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George Bernard Shaw and his timeless insights:
The New Statesman published Shaw’s essay as a “war supplement.”
“The time has come,” he wrote, “to pluck up courage and begin to talk and write soberly about the war.” Shaw claimed he could muster clear thoughts about England’s role because he was Irish. He was unmoved by imperialist sentiments and patriotic lies. The government had cited Germany’s invasion of Belgium as its cause for war, but he thought this was false and hypocritical. If not Belgium, some other excuse would have been found, as a close examination of the actions and secret agreements of the Foreign Secretary made clear. Britain was the world’s most aggressive imperial power, occupying numerous countries around the globe with no less callousness and no more legitimacy than Germany in Belgium. Britain had no right to object to the imperialism of others while blithely practicing an imperialism of its own. The English press critiqued German Junkerism, but England was led by its own imperious oligarchs and aristocrats, a class analogous to the Junkers and just as bad, just as belligerent, just as unaccountable. Only through the democratization of foreign policy, the socialization of landed wealth, and a postbellum rejection of imperial militarism on all sides — including that of France and England — could the war be made to serve just ends. Demonizing the German enemy was a base and baseless act of propaganda. If Germany was defeated, it should not be humiliated or loaded down with an impossible war debt, otherwise the cycle of inter-imperial wars would continue.
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I first got into George Bernard Shaw with the false attribution of fish/ghoti:
Ghoti is often cited to support English spelling reform, and is often attributed to George Bernard Shaw,[5] a supporter of this cause. However, the word does not appear in Shaw's writings,[2] and a biography of Shaw attributes it instead to an anonymous spelling reformer.[6] Similar constructed words exist that demonstrate English idiosyncrasies,[1] but ghoti is the most widely recognized.[citation needed]
"The essay burst like a bombshell, not so much above his enemies as in [George Bernard] Shaw’s own life. Good friends broke with him; allies publicly condemned him; he was pushed out of professional societies; bookstores and libraries removed his work from their shelves. When he wanted to publish a follow-up, The New Statesman refused."
WWI was immensely popular in Britain, at least in the first years.
"In August 1914, at the start of World War I, Admiral Charles Fitzgerald founded the Order of the White Feather with the support of the prominent author Mary Augusta Ward. The organisation aimed to shame men into enlisting in the British army by persuading women to present them with a white feather if they were not wearing a uniform." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_feather#World_War_I)
In Heinrich Mann's novel Man of Straw, the anti-hero manages to get out of military service with a bogus diagnosis of foot problems. He drew on Thomas Mann's experience: their mother knew a doctor, the doctor was willing to do a favor, Thomas Mann was discharged.