I can smell a post of Augy coming in, describing how the evil capitalist people in power started WW1 just to have a little fun.
Okay troll, i'll feed you. The Great War was a crime against humanity committed by the competing imperialist states in the interests of local capital, and the millions of people forced into slavery and combat had no interest served by it. It was simply pointless for the working-class people who fought and sustained the war. That's why it was necessary to create a huge propaganda machine for blind jingoism, whose memes survive a century later. Being on the losing side of the war was nothing to fear: any vindictive measures imposed by the victors would simply be experienced as a fractional increase in the industrial exploitation they were already subject to from their own nation's ruling class, which they already knew perfectly well how to struggle against (especially in Russia and Germany).
This isn't about hippie non-violence, it's about active resistance to militarism. The war only ended when it did because the belligerents ran out of steam, and this only happened because crucial sectors of their industrial base and military apparatus rose a red flag and refused to contribute to the war effort. The obedient soldiers and workers who sacrificed their lives and freedom for their fatherland achieved nothing but their own deaths and the enslavement of their fellows; the revolutionaries who sabotaged their own state's home front (sometimes with covert aid from the enemy government) were the heroes who saved their people from the total war caused by unfettered imperialist capitalism.