Shame on military glory, shame on armies, shame on the soldier's profession, which changes men, some into stupid victims, others into base executione… - Henri Barbusse

"But time did not stand still, and now we scarcely love each other." I am thinking,' you said, 'that this moment will never come again. I am thinking that you are going to change, to die, and go away. I am thinking so truly, so hotly, how precious these moments are, how precious you are, you who will never again be just what you are now, This is the wound — time, which passes and changes us. To grow old, to think differently, to die.

I saw that they wanted to kill the past. When we are old, we let it die; when we are young and strong, we kill it.

We shall say to ourselves, says one, 'After all, why do we make war?' We don't know at all why, but we can say who we make it for. We shall be forced to see that if every nation every day brings the fresh bodies of fifteen hundred young men to the God of War to be lacerated, it's for the pleasure of a few ringleaders that we could easily count; that if whole nations go to slaughter marshaled in armies in order that the gold-striped caste may write their princely names in history, so that other gilded people of the same rank can contrive more business, and expand in the way of employees and shops — and we shall see, as soon as we open our eyes, that the divisions between mankind are not what we thought, and those one did believe in are not divisions.