Fracture: Life and Culture in the West, 1918-1938

by Philipp Blom

Soldiers home on leave from this monstrous reality often found themselves more frustrated than relieved. Having lived in an ongoing butchery that had come to seem senseless, having slept alongside unburied corpses and witnessed friends and comrades ripped apart by the random, anonymous destruction of a shell fired from miles away, having lost trust in old faiths and respect for their superiors, and having come to doubt the justice of their national cause, they returned home to a world dominated by patriotic rhetoric and the wisdom of armchair warriors who continued to regard the war as just and as an opportunity for heroism and manly combat—in effect, as a kind of operetta war, a view that took no account of the savage reality and merely added insult to terrible injury.