Bollocks Keith - there is no access to those diaries by the general public, historians have used a minuscule number to back up their various claims - not one of them,as I recall have ever called the soldiers who fought liars - only you.
The &80 you posted were claims of soldiers who returned with the same conviction they left with.
"Jim, any comments on the final Paxman programme?"
My view of Paxman - a perfect summing up to an unprecedented slaughter.
The war throughout was presented for what it was, two massive groups of men, overwhelmingly working people, thrown at each other in face-to-face fighting until one of them gave way.
As the slaughter went on the numbers were made up by more working men.
The end-result of it all - panning shots of cemeteries filled with young men who had given their lives for an Empire that was soon to disintegrate, largely to the ritual slaughter that had taken place   
Throughout the programmes there wan't a single example of "great leadership", just the shepherding of millions of young men to their deaths; it was never anything more than a crudely choreographed bloodbath, it didn't even have the panache of a John Ford bar-room brawl as far as leadership was concerned.
Even at the beginning of 1918 Haig was demanding yet more human sacrifices to throw at the 'enemy' - working class Germans who were undergoing the same brutality and inhumanity at the hands of their leaders
Haig demanded total commitment to the death, "no surrender" - where have we heard that before?
Blunders, miscalculations, indifference, incompetence emanated from the top, both on the war front and at home, with complacency and unpreparedness.   
At home the profiteers continued to profit and businessmen exploited the families of those busily dying for the British Empire.
What gains were made by the end of the war were brought about by the realisation that those who had sacrificed their menfolk, many of whom had previously been living in hovels, would never willing return to those brutalising conditions
For a short time they were allowed to benefit from the brief relaxing of oppression to the extent of at last being able to feed their families.
Some of us were allowed to vote - even (some) women
Those changes were pretty short lived - by the twenties there was mass unemployment, unrest, strikes, a return to poverty, hunger marches - and then preparation for even more slaughter.
The people (not the leaders) in Germany where humiliated and impoverished by crippling war reparations, yet they attempted (and failed) in the years following the war, to overthrow those who had led them to the slaughter.
Britain allowed Germany to re-arm, first ignored, the attempted to appease Herr Hitler and his buddies and vilified and criminalised anybody who tried to stop him.
"Then we started all over again", as Eric Bogle was once heard to remark
I'm assuming that your asking my opinion because you are incapable of making your own assessment from your script and want to bonce off somebody else's who bothered their ares to follow the programmes
It's fairly obvious that you have watched none of these and are waiting for someone to give you a toe-hold into your BBC acquired script.
Now feel free to fire away
Jim Carroll