Throughout the First World War, official and unofficial propagandists alike stressed the idea of cultural superiority as justification of war in defence of ‘Civilisation’. In 1916, official German propagandists released a poster offering portraits of great artists alongside comparative illustrations of social welfare as a refutation of Allied charges of ‘barbarism’ in conquered territories. In London, the ‘most effective series of recruitment posters’ quoted lines of William Shakespeare on war as a reflection of the tradition of poetry, language, and resolve. Spearheading British propaganda efforts in the early years of the war, Charles Masterman, at Lloyd George's behest, enlisted the services of various writers and poets for Wellington House, and saw that their endorsement of the war was published not just in England but on the front page of the New York Times. The American poet-soldier Alan Seeger, who joined the French Foreign Legion at the outbreak of the war, from 1915 until his death in 1916 published excerpts from his diary as well as occasional editorials urging American intervention. Writing from the trenches at Aisne, he presented his case on the grounds of the cultural and moral superiority of the Allied cause, invoking the universal duty to march ‘forth with haste’. The Times sent Robert Bridges to report on factory conditions: his piece was consciously poetic, as was Rudyard Kipling's ‘The Battle of Jutland’, when describing the plight of British ships under attack. It can even be argued that the persistent appeal of Brooke's War Sonnets to wartime readers was at least in part down to their echoing the rhetoric of war correspondents, who saw it as their duty to explain the war in aesthetic – as well as political and logistical – terms to the readership.

From its start, writers and public figures defined, recast, expanded, and narrowed the war's philosophical terrain. Journalists and editors responded to war news by fitting their copy to the accepted ideals of justification, which fell under the consensus principle established in August 1914: the actions of the Triple Alliance nations, and in particular German aggression, meant that the Allies held the moral imperative.