Changing attitudes toward the First World War

Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,

And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,

With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,

To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,

Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary,

Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move,

And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary,

And all the little emptiness of love!

[August 1, 1914:] If we must have war, all parties cease. We are only German brothers. In times of peace this or that party has attacked me; I forgive them now with all my heart. If our neighbors are not satisfied to leave us in peace, then we hope and pray that our good German sword will come out of the struggle victorious.

[August 4, 1914:] No lust of conquest drives us on; we are inspired by the unalterable will to protect the place in which God has set us for ourselves and all coming generations. . . . In a defensive war that has been forced upon us, with a clear conscience and a clean hand we take up the sword.

"Two armies fighting each other—that's like one great army committing suicide!" . . .

"They'll say those things to us by way of paying us with glory, and to pay themselves, too, for what they haven't done. But military glory—it isn't even true for us common soldiers. It's for some, but outside those elect the soldier's glory is a lie, like every other fine-looking thing in war. In reality, the soldier's sacrifice is obscurely concealed. The multitudes that make up the waves of attack have no reward. They run to hurl themselves into a frightful inglorious nothing."

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 the war upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation has now become a war of aggression and conquest. . . .

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. . . . On behalf of those who are suffering now, I make this protest against the deception which is being practised upon them; also I believe it may help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share and which they have not enough imagination to realise.

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,

And towards our distant rest began to trudge. . . .

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs . . .

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.*

*Latin: "It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country."

The Congress of Soviets of all Russia in session at Petrograd adopted resolution that all belligerents commence negotiations for just democratic peace such as is wanted by majority of working classes of all belligerents and was wanted in Russia after fall of monarchy; such peace should be immediate, without annexations or forcible conquest of foreign nation and without indemnities. . . .

The government regards it a crime to continue war to partition weak nations among the powerful and proclaims its solemn decision to sign peace conditions as above. All peace negotiations shall be absolutely open and non-secret and all secret treaties of former Government shall be published and declared null and void.

So far as possible, therefore, it was the policy of France to set the clock back and to undo what, since 1870, the progress of Germany had accomplished. By loss of territory and other measures her population was to be curtailed; but chiefly the economic system, upon which she depended for her new strength, the vast fabric built upon iron, coal, and transport must be destroyed. . . .

This is the policy of an old man [French prime minister Georges Clemenceau], whose most vivid impressions and most lively imagination are of the past and not of the future. He sees the issue in terms of France and Germany, not of humanity and of European civilization struggling forwards to a new order. The war has bitten into his consciousness somewhat differently from ours, and he neither expects nor hopes that we are at the threshold of a new age.