This is not a war, this is a test of how far man can be degraded.
The book is essentially a book about the experiences of war; yet those who were actually there agree that this was not war in the traditional sense and was the first world war of its kind that centered around some kind of genocide. Wars that had preceded this one were relatively basic affairs; one side tried to out-strategize, out-maneuver, and out-shoot the other side, until it became apparent that someone was winning. World War One was the first war that sent men to live in such terrible conditions. There were not enough uniforms; the living were forced to wear the boots of the dead because there were not enough boots to go around. Men lived in muddy trenches, where it rained, breeding disease, pneumonia was rampant, bodies of the dead stayed in the trenches for days or weeks because there was no way of removing them. This was not war in the traditional sense, but a series of conditions that soldiers were forced to endure that in the end treated them as less than human.
Some crime against nature is about to be committed. I feel it in my veins. Those men and boys are grocers and clerks, gardeners and fathers - fathers of small children. A country cannot bear to lose them.
This logic was sadly lost on those engineering the war. The men that are referred to in this statement are all those who are needed in order for a country and a generation to keep going. Farmers, who grow food for the nation (it was a time before mass importing and exporting of produce). Grocers, who sell the food that is needed. Fathers, and those who should be fathers, both needed in order for the next generation to thrive, or indeed for them to be a next generation at all. The statement questions the practice of mass conscription which runs the danger of wiping out an entire generation of men and therefore making it impossible to produce a future generation to take the country forwards.
