There's scarcely a great subject in the world which you don't have to take as a whole, and from the biggest point of view, to appreciate it thoroughly.

It's exactly different with war.

If you want to understand more than the platitudes, you want to just take in one section of the fighting.

Say there are fifty Englishmen, decent fellows, been dragged from their posts as commercial travellers or small tradesmen or labourers or what-not, and they get mixed up with a similar number of Germans.

Those Germans ain't the fiends we read about.