I always said that if I could just find a guy who could chop wood and had a nice smile it wouldn't bother me if he was a thug or an aristocrat as long as he was a good guy. And I've ended up with an educated thug.
It was quite a European war until 1917 when the Americans joined up. They don't have the same sense of the loss of innocence and the cataclysmic loss of life. A whole generation was wiped out.