Read "A General Sketch of the European War" by Hilaire Belloc online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
When we have clearly grasped the German attitude, as it may thus be not unfairly expressed, we shall not find it difficult to conceive why a conflict between such a will and other wills around it broke out.
We need waste no time in proving the absurdity of the German assumptions, the bad history they involve, and the perverse and twisted perspective so much vanity presupposes. War can never be prevented by discovering the moral errors of an opponent. It comes into being because that opponent does not believe them to be moral errors; and in the attempt to understand this war and its causes, we should only confuse ourselves if we lost time over argument upon pretensions even as crassly unreal as these.