Ugly Botany: WWI

Any Brit will tell you one of our greatest tragedies is WWI. This terrible, dreadful war in which nearly a million people died. The trenches were less battlefields and more like places where boys and men waited to be blown apart. My book takes place about thirty years before the start of WWI but its integral themes: the arrogance of colonialism and the great powers; the nineteenth century bumbling into the twentieth; Death claiming a generation of young men; Patriotism and Intellectualism crumbling in the face of slaughter -- are all there

It's almost like civilization didn't understand the world, and its brutality, before WWI. Society and people did horrible things beforehand but there was still this innocence, this lack of understanding. Never before WWI had there been so much mass and meaningless death. So much bureaucracy and logic falling into an abyss. Things fall apart.