Raed
As you say - opinions are opinions.
I am no expert of WW1 - I approach it as a humanitarian rather than someone with a deep knowledge of history.
However, I am fascinated by the social history of the latter half of the 19th and first half of the twentieth century.
The book that knocked my socks off is entitled 'The Kings Depart', by Richard M Watt, basically a history of the period from the end of the war to the rise of Nazism in Germany - by a non-historian journalist, and probably because of that, highly readable (still available from the Book Depository, last time I looked).
What I came to believe after reading it was how easy it would have been for British and German soldiers to say, "Look lads, this has **** all to do with us and whoever wins, none of us are going to gat anything out of it".
This was the line taken by the radical socialist parties and if it had been followed, go count how many lives could have been saved.
Russia kicked out the leaders who sent them to war - Germany came within a hairs-breadth of doing the same.
Whatever happened or might have happened later in both is beside the point - at least we wouldn't be 'celebrating the deaths of so many young men today.
Jim Carroll