 God, isn't it good to spill the blood of somebody in the name of the nation? And never did I feel so German as when I did that. And that might seem like simply the thoughts of a psychopath, but we see that that really does permeate that First World War generation, the sense that things are achieved by violence. They make people great. They make states great. They're the opposite of the sort of flabby, sort of decadent, democratic sensibility, and it's the way greatness is found.