Here is the essay by George Orwell that "GUEST,Edthefolkie" pointed us to:
Rudyard Kipling

Quite long, but well worth reading. (Being long can be a virtue when things are well worth reading.)
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It's too easy looking back to ignore the fact that what seems in hindsight insane was in 1914 a virtually universal consensus - a determination and enthusiasm for the War as a totally righteous enterprise. On both sides.

It united people who idolised Kipling's Imperialism, and people who detested it. Militant suffragettes who had been involved in something close to war against the British government backed the war. In Ireland a republican like Tom Barry joined up to fight for "the rights of small nations"(and in the process acquired military skills he later used to fight the British back home in Cork.) Gandhi out in India backed the war effort.

And we don't have to think back very far to see something very similar in the wake of the Two Towers.

It is fair to attack the judgement of people who back wars on the basis that they are mistaken - tempering this with a recognition of how very few people saw it that way at the time. But to support and promote a war in which other people's children are sent to die, and make damn sure it is not our children, that may be human, but it is certainly not something in which to take pride.

George Herbert Walker Bush and George W Bush, or Rudyard Kipling and Jack Kipling. Take your pick...