or the first time in modern history, to be a war that involved the whole world, or, at the very least, pitted its major nations against one another. In 1914, to be neutral was to be irrelevant. Germany was fighting Britain, and everyone else had to choose a side, because something more important was happening. As Modris Eksteins writes, ôFor the Germans this was a war to change the world; for the British this was a war to preserve a world. The Germans were propelled by a vision, the British by a legacyö (119).
Whatever was happening on the larger scale, for the individual soldier, called to fight
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