A couple of decades before that, in the immediate aftermath of the shambles that was World War I, Oswald Spengler gave definitive expression to the temperament of the times in his sprawling Teutonic threnody Der Untergang des Abendlandes, “The Decline of the West.”

WAR IS HELL, INDEED!

"I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell."

-- William Tecumseh Sherman