One of my most jarring discoveries was that official wartime censorship—carried out by the military, the War Office, and the press—coincided with the self-censorship that psychiatrists of the time identified as a major contributor to shell-shock and to the disillusionment expressed by combat veterans.
“It is a Wide Road that Leads to War”
On January 1, 1900, an editorial in the New York World predicted that the twentieth century would “meet and overcome all perils and prove to be the best that this steadily improving planet has ever seen.” The war that broke out just a few years later in 1914 showed that the twentieth century would become something entirely different.