Most veterans rejected the 'poets' view'. One old soldier, named Henry Mellersh, declared in 1978 that he wholeheartedly rejected the notion that the war was 'one vast, useless, futile tragedy, worthy to be remembered only as a pitiable mistake'.
Instead, wrote Mellersh: 'I and my like entered the war expecting an heroic adventure and believing implicitly in the rightness of our cause; we ended greatly disillusioned as to the nature of the adventure, but still believing that our cause was right and we had not fought in vain.'
The fact that Britain sacrificed so many lives to prevent the triumph of Germany's militarists should be a matter of pride to those men's modern descendants, not grounds for ministers to take refuge in empty platitudes.

That view was far more widely held by Mellersh's contemporaries than the 'futility' vision of Owen, Sassoon and their kin.


"Notwithstanding the enormous casualty lists, in 1918 many Britons thought they had achieved a miraculous deliverance from an evil enemy. They celebrated a remarkable military victory and national survival. For those who had served in the trenches, and for those left at home, the war experience encompassed not only horror, frustration and sorrow, but also triumph, pride, camaraderie and even enjoyment, as well as boredom and apathy."


Dr. Gary Sheffield.
" popular opinion: that the issues were not worth the ensuing bloodbath. Most modern scholars would not agree