He also volunteered for military service in world war 1, and when he reached the front line volunteered for the extremely dangerous assignment of crawling into no-man’s land alone to make observations of the enemy. He said it seemed absurd to be a volunteer among draftees and not take on the most dangerous missions.
His World War I journal portrays him has an very egoistical man, with a violent contempt to everyone, including his comrades. He wrote: "It is almost impossible to find a trace of humanity in them [the men of his unit]" and, about marines, "I often cannot discern the human being in a man". As an extremely wealthy and high-class officer, he despised the low ranked soldiers ("stupid", "malicious", "pigs"...), but also the other officers ("pigs", "utterly limited"). He volunteered for the army of Austro-Hungarian empire and expected others to follow; he failed to understand that the e.g. Serbian soldiers whose people was oppressed by the empire did not share his views.
I don't care about his personal life, but since this thread was turning into an hagiography, I just wanted to draw a more complex portray.
