Paul Fussell says in The Great War and Modern Memory:

"the Great War took place in what was, compared to ours, a static world, where values appeared stable and where the meanings of abstractions seemed permanent and reliable. Everyone knew what Glory was, and what Honor meant. It was not until eleven years after the war that Hemingway could declare in A Farewell to Arms that 'abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.' In the summer of 1914 no one would have understood what on earth he was talking about" (p. 21).