’s room returns? From the perpetual silence where the grace Of human sainthood burns Hastes he once more to harmonise and heal? I know not. Only I feel His influence undiminished And his life’s work, in me and many, unfinished."

"[A]s he relates the story there emerges a most delightful picture of English country life, by no means of its sporting side only. It is written in the pleasantest of good prose, simple, cool, and telling. It is marked by very vivid perception and by quiet and good-humoured irony."

"If A Fox-Hunting Man presents the Edwardian Age as an idyll of hunting and cricket, The Old Century is a complementary idyll of a serenely cultivated existence carried on, like the former, in the atmosphere of perpetual summer."

"Cecil Day-Lewis, A Time to Dance, 1936. Also quoted in C. Day-Lewis: The Golden Bridle - Selected Prose. Oxford University Press, 2017."

"During the War, Siegfried Sassoon published a volume of poems called Counter-Attack: these poems expressed in satire his violent revulsion from all that the war meant. They were a personal expression, as all good poetry is, but they had a considerable influence amongst those numerous intellectuals who had been swept into the War on a tide of Rupert Brooke feeling: I know of several, indeed, whose disillusionment was crystallised by these poems and who became conscious revolutionaries from the moment of reading them."

"You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye Who cheer when soldier lads march by, Sneak home and pray you'll never know The hell where youth and laughter go."

"I'd say — "I used to know his father well; Yes, we've lost heavily in this last scrap." And when the war is done and youth stone dead, I'd toddle safely home and die — in bed."

"If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath, I'd live with scarlet Majors at the Base, And speed glum heroes up the line of death."

"Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin They think of firelit homes, clean beds, and wives."

"Soldiers are citizens of death's grey land, Drawing no dividend from time's to-morrows. In the great hour of destiny they stand, Each with his feuds, and jealousies, and sorrows."

"Lost in a blurred confusion of yells and groans... Down, and down, and down, he sank and drowned, Bleeding to death. The counter-attack had failed."

"Mute in the clamour of shells he watched them burst Spouting dark earth and wire with gusts from hell, While posturing giants dissolved in drifts of smoke. He crouched and flinched, dizzy with galloping fear, Sick for escape,— loathing the strangled horror And butchered, frantic gestures of the dead."

"I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust. I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed. On behalf of those who are suffering now I make this protest against the deception which is being practised on them; also I believe that I may help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the contrivance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realize."

"I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the War is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it. I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that this War, on which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest."

"I must add that in the light of subsequent events it is difficult to believe that a Peace negotiated in 1917 would have been permanent. I share the general opinion that nothing on earth would have prevented a recurrence of Teutonic aggressiveness."

"The visionless officialized fatuity That once kept Europe safe for Perpetuity."

"Everyone suddenly burst out singing; And I was filled with such delight As prisoned birds must find in freedom."

"Here was the world's worst wound. And here with pride 'Their name liveth for evermore' the Gateway claims. Was ever an immolation so belied As these intolerably nameless names? Well might the Dead who struggled in the slime Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime."

"Who will remember, passing through this Gate, The unheroic Dead who fed the guns? Who shall absolve the foulness of their fate, — Those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones? Crudely renewed, the Salient holds its own. Paid are its dim defenders by this pomp; Paid, with a pile of peace-complacent stone, The armies who endured that sullen swamp."

"Let no one ever, from henceforth say one word in any way countenancing war. It is dangerous even to speak of how here and there the individual may gain some hardship of soul by it. For war is hell, and those who institute it are criminals. Were there even anything to say for it, it should not be said; for its spiritual disasters far outweigh any of its advantages."

"October's bellowing anger breakes and cleaves The bronzed battalions of the stricken wood In whose lament I hear a voice that grieves For battle's fruitless harvest, and the feud Of outrage men. Their lives are like the leaves Scattered in flocks of ruin, tossed and blown Along the westering furnace flaring red. O martyred youth and manhood overthrown, The burden of your wrongs is on my head."