Paul M tivier was 16 when he enrolled, illegally. He was underage. He fought in the trenches around Vimy. He was 100 when he returned to attend the ceremony honouring the unknown Canadian soldier at the Vimy monument. In the war there were only craters, mud and rats.
War is ugly.
In this dreadful landscape the 20th century was shaped. In his book, The Great War and Modern Memory, the historian Paul Fussell wrote that the reshaping was as much psychological, even literary, as political. Optimism was replaced by irony, the bitter irony of soldiers who fought and knew that their fighting was futile. The irony was fed into the books written by men like Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon and Erich Maria Remarque. It became the template of war-writing to this day.