“When you see a war as I have seen it, you ask yourself: “How can we put up with such a thing?  What frontier traced on a map, what national honor could possibly justify it?  How can what is nothing more than banditry be dressed up as an ideal, and allowed to happen?

“They told the Germans: ‘Forward to a bright and joyous war!  On to Paris!  God is with us, for a greater Germany!’  And the good, peaceful Germans, who take everything seriously, set forth to conquer, transforming themselves into savage beasts.

“They told the French: ‘The nation is under attack.  We will fight for Justice and Retribution.  On to Berlin!  And the pacifist French, the French who take nothing at all seriously, interrupted their little modest rentier reveries to go and fight.

“So it was with the Austrians, the Belgians, the English, the Russians, the Turks, and then the Italians.  In a single week, twenty million men, busy with their lives and loves, with making money and planning a future, received the order to stop everything to go and kill other men.  And those twenty million individuals obeyed the order because they had been convinced that this was their duty. ”

Gabriel Chevallier, Fear: A Novel of World War I, translated by Malcolm Imrie, (1930/2011)