We were carrying something in our heads which belonged to us alone, and to those we had left behind us in the battle. - Siegfried Sassoon

Who will remember, passing through this Gate,
The unheroic Dead who fed the guns?
Who shall absolve the foulness of their fate, —
Those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones?
Crudely renewed, the Salient holds its own.
Paid are its dim defenders by this pomp;
Paid, with a pile of peace-complacent stone,
The armies who endured that sullen swamp.

To him, as to me, the War was inevitable and justifiable. Courage remained a virtue. And that exploitation of courage, if I may be allowed to say a thing so obvious, was the essential tragedy of the War, which, as everyone now agrees, was a crime against humanity.

One evening I asked whether he [Rivers] thought I was suffering from shell-shock.
‘Certainly not,’ he replied.
'What have I got then?’
'Well, you appear to be suffering from an anti-war complex.