“Once you have lain in her arms,” another writer and Western Front veteran, Guy Chapman, said of war, “you can admit no other mistress. You may loathe, you may execrate, but you cannot deny her. . . . No wine gives fiercer intoxication, no drug more vivid exaltation. . . . Even those who hate her most are prisoners to her spell. They rise from her embraces, pillaged, soiled, it may be ashamed; but they are still hers.”
