What makes the Great War so different from the Second World War is, for one, the lack of an identifiable “evil”. On the other side were no Nazis or fascist regimes that were accepted by the common soldier as a threat to democracy. Instead, there were conscripts, labourers, workers. And while propaganda tried to make them appear inhumane, WW1 soldiers were quick to find out that they were anything but. Unlike WW2, the Germans and their allies were not seen by the Entente conscripts as the armed hand of a dangerous regime, but as a bunch of half-soldiers thrown there by chance, a bit like them.
Neither side’s average soldier really knew what prompted the war to happen, and if they did, they did not care about it much on a personal level; territorial, colonial and economical disputes between governments were not the common lot of a country’s inhabitants, and while some did believe there had to be a stop to German militarism, or at least that they had to defend their country, there really wasn’t any feeling of good against evil, black and white quest for justice that would inspire a war against Nazism.
And finally, the culture shock. WW2 soldiers knew what to expect from machinery and war technology. WW1 soldiers did not. The Great War was a forced transition from the 19th century to the modern era, and no 1914 conscript ever imagined that they would have to face shrapnel, machineguns, tanks, combat gas, aviation and other modern inventions. This explains why the cases of shellshock were significantly higher than in WW2, aside from the fact PTSD was better known by the 1940s.
