During the miserable trench warfare of WWI, a night of humanity offered  some hope of peace. Arthur Conan Doyle called it “one human episode amid  all the atrocities.”

After war, some soldiers become peace activists. All Quiet on the Western Front (German: Im Westen nichts Neues, lit. 'In the West Nothing New') is a novel by Erich Maria Remarque, a German veteran of World War I. The book describes the German soldiers' extreme physical and mental stress during the war, and the detachment from civilian life felt by many of these soldiers upon returning home from the front. The book and its sequel, The Road Back (1930), were among the books banned and burned in Nazi Germany.

Smedley Darlington Butler was a United States Marine Corps major general, the highest rank authorized at that time, and at the time of his death the most decorated Marine in U.S. history. He wrote War is a racket.

Howard Zinn is perhaps best known for his People's History of the United States, a book that has featured in The Simpsons and was recommended by Matt Damon's character in the film Good Will Hunting. In The Bomb, Zinn puts two essays side by side, one entitled "Hiroshima, breaking the silence", the other "The bombing of Royan". As a young man eager to be demobbed, Zinn recalls celebrating the dropping of the atomic bomb; it meant the end of a war he did not wish to return to. He had taken part in the bombing of the French town of Royan just three months earlier. The essays revisit that unthinking celebration and desire to follow orders of those months in 1945. Using historical evidence, it also argues that neither mission was necessary and asks what prompted military action that would transcended military logic and moral sensibilities.