This strange state of mind which fell upon us for a little while after the guns had been silenced was a vague obscenity.
It was the faint, lingering aftertaste of having achieved something monstrous.
We had unleashed powers beyond our comprehension. Entire countries lay in waste beneath our hands - and, in the doing of it, our hands were forever stained.
It was of no avail to tell ourselves that what we had done was what we had to do, the only thing we could have done. It was enough to know that we had done it.
We had turned the evil of our enemies back upon them a hundredfold, and in so doing,
something of our own integrity had been shattered, had been irrevocably lost.
We who had fought this war could feel no pride.
Victors and vanquished, all were one.
We were one with the crowds moving silently along the boulevards of Paris; the old women hunting through the still ruins of Cologne; the bodies piled like yellow cordwood at Dachau; the dreadful vacant eyes of the beaten German soldiers; the white graves and the black crosses and the haunting melancholy of our hearts.
All, all, were one, all were the ghastly horror of what we had known, of what we had helped to do.

Captain Laurence Critchell, American.