Unlike Henri Barbusse, who, in his
dreadful book Le Feu, gave the unrelieved blackness of this human
drama, I have here and in other books shown the light as well as the
shade in which our men lived, the gaiety as well as the fear they had,
the exultation as well as the agony of battle, the spiritual ardor of
boys as well as the brutality of the task that was theirs. I have
tried to set down as many aspects of the war's psychology as I could
find in my remembrance of these years, without exaggeration or false
emphasis, so that out of their confusion, even out of their
contradiction, the real truth of the adventure might be seen as it
touched the souls of men.
Yet when one strives to sum up the evidence and reach definite
conclusions about the motives which led men of the warring nations to
kill one another year after year in those fields of slaughter, the
ideals for which so many millions of men laid down their lives, and
the effect of those years of carnage upon the philosophy of this
present world of men, there is no clear line of thought or conviction.
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