@Emmie I have acknowledged that fact, have I not? Yes, command on all sides would have been inexperienced with modern day warfare, but that does not, to me at least, excuse the scale of deaths. Even taking this inexperience into account though, you can find examples of incompetence or just plain "cannon fodder" mentality amongst the military top rank.
And yes, of the roughly 5 million men under arms in 1918, half were volunteers, and half were conscripted, and no doubt many who had been conscripted would have volunteered anyway , but that's neither here nor there really - At that stage of the game, you would have been fighting out a sense of honour, of duty, of camerarderie, out of a sense of obligation, out of pressure to avoid being seen as a coward, out of a need to support family and friends who were already involved, but that does not excuse the sheer senseless waste of millions of lives over a political dance of empires and the ambitions of an elite privileged few.