"Are we in for a long war?" I said to Saint-Loup. "No, I believe it will be very short," he replied. But here, as always, his arguments were bookish. "Bearing the mind the prophecies of Moltke, re-read," he said to me, as if I had already read it, "the decree of the 28th of October, 1913, about the command of large formations; you will see that the replacement of peace-time reserves has not been organised or even foreseen, a thing which the authorities could not have failed to do if the war were likely to be a long one." It seemed to me that if the decree in question could be interpreted not as a proof that the war would be short, but as a failure on the part of its authors to foresee that it would be long, and what kind of war it would be, the truth being that they suspected neither the appalling wastage of material of every kind that would take place in a war of stable fronts nor the interdependence of different theatres of operations.
Outside the limits of homosexuality, among the men who are most opposed by nature to homosexuality, there exists a certain conventional idea of virility, which the homosexual finding at his disposal proceeded, unless he is a man of unusual intelligence to distort. This ideal - to be seen in certain professional soldiers, certain diplomats - can be singularly exasperating. In its crudest form it is simply the gruffness of the man with the heart of gold who is determined not to show his emotions, the man who at the moment of parting from a friend who may very possibly be killed has a secret desire to weep, which no one suspects because he conceals it beneath a mounting anger which culminates at the actual moment of farewell, in a sort of explosion: "Well, now, damn it! Shake hands with me, you old ruffian, and take this purse, it's not use to me, don't be an idiot." . . . And the reader understands that this "sharp tone" is simply grief showing itself in men who do not want to appear to feel grief, an attitude which might be ridiculous and nothing more but is in fact also sinister and ugly, because it is the manner of feeling grief of whose who think that grief does not matter, that there are more serious things in life than being parted from one's friends, etc., so that when someone dies they give the same impression of falsehood, of nothingness, as on New Year's Day the gentleman who hands who a present of marrons glaces and just manages to say with a titter: "With the compliments of the season!"
Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 766-767
Marcel is reflecting on a discussion that he had with his friend Robert de Saint-Loup from 1914 when he was visiting Paris. It's sad to think of how many people had the same view in 1914 that Robert had. A very typical saying from French soldiers was, "Berlin by Christmas." They believed that they would roll through the German lines, win a glorious victory, and get to spend Christmas in Berlin. Of course,the corresponding popular statement among young German soldiers was, "Paris by Christmas." Saint-Loup was based his view on statements by the German general Moltke, while others simply believed that the European economies were so interlinked that no one would allow the war to go on for too long - and of course others were simply blinded by nationalistic fervor. No matter the cause, few prophesied the long nightmare that was to follow. There were those, such as the British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, who remarked, "The lamps are going out all of Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time," but they were in the minority.
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