Pathology of First World War (Pathology of Historians)

HAVE WE ENTERED THE AGE OF THE CRACKPOT?
Richard Koenigsberg on Niall Ferguson's view of the First World War

Niall Ferguson is an illustrious historian. Yet in his The Pity of War: Explaining World War I, he makes the astonishing statement that

"MEN MAY HAVE FOUGHT (in the First World War) BECAUSE FIGHTING WAS FUN."

We have become accustomed recently to politicians making bizarre, delusional statements, But to hear a respected historian making such a statement is stunning.

I have selected below photos and descriptions of the war that refute this extraordinary statement (as if it needs refutation). But perhaps it is time to begin "calling out" historians and others who make such statements.

HAVE WE ENTERED THE "AGE OF THE CRACKPOT?"

“Men were squashed. Cut in two or divided from top to bottom. Blown into showers; bellies turned inside out; skulls forced into the chest as if by a blow from a club.”

“You eat beside the dead; you drink beside the dead, you relieve yourself beside the dead and you sleep beside the dead.”

“To die from a bullet seems to be nothing; parts of our being remain intact; but to be dismembered, torn to pieces, reduced to pulp, this is the fear that flesh cannot support and which is fundamentally the great suffering of the soldier." "I

"I saw a man drinking avidly from a green scum-covered marsh, where he lay, his black face downward in the water, a dead man lying on his stomach and swollen as if he had not stopped filling himself with water for days."